Body Portraits of Spiritual Selves: Culture Working Though Relationships in an Afro-Brazilian Community

To accomplish a person-centered study of the body in culture, I developed a novel methodological and descriptive approach called body portraiture . A body portrait is a descriptive analysis of four components of a cultural subject's bodily ways of being in the context of his or her life history and sociocultural community. These four components are the physical body, the individual movement style, the ways of interacting with other bodies in space, and the ways of sensing and imagining one's own and other bodies.