Incorporating practices are distinguished from inscribing practices. The transition from an oral culture to a literate culture is a transition from incorporating to inscribing practices.
Incorporating practices are messages that a sender or senders impart by means of their own current bodily activity, and only during the time that their bodies are present to sustain that particular activity, often in the form of habit. In inscribing practices, such as writing, we trap and hold information long after the human organism has stopped informing. Incorporating practices can be thought of as "living," especially in the form of "living tradition." They are primarily performative. "If the reader interprets oral learning as listening to something repeated in exactly the same form many times, if he equates it with oral memorization by rote, then he will fail to grasp the peculiar process involved in learning an oral epic ... with oral poetry we are dealing with a particular and distinctive process in which oral learning, oral composition, and oral transmission almost merge." (A. B. Lord)
The memorization of culturally correct posture may be taken as an example of incorporating practices. (cf Foucault's "means of correct training") In all cultures, much of the choreography of authority is expressed through the body. (Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, pp 73-4) Culturally specific postural performances provide us with a mnemonics of the body
incorporating practices
in theory