West Africans enjoy a sensory-emotional, embodied way of knowing that can be summed up with the Anlo-Ewe phrase seselelãme. This compelling term, seselelãme, comes from the language Sefakor Komabu-Pomeyie grew up speaking in southeastern Ghana, and it forms the basis for decades of work Kathryn Geurts has conducted as an anthropologist and guest among Anlo people. Functionally, seselelãme captures a panoply of sensory-emotional experiences, signals, and perceptions, distinguishing it from ontological traditions that emphasize atomization, fragmentation, and categorization. This situates seselelãme almost in opposition to longstanding Euro-American ways of being, which have privileged splits among cognition, sensory perception, emotional feeling, and behavioral expressions. Those seeking to challenge the mind/body dichotomy can be found throughout society, from academics such as linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson (1999), as well as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (2000), to practicing psychotherapists such as Susan Aposhyan (2007) or medical doctors such as James S. Gordon, who founded and directs The Center for Mind-Body Medicine. With Anglo-Americans and other Global North populations fervidly trying to weave or knit together entities that have been epistemologically separated for centuries (such as mind, body, spirit; individual, community, globe; human, animal, planet), seselelãme seems to appeal to some as a potential (if small) panacea. This chapter explores its contemporary spread into a globally popular phenomenon appearing in films, workshops, blogs, therapy sessions, and other venues spotlighted on the world wide web.

This early twenty-first century spread of seselelãme raises thorny questions. For example, what sorts of interpretations are being made about seselelãme by people attempting to deploy it in Euro-American contexts? When claiming that seselelãme is a “concept” that “posits that everything is connected” (Jude, 2016), how does this distort and “Westernize” an organically African phenomena? What are the implications of individualizing and commoditizing seselelãme in New Age, self-actualization workshops in Global North contexts? In what ways does this perpetuate “symbolic and structural asymmetries underpinning institutional power/violence” (Champagne and Friedman, personal communication, November 5, 2019)? When seselelãme is culturally appropriated and then marketed as “an inner realm in which all the world is experienced and felt” (Shepherd, 2017, p 17), how does this compound Global North and Global South discrepancies, tensions, and mistrust?