Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 37:2 0021–8308 © 2007 The Author Journal compilation © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK JTSB Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 0021-8308 © 2007 The Author Journal compilation ©The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007 XXX Original Articles Theories of Embodied Knowledge Gabriel Ignatow Theories of Embodied Knowledge: New Directions for Cultural and Cognitive Sociology? GABRIEL IGNATOW 1. INTRODUCTION A small number of sociologists interested in culture have recently argued that knowledge developed in fields like cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience can have significant theoretical implications for cultural research (e.g., Bergesen, 2004a,b; DiMaggio, 1997, 2002). DiMaggio (2002), for example, has argued that cognitive psychology can take sociologists’ “debates over presuppositions and render them empirical,” and can fill important gaps in sociological theory ( p. 275). Indeed, sociological propositions about the workings of cognition are rarely specified or tested, but are of central relevance to studies of identity, collective memory, cultural codes, symbolic boundaries, logics of action, social movement framing, and many other productive theoretical concepts and categories. In this paper I attempt to advance sociological analysis of culture and cognition by drawing out lessons from recent work in cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience on the relations between bodily and emotional processes, on the one side, and knowledge and reasoning on the other. I place this work within the context of the turn to the body in sociological theory and several other fields, and submit that cultural and cognitive sociology have tended to elide the body, but that this elision is no longer defensible given what is now known on the relations between reason and emotion, and knowledge and the body. I suggest that greater recognition of the bodily foundations of culture and cognition can lead to promising new directions for cultural sociology. In turn, a cultural sociology that theoretically accounts for the bodily foundations of knowledge can make more convincing arguments regarding social influences on the construction of knowledge. While sociologists have in recent decades taken an interest in both cognition (e.g., Cicourel, 1973; Cerulo, 1998, 2002, 2006; Eyerman and Jamison, 1991; DiMaggio, 1997, 2002; Martin, 2000, 2002; Lizardo, 2004) and the body (e.g., Turner, 1996; Featherstone, 2000; Shilling, 1993, 2004), sociological theories of culture and cognition, and of the body, have overlapped little if at all. This has left sociology out of step with a broad shift in the human sciences toward conceiving