[A keynote paper prepared for a special session, “Space and Situated Cognition,” held at the 6th International

Conference on Spatial Cognition, September 7-11, 2015, Rome, Italy. Tentatively, this paper is to be published in a
forthcoming 2015 issue of Cognitive Processes; © David Seamon 2015]

Situated Cognition and the Phenomenology of Place:

Lifeworld, Environmental Embodiment, and Immersion-in-World
David Seamon
www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/

Abstract
This paper makes use of a passage from novelist Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years
of Solitude to illustrate Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body and to consider what
the related phenomenological concepts of place, environmental embodiment, and immersion-in-
world might offer research in situated cognition.
Key words: body-subject, lifeworld, lived body, Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology, place, situated
cognition

Introduction
In phenomenological research, immersion-in-world is a term sometimes used to depict the
always already lived embeddedness of human beings in the worlds in which they find themselves
(Seamon 2014). This lived embeddedness is associated with the lifeworld—each person and
group’s world of taken-for-grantedness typically out of sight, transparent, and thus hidden as a
phenomenon. A central phenomenological aim is to examine the lifeworld directly and thereby to
identify and understand the tacit, unnoticed aspects of human experience so they can be
accounted for theoretically and practically. In this paper, I explore some phenomenological
aspects of lifeworld and immersion-in-world by explicating a short (500-word) passage from
critically-acclaimed Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’s magical-realist novel, One
Hundred Years of Solitude (García Márquez 1967, pp. 246-48). I first link descriptive elements
of this passage with French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of lived
embodiment (Merleau-Ponty 1962). I then discuss how this passage relates to research on the
phenomenology of place. I conclude that immersion-in-world points to a complex people-world
connectedness and intertwining that incorporate corporeal, temporal, and environmental
dimensions. This understanding of immersion-in-world via environmental embodiment and place
may offer significant insights for research on situated cognition.
In the passage from García Márquez explicated here, elderly family matriarch Úrsula
Iguarán is losing her sight because of cataracts. She refuses to tell anyone, however, because
blindness would be a sign of uselessness in her remote village community. She sets herself to
cope with the dimming everyday world by focusing on “a silent schooling in the distances of
things and people’s voices,” so that she can see, via astute mental recollection, what her failing
eyes cannot. She becomes keenly aware of odors, which intensify her environmental sensibilities
in a way much more acute than the visual presence of “bulk and color.” She comes to know so
well the placement of everything in her everyday world that she forgets much of the time that she
is blind.
In demonstrating Úrsula’s thorough re-mastery of her lifeworld, García Márquez presents
two vivid examples, the first involving family member Fernanda, who loses her wedding ring.
Having carefully noticed, because of her blindness, the daily behavior patterns of other family
members, Úrsula quickly locates the ring because she had come to realize that “every member of
the family, without realizing it, repeated the same path every day [and] the same actions.” Only
when they “deviated from meticulous routine,” did they fall prey to losing something, which
Fernanda had done because, in airing the mattresses, she had placed her ring high on a shelf to be
out of reach from her children. Fernanda looked for the ring along the routes of her everyday
household activities “without knowing that the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits
and that is why it is so difficult to find them.”
In his second example of blind Úrsula’s re-mastery of her everyday world, García
Márquez describes a mishap in which, one afternoon, Úrsula collides with another family
member, Amaranta, who is on the porch sewing. Amaranta chides Úrsula for her carelessness,
but Úrsula retorts that it is Amaranta’s fault because she is not sitting in her usual place. This
accident leads Úrsula to attend to Amaranta’s porch behaviors more carefully. She comes to
realizes that, because of the shifting seasonal position of the sun, family members sitting on the
porch imperceptively changed their position without being aware: “From then on Úrsula had
only to remember the date to know exactly where Amaranta was sitting.”

