The Social Meaning of the Senses

The Social Meaning of the Senses PDF Author: Paul Eisewicht
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3658385804
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
That which we consider to be real we call knowledge. As a rule, we consider what our five senses convey to us to be real. Our perception and what we consider real and construct as socially effective differs depending on which senses we focus on and how intensively. The connection between reality constructions and sensory conditions has received little attention in social research so far. This concerns, for example, the use of our sensory organs for empirical reconstructions of bodies of knowledge, sensory perceptions as part of bodies of knowledge, or the question of how far knowledge is dependent on sensory abilities. This anthology attempts to close this gap by focusing on the social significance of sensory perceptions and discussing it using the example of various objects of investigation. This book is a translation of an original German edition. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation.

The Social Meaning of the Senses

The Social Meaning of the Senses PDF Author: Paul Eisewicht
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3658385804
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description
That which we consider to be real we call knowledge. As a rule, we consider what our five senses convey to us to be real. Our perception and what we consider real and construct as socially effective differs depending on which senses we focus on and how intensively. The connection between reality constructions and sensory conditions has received little attention in social research so far. This concerns, for example, the use of our sensory organs for empirical reconstructions of bodies of knowledge, sensory perceptions as part of bodies of knowledge, or the question of how far knowledge is dependent on sensory abilities. This anthology attempts to close this gap by focusing on the social significance of sensory perceptions and discussing it using the example of various objects of investigation. This book is a translation of an original German edition. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation.

Sensory Experiences

Sensory Experiences PDF Author: Danièle Dubois
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027258902
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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Book Description
Sensory Experiences: Exploring meaning and the senses describes the collective elaboration of a situated cognitive approach with an emphasis on the relations between language and cognition within and across different sensory modalities and practices. This approach, grounded in 40 years of empirical research, is a departure from the analytic, reductive view of human experiences as information processing. The book is structured into two parts. Each author first introduces the situated cognitive approach from their respective sensory domains (vision, audition, olfaction, gustation). The second part is the collective effort to derive methodological guidelines respecting the ecological validity of experimental investigations while formulating operational answers to applied questions (such as the sensory quality of environments and product design). This book will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners dealing with sensory experiences and anyone who wants to understand and celebrate the cultural diversity of human productions that make life enjoyable!

Sensual Relations

Sensual Relations PDF Author: David Howes
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472026224
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
With audacious dexterity, David Howes weaves together topics ranging from love and beauty magic in Papua New Guinea to nasal repression in Freudian psychology and from the erasure and recovery of the senses in contemporary ethnography to the specter of the body in Marx. Through this eclectic and penetrating exploration of the relationship between sensory experience and cultural expression, Sensual Relations contests the conventional exclusion of sensuality from intellectual inquiry and reclaims sensation as a fundamental domain of social theory. David Howes is Professor of Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec.

Ways of Sensing

Ways of Sensing PDF Author: David Howes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317929470
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Ways of Sensing is a stimulating exploration of the cultural, historical and political dimensions of the world of the senses. The book spans a wide range of settings and makes comparisons between different cultures and epochs, revealing the power and diversity of sensory expressions across time and space. The chapters reflect on topics such as the tactile appeal of medieval art, the healing power of Navajo sand paintings, the aesthetic blight of the modern hospital, the role of the senses in the courtroom, and the branding of sensations in the marketplace. Howes and Classen consider how political issues such as nationalism, gender equality and the treatment of minority groups are shaped by sensory practices and metaphors. They also reveal how the phenomenon of synaesthesia, or mingling of the senses, can be seen as not simply a neurological condition but a vital cultural mode of creating social and cosmic interconnections. Written by leading scholars in the field, Ways of Sensing provides readers with a valuable and engaging introduction to the life of the senses in society.

Changing Senses of Place

Changing Senses of Place PDF Author: Christopher M. Raymond
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108856926
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
Global challenges ranging from climate change and ecological regime shifts to refugee crises and post-national territorial claims are rapidly moving ecosystem thresholds and altering the social fabric of societies worldwide. This book addresses the vital question of how to navigate the contested forces of stability and change in a world shaped by multiple interconnected global challenges. It proposes that senses of place is a vital concept for supporting individual and social processes for navigating these contested forces and encourages scholars to rethink how to theorise and conceptualise changes in senses of place in the face of global challenges. It also makes the case that our concepts of sense of place need to be revisited, given that our experiences of place are changing. This book is essential reading for those seeking a new understanding of the multiple and shifting experiences of place.

