User:Bioarchaeo/Embodiment theory in anthropology/Ngoodell42 Peer Review

General info--Review by User ngoodell42

 * Whose work are you reviewing?

Bioarchaeo


 * Link to draft you're reviewing
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bioarchaeo/Embodiment_theory_in_anthropology?veaction=edit&preload=Template%3ADashboard.wikiedu.org_draft_template


 * In-line comments:
 * I'd remove the word "arbitrary" from your article lead section when talking about other theories of embodiment...leaving that word in makes it sound like you have injected an opinion about the validity of the other theories in the article
 * same with the second to last line of the lead section...some of the language here takes a position on the issue at hand (for example, "the physical body was historically relegated to the realm of...")
 * remove the word "Ultimately" from "Ultimately, Mauss saw human actions..." for objectivity/to keep the Wikipedia style tone
 * incomplete sentence in section on Foucault that needs fixing: "Specifically, his concept of biopower as it relates to institutionalized surveillance and state discipline."
 * I'd remove the phrase "as we understand it today" from the first line of embodiment in feminist theory section...only for the reason of keeping the Wikipedia style tone of factuality
 * On the next line, who is Threadcraft? It might be worth adding a quick note to explain...i.e, "Shatema Threadcraft, a feminist theorist, attributes the connection..."
 * "The relationship between feminist theory and embodiment theory is understandably fraught." --> I'd get rid of this sentence and directly explain what you mean here...why is it fraught? then you can go through your examples like you do
 * Racialized Embodiment Section: watch out for the essay style language again...you say "have complicated our understandings"...might be better to say "have complicated anthropologist's understandings" instead


 * General/Overall Comments:
 * This article is very rich in that it offers a lot of summaries of different theories from a variety of fields. Great work! I think your biggest challenges are:
 * tone--you often use phrases that are more "essay" like--like "these things have complicated our understandings of" or "Angela Davis demonstrated that"--phrases that establish either a community or implicitly back a certain argument...and so something to keep in mind as you go back over this is to just watch for those kinds of phrasings and replace them with more neutral, objective, and factual phrases. (This is something I just struggled with all day as I rewrote my own draft.)
 * structure--As the article is structured right now, I came into this thinking that I was going to hear from anthropologists right away about their theories of embodiment. But you instead begin with Descartes. If you look at the footnotes, it becomes more apparent that you're citing certain anthropologists here and their critiques of him (and the other theorists you bring up). I think it might help to bring them out from behind these citations more and more directly into the text, just so its more obvious that the layperson that these are engagements with these ideas coming from anthropologists. For example, in the Descartes section, saying something like "Anthropologist Margaret Lock has demonstrated how substance dualism has persisted...." or something like "Russell Keat has critically employed Cartesian mind-body dualist theories in his analysis of xyz..." So, if you do this work and bring the authors out from behind the citations/footnotes more, it might be more obvious that each section is about a different kind of approach that anthro's have taken to embodiment theory. (to be clear, some of your sections do this already--I liked how your section on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu opened by immediately saying, "Okay, here is an anthropologist who has approached embodiment in these other ways, using these theories, and here is how an anthro might do that...") To put this another way, I think some more signposting might help. Adding sentences at the beginning of each section saying "Some anthropologists have used the theories of Judith Butler to study embodiment instead." or "the embodiment ideas of Angela Davis have also been influential on anthropologists" etc. would do a lot of this work too. I hope this comment makes sense--feel free to email/text me if not and I'll try to explain more.
 * I'll close by just saying that I see how you're working with a lot of material here from all across the board, and that's super impressive. This is on track to become a terrific article!