Habit, Perception, and Lived Body

Úrsula’s story is significant phenomenologically because it highlights the habitual, taken-for-
granted dimension of everyday human experience and points to the lived body as its unself-
conscious foundation. García Márquez describes the lived intimacy of relationship between the
characters and the material world in which they find themselves spatially and place-wise. In
elegant, ironic fashion, he demonstrates how a seeming disadvantage—being blind—can
potentially make one more aware and thus better able to “see,” even though this new mode of
“seeing” remains in what the phenomenologist calls the natural attitude—the unquestioned
acceptance of the things and experiences of the lifeworld. In recasting García Márquez’s account
phenomenologically, we can say that, via the paradox of Úrsula’s not being able “to see,” she
necessarily must make the lifeworld an object of directed attention. She realizes within the
natural attitude (and we realize phenomenologically) that immersion-in-the-world refers to the
lived fact that human beings are always already inescapably entwined in and subsumed by their
worlds that, most of the time, “just happen” without the intervention of anything or anyone.
What, more specifically, does Úrsula’s story contribute to phenomenological
understanding? First, it points to what Merleau-Ponty meant when he defined perception as the
immediate givenness of the world founded in corporeal sensibility (Merleau-Ponty 1962). To
preserve her family status, blind Úrsula must become aware self-consciously, through
observation and practice, of this immediate, prereflective givenness of her household world as it
is encountered and activated via corporeal sensibility. Merleau-Ponty pointed to Úrsula’s
situation when he wrote that “My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and… is…
the general instrument of my ‘comprehension’” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 235). In typical
lifeworlds, qualities of materiality, spatiality, and place directly resonate with lived bodies and
thereby convey and presuppose immediate situations and meanings, though usually at a tacit,
unself-conscious level of awareness that phenomenological efforts attempt to locate and describe
reflexively. García Márquez’s description illustrates how Úrsula, via her remaining sensory
awarenesses, re-establishes a lived communion with family life—a renewed immersion-in-world
founded in unusual but obligatory understandings unsuspected by other household members.
Because Úrsula’s taken-for-granted immersion-in-world mostly collapses as she becomes
blind, she is required, out of necessity, to compensate her sightlessness with other dimensions of
corporeal sensibility—smells, sounds, and scrupulous conscious attention to habitual household
actions of herself and others. Úrsula not only must find new ways of encountering the immediate
perceptual givenness of her world, but she also must reconfigure workable means to wayfind in
and cope with that world. In becoming more aware of family members’ actions and traversals,
Úrsula shifts her attention to what phenomenologically might be described as “the bodily
constitution of the household’s lived geography”—a shift Merleau-Ponty associated with
intentional bodily mobility and the body schema, or body-subject, as I call it here. Body-subject is
the pre-cognitive intelligence of the body manifested through action and intertwining with the world
at hand: “A movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it has
incorporated it into its ‘world’, and to move one’s body is to aim at things through it; it is to
allow oneself to respond to their call….” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 139). This manner of bodily
presence and action points toward an intentional corporeal unfolding in the world as that world
sustains the unfolding.1
We see this unself-conscious but intentional bodily unfolding in Úrsula’s discovery of
household members’ habitual actions and routines. Thus, Úrsula recognizes that Fernanda’s ring
can be found through attention to the “only thing different that she had done that day”—airing
the mattresses, removing her ring, and putting it in a place away from the children. Similarly,
because Amaranta had shifted her porch position to be in the sun, Úrsula realizes how the
absolute regularity of household routines work in dialogue with shifting aspects of the world—in
this case, seasonal change.

Body-Subject, Environmental Ensembles, and Place

In speaking of a wider-scale interconnectedness between people and their worlds, García
Márquez’s account intimates the spatial versatility of body-subject as expressed in more complex
bodily ensembles extending over time and space and fashioning a wider lived geography. For
example, renewed mastery of threading a needle or boiling milk points to what might be called
body-routines—sets of integrated behaviors and actions sustaining a particular task or aim—for
example, Úrsula’s making breakfast for the family or her repairing a torn shirt (Seamon 1979). In
turn, body-subject contributes to a wider complex of habitual actions of the sort that Úrsula
locates via Amaranta’s shifting porch position: Without realizing it, every family member
“repeated the same path every day, the same actions….” One can describe these automatic,
repetitive unfolding actions via time and place as time-space routines—sets of more or less
habitual bodily actions extending through a considerable portion of time, for example,
Amaranda’s sewing-on-the-porch routine (Seamon 1979).
As indicated by Úrsula and Amaranda’s collision on the porch, García Marquez’s
description intimates that the household as a whole incorporates a more comprehensive time-
space regularity whereby the habitual actions of individual members commingle to make the
household a living place. This larger-scale environmental ensemble can be called a place
ballet—an interaction of individual bodily routines rooted in a particular environment, which, as
Úrsula’s household suggests, may become an important place of interpersonal and communal
exchange, meaning, and attachment (Seamon 1979).

1
Simple experiential exercises for seeing firsthand the “lived nature” of body-subject include, for
example, moving a household object that has a place to a new place; or setting oneself to get to a
destination by a route other than usual. Though seemingly trivial, these exercises can reveal
much about ordinary bodily actions and routines (Seamon 1979, pp. 201-10).
 Philosopher Edward Casey speaks of the relationship between self and place as
“constitutive coingredience—in other words, “each is essential to the being of the other,” and
thus there can be “no place without self and no self without place.” What is needed, he suggests,
“is a model wherein the abstract truth of this position… can be given concrete articulation
without conflating place and self or maintaining the self as an inner citadel of unimplaced
freedom” (Casey 2001, p. 684). Here, Casey infers a central dilemma for situated cognition,
which holds to the ontological assumption of cognitive consciousness as an “inner citadel of
unimplaced freedom.” In other words, the more comprehensive phenomena of lived
emplacement and human-immersion-in-world is reduced to a head-centered situated cognition,
which, even in embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended (“4e”) versions, remains envisioned
conceptually as directing a lived body still ontologically severed from a world that, in actual fact,
contributes to and presupposes the lived body’s involvement in that world, at least as that world
remains more or less the same.

