Chapter 6

The self within

This chapter discusses the Chinese embodied view of selfhood by examining body parts that constitute an important source of self-related conceptual schemes and cognitive categories in Chinese. Body parts are found to be prominent as the seat of the self or one’s essential being in the Chinese conceptual system. The ways in which they are used by contemporary Chinese immigrants in the articulation of selfhood not only reflect the indigenous conceptions of the embodied selfhood in the Chinese conceptual system, but also reveal some age-old cultural premises which are historically-transmitted and ideologically formed.