The gut as teacher
Learning from our bodies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3384/rela.2000-7426.5138Keywords:
gut, ecofeminism, popular education, systems, interconnectednessAbstract
This paper reports on a short course for working class people, in Cape Town, South Africa. It outlines how a ‘gut pedagogy’, that is, a practice of teaching through the body that takes the digestive system as ‘teacher’, is the starting point for ‘reading the world’. The journey of food as life and energy-giving substances from the world, through the body, back into the world, illustrates how systems are entangled with each other. The gut pedagogy is deliberately centred within a part of the body that mediates between inside and outside, yet is rarely spoken about. The practice is rooted firmly within feminist popular education that re-connects what has been separated – body and mind, humans and more-than-humans, the gut and the brain. Feminist practice respects and surfaces different ways of knowing, both rational and gut instinct. The paper shows that we can learn from our bodies, if we listen: about health, about the interconnectedness of all life, about the need to respect life and work together to maintain our planet.
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