Brenda Farnell is a professor of sociocultural and linguistic anthropology and American Indian studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include ethnopoetics and Indigenous performance, Plains Indian sign language and dances of the Northern Plains, discourse-centered linguistic anthropology, movement literacy, and problems in social theory and embodiment. Her most recent book is Dynamic Embodiment for Social Theory: “I Move, Therefore I Am” (2012). Recent papers include “Performing Precision and the Limits of Observation” (with Robert N. Wood), in Redrawing Anthropology: Materials, Movements, Lines (2011); “Theorizing ‘the Body’ in Visual Culture,” in Visions of Culture: A History of Visual Anthropology (2011); and “Choreographic Intimacies” (with Robert N. Wood) in Collaborative Intimacies in Music and Dance (2017).

Charles R. Varela is a research associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds an MA in psychology and a PhD. in sociology from New York University and was professor of sociology and psychology at Union County College, New Jersey, from 1960 to 1998. His scholarly interests focus on fundamental theoretical problems at the intersection of the natural and social sciences, mediated by the philosophy of science and unified by the issues of human agency, embodiment, and causality. He is the author of the book Science for Humanism: The Recovery of Human Agency (2009). Papers in this area published in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour include “Determinism and the Recovery of Human Agency” (1999), “The Impossibility of Which Naturalism?” (2002), and “Biological Structure and Embodied Human Agency: The Problem of Instinctivism” (2003). Papers on the problem of dynamic embodiment include “Harré and Merleau Ponty: Beyond the Absent Moving Body in Embodied Social Theory” (1994), “Cartesianism Revisited: The Ghost in the Moving Machine or the Lived Body” (1995), and “The Second Somatic Revolution” (with Brenda Farnell) (2008).