The Life of the Senses

The Life of the Senses PDF Author: François Laplantine
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100018305X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
Both a vital theoretical work and a fine illustration of the principles and practice of sensory ethnography, this much anticipated translation is destined to figure as a major catalyst in the expanding field of sensory studies.Drawing on his own fieldwork in Brazil and Japan and a wide range of philosophical, literary and cinematic sources, the author outlines his vision for a ‘modal anthropology’. François Laplantine challenges the primacy accorded to ‘sign’ and ‘structure’ in conventional social science research, and redirects attention to the tonalities and rhythmic intensities of different ways of living. Arguing that meaning, sensation and sociality cannot be considered separately, he calls for a 'politics of the sensible' and a complete reorientation of our habitual ways of understanding reality.The book also features an introduction to the sensory and social thought of François Laplantine by the editor of the Sensory Studies series, David Howes.

The Senses of Democracy

The Senses of Democracy PDF Author: Francine R. Masiello
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477315047
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
In The Senses of Democracy, Francine R. Masiello traces a history of perceptions expressed in literature, the visual arts, politics, and history from the start of the nineteenth century to the present day. A wide transnational landscape frames the book along with an original and provocative thesis: when the discourse on democracy is altered—when nations fall into crisis or the increased weight of modernity tests minds and nerves—the representation of our sensing bodies plays a crucial role in explaining order and rebellion, cultural innovation, and social change. Taking a wide arc of materials—periodicals, memoirs, political proclamations, and travel logs, along with art installations and fiction—and focusing on the technologies that supplement and enhance human perception, Masiello looks at the evolution of what she calls “sense work” in cultural texts, mainly from Latin America, that wend from the heights of romantic thought to the startling innovations of modernism in the early twentieth century and then to times of posthuman experience when cyber bodies hurtle through globalized space and human senses are reproduced by machines. Tracing the shifting debates on perceptions, The Senses of Democracy offers a new paradigm with which to speak of Latin American cultural history and launches a field for the comparative study of bodies, experience, pleasure, and pain over the continental divide. In the end, sense work helps us to understand how culture finds its location.

Culture and the Senses

Culture and the Senses PDF Author: Prof. Kathryn Geurts
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 052093654X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Adding her stimulating and finely framed ethnography to recent work in the anthropology of the senses, Kathryn Geurts investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. Geurts discovered that the five-senses model has little relevance in Anlo culture, where balance is a sense, and balancing (in a physical and psychological sense as well as in literal and metaphorical ways) is an essential component of what it means to be human. Much of perception falls into an Anlo category of seselelame (literally feel-feel-at-flesh-inside), in which what might be considered sensory input, including the Western sixth-sense notion of "intuition," comes from bodily feeling and the interior milieu. The kind of mind-body dichotomy that pervades Western European-Anglo American cultural traditions and philosophical thought is absent. Geurts relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinesthesia, which most Americans would not even identify as a sense. After this nuanced exploration of an Anlo-Ewe theory of inner states and their way of delineating external experience, readers will never again take for granted the "naturalness" of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell.

Art and the Senses

Art and the Senses PDF Author: Francesca Bacci
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199230609
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 679

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Book Description
The senses play a vital role in our health, our social interactions, and in enjoying food, music and the arts. The book provides a unique interdisciplinary overview of the senses, ranging from the neuroscience of sensory processing in the body, to cultural influences on how the senses are used in society, to the role of the senses in the arts.

The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture

The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture PDF Author: Phillip Vannini
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136652116
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture is the definitive guide to the sociological and anthropological study of the senses. Vannini, Waskul, and Gottschalk provide a comprehensive map of the social and cultural significance of the senses that is woven in a thorough analytical review of classical, recent, and emerging scholarship and grounded in original empirical data that deepens the review and analysis. By bridging cultural/qualitative sociology and cultural/humanistic anthropology, The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture explicitly blurs boundaries that are particularly weak in this field due to the ethnographic scope of much research. Serving both the sociological and anthropological constituencies at once means bridging ethnographic traditions, cultural foci, and socioecological approaches to embodiment and sensuousness. The Senses in Self,Society, and Culture is intended to be a milestone in the social sciences’ somatic turn.