Phenomenology and Situated Cognition

Specifically, a phenomenological understanding of lived body, place, and immersion-in-world
offers the following conclusions relevant for research on situated cognition.
1. From a phenomenological perspective, there is little evidence that, experientially, cognition
plays a significant role in more-or-less habitual, everyday behaviors, actions, and routines
(Seamon 1979). Neruophysiological processes and interconnections may be claimed via
reductive indicators like functional magnetic resonance imaging but, experientially and
phenomenologically, one can conclude, through careful, firsthand phenomenological
observations of one’s own daily experience, that cognitive phenomena play a limited role in
everyday behaviors, actions, and routines, which instead are grounded in body-subject and
lived emplacement (as Úrsula discovered in attending to everyday household events and
routines). 2
2. The intentionality of body-subject is unself-conscious, expressed through bodily action, and
typically in sync with qualities of the world, particularly lived distance, lived space, and lived
time. Though the examples I’ve provided from García Márquez relate to habitual, humdrum
events-in-place, one must recognize that the lived body via body-subject incorporates a wide
range of lived awareness and knowledge that, in addition to routine corporeal actions, can
involve an emotional dimension shaping expressive bodily actions and presentations. For
instance:
 love of bodily movement expressed, for example, in exceptional athletic performance or
in corporeal art forms like dance, mime, pantomime, and performance art;

2
Clearly, there are situations, mostly in learning new actions and routines, when cognition
“directs” body-subject—for example, learning to type and directing which fingers to strike which
keys. Once, however, the keyboard has become a kind of “habitual, routine field,” cognitive
attention is no longer needed, and one can proceed efficiently as his or her mind may be on
matters far removed from the typing task at hand. Ursula’s use of careful observation
illustrates—in her case, out of necessity—another significant aspect of cognition in relation to-
bodily action: becoming self-consciously aware of and re-mastering lifeworld situations and
needs corporeally.
  mechanical ability and transferable versatility, whereby, for example, the proficient
mechanic readily repairs a faltering engine or the skilled carpenter adeptly rebuilds a
failing stair;
 manual dexterity and artistry, whereby the practiced silversmith fashions an elegant
bracelet or the accomplished potter transforms shapeless clay into a handsome vase.
3. If human beings are always already immersed in world via lived body, body-subject, and
environmental embodiment, then place and lived emplacement become a primary ontological
structure that subsumes both human experience and the material world in which that
experience happens. Lived place presupposes that “the very possibility of the appearance of
things—of objects, of self, and of others—is possible only within the all-embracing compass
of place” (Malpas 1999, p. 15). If human experience and the world are only present through
place, then this lived fact means that, rather than the limited focus on situated cognition, the
cognitive scientist must probe the various lived ways that places shape human experience and
human experience shapes places: “It is through our engagement with place that our own
human being is made real, but it is also through our engagement that place takes on a sense
and a significance of its own” (Malpas 2009, p. 33).
4. Most broadly, there are needed three interconnected phenomenologies:
 First, a comprehensive, integrated phenomenology of the modes of intentionality whereby
human beings encounter, give attention to, act in, and understand their worlds; what, in
other words, is the lived range of awareness, attention, knowing, intention, motivation,
feeling, and bodily action whereby human beings are and become in the world?
 Second, a comprehensive, integrated phenomenology of how qualities of the world—e.g.,
materiality, spatiality, temporality, sociality, and so forth—make lifeworlds and, just in
being what those qualities are, sustain or undermine human life.
 Third, a phenomenology that integrates the first two phenomenologies into a
comprehensive understanding of human-immersion-in-world, particularly as the
phenomenon of place might provide an organizing ontological structure. It well may be
that cognitive science must move away from a focus on the cognitive self (even as
extended by body, feelings, environment, and world) and move toward a conceptual and
epistemological understanding of lived emplacement via phenomenology. One key
question is how lived emplacement and the experience of place might be understood
generatively and dynamically in a way whereby lived relationships come before the
human and environmental parts. How, in other words, might we facilitate an
understanding whereby place is “constituted through a gathering of elements that are
themselves mutually defined only through the way in which they are gathered together
within the place they also constitute” (Malpas 2006, p. 29)?
References
Casey, E (2001) Between geography and philosophy. Annals, Association of American Geographers, 91:683-93
García Márquez, G (1967) A hundred years of solitude. Vintage, New York
Malpas, J (1999) Place and experience. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Malpas, J (2006) Heidegger’s topology. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Malpas, J (2009) Place and human being. Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 20(3):19-23
Merleau-Ponty, M (1962) Phenomenology of perception. Humanities Press, New York
Seamon, D (1979) A geography of the lifeworld. Croom Helm, London
Seamon, D (2014) Lived bodies, place, and phenomenology, Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 4:143-
66

View publication stats