The centrality of bodies in human action has attracted considerable attention within the social sciences. Over recent years, this interest has been directed less to individual bodies than to bodies in relation with others and things in their world. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962/1945) highlighted bodies in relation through the concept of the ‘lived body.’ A range of later efforts to capture this relationality include¾to name but a few among many¾Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of habitus, Michel Foucault’s (1977) notion of the body as object and instrument of power, Anthony Gidden’s (1984) practical consciousness, Elizabeth Grosz’s (1994) descriptions on inscribing or etching of volatile bodies by discursive systems, and Iris Marion Young’s (1990) elaboration of bodily comportment as reflective of gendered existence in the world.

Close attention to bodies in relation has importance for understanding skilful performance. Using the example of walking along an uneven surface, Tim Ingold argues, as follows:

"surely we walk, just as we talk, write and use tools, with the whole body…. [And] it is in the very “tuning” of movement in response to the every-changing conditions of an unfolding task that the skill of any bodily technique ultimately resides….  Indeed it could be said that walking is a highly intelligent activity. This intelligence, however, is not located exclusively in the head but is distributed throughout the entire field of relations comprised by the presence of the human being in the inhabited world." (Ingold, 2011, pp. 46-47)

In a similar vein to Ingold, Merleau-Ponty emphasises “not a matter of ‘I think that’ but of ‘I can’” (p. 137). As Merleau-Ponty and Ingold point out, inhabiting our world includes not merely exercising the brain, but continually negotiating things in our surroundings as we perform everyday or less usual tasks. Likewise, and simultaneously, inhabiting our world involves interacting with others as we go about our activities. These negotiations and interactions occur through using the whole body. This is evident in the clumsiness or frustration we can feel when learning something new, which contrasts with the fluency of skilful performance. As Merleau-Ponty expressed it: “The body is the vehicle of being in the world” (p. 146). Moreover, I have “not only an experience of my body, but an experience of my body-in-the-world” (p. 141). This concept of the body is not limited, then, to interconnecting systems of organs, but is the body as lived.

While previous research approaches have succeeded in ‘bringing the body in from the cold’ after an earlier preoccupation with ‘mental’ or intellectual activity, these approaches have typically not highlighted how skilful performance occurs through the body’s entwinement with world. In this paper, we sketch a theoretical framework for the purpose of extending previous accounts of working with, and learning through, the body in skilful performance. We adopt this theoretical framing in empirically investigating genetic modification of plants in biotechnology. A key feature of this analysis is attention to the body as medium for our entwinementwith world (Merleau-Ponty (1962/1945) in skilful performance (see Dall’Alba, 2009; Dall’Alba & Sandberg, 2014). In plant modification, not only do practitioners work with their bodies (in the sense Ingold and Merleau-Ponty indicate above), but they also work towards developing a product that will impact upon other bodies in specific ways. In our analysis, we consider both these senses, that is, working with the body and working toward other bodies. 

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