These should inform a broad approach to unpacking the depth of embodiment theory, while Kiverstein 2012 provides foundations for embodied cognition and serves as an overview of how cognitive sciences embrace theories of embodiment, including how sciences have grappled with differing conceptualizations of embodiment and how philosophers and other theorists approach the notion. Such scholarship is bolstered and informed by classic work such as Merleau-Ponty 1945, which accounts for phenomenological theory and discusses the role of human perception in experience Todd 1937, an early work on bodily memory and connectivity between physiology and emotional state through the lens of dance, gesture, and movement and Richardson 1974, which includes deeper anthropological conversations on materiality and human awareness. Work on embodiment within the anthropological canon largely stems from research on the body, such as Farquhar and Lock 2007 as well as Halliburton 2002, which invites cross-cultural comparisons in order to recalibrate assumptions about human relationships with bodies. Through insightful dialogue on the essence of experience, Csordas 1990 invites anthropologists to explore culture and society by way of embodiment.

Mascia-Lees 2011 and Johnson 2017 are among the most essential treatments in embodiment, providing a slew of cultural case studies and asking the question of how bodies inform understanding, respectively.

There are differing yet related understandings of embodiment theory among different sciences and fields, and readers are encouraged to research these interdisciplinary considerations for what is ultimately a multidisciplinary concept. Kerschbaumer 2016 provides a succinct anthropology of virtual worlds, which is a great place to start in that regard. There are not a large number of texts that provide a distinct overview of embodied/virtual environments, since these are emerging frameworks that meet at an intersection of a number of disciplines and scholarly traditions. This article includes new work from science journals and popular media to illustrate how new human adaptations, ecologies, and virtual perceptions interface with embodiment. Mediated and augmented experiences have all manner of applications and implications, including overriding biology and genetics, posing questions for the future of the human condition. Theories of being and knowing, inherent to the anthropological canon, pose examination of bodily knowledge and bring about inquiry in medicine, disability studies, cognition, and health, to name a few. Simulated or virtual experiences make use of what we know about human perception to create new forms of reality. Simultaneously, media, entertainment, and design technology have moved into virtual reality and augmented experiences that either transcend, mimic, or escape earthly realms or physical limitations. Scholars have referred to this era as the Anthropocene, which ultimately points to human dilemma, since human behavior is defined by progressively more destructive behavior that yields an earth on which humans cannot rely for resources. Questions of materiality give way to attention on the physical, earthly environment to which humans have evolved and with which humans have coadapted. It is generally well accepted that cultural perspectives inform human knowledge, but theories in embodiment ask how social and cultural conditions inform not only perspectives, but also experiences or felt senses (or both). Conjuring many inquiries in biology, cognition, psychology, ethics, philosophy, religion, and ecology, this collection is composed mostly of work in the humanities and social sciences and is skewed by traditions in anthropology. Embodiment is inherently a social concept, and one that rests on foundational understandings of human evolution and adaptation as well as human sociability and socialization, sometimes explored as ecosocial phenomena. With implications for larger questions regarding the human mind, and apart from dualistic conversations on mind-body connections, embodiment theories view the body as a tool for participation in lifeworlds. This list includes work that researches, discusses, or questions notions of virtual with regard to landscapes of experience and that looks to discourses on the role of the body in human perception.

Selected works account for embodiment literature and emergent considerations of the body in what may be considered a post-body, or post-human, era of technology, connectivity, and communications. This article by no means serves to account for theories on virtual technologies or virtual design but, rather, offers a distinct exploration on the role of the body in virtual experiences and spaces.

Define virtual body