Author: Prof. Kathryn Geurts
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 052093654X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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.
Culture and the Senses
Author: Prof. Kathryn Geurts
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 052093654X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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.
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 052093654X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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.
Sensual Relations
Author: David Howes
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472026224
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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.
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472026224
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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.
The City and the Senses
Author: Dr Alexander Cowan
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409479609
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
How do we experience a city in terms of the senses? What are the inter-relations between human experience and behaviour in urban space? This volume examines these questions in the context of European urban culture between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, exploring the institutions and ideologies relating to the range of sensual experience and its interpretation. Spanning pre-industrial and modern cities in Britain, France, Germany and the United States, it enables the reader to establish major contrasts and continuities in what is still an evolving urban experience. Divided into sections corresponding to the five senses: noise, vision, taste, touch and smell, each sections allows for comparisons which act as reminders that the experience of the city was a multi-sensual one, and that these experiences were as much intellectual as physical in their nature.
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409479609
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
How do we experience a city in terms of the senses? What are the inter-relations between human experience and behaviour in urban space? This volume examines these questions in the context of European urban culture between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, exploring the institutions and ideologies relating to the range of sensual experience and its interpretation. Spanning pre-industrial and modern cities in Britain, France, Germany and the United States, it enables the reader to establish major contrasts and continuities in what is still an evolving urban experience. Divided into sections corresponding to the five senses: noise, vision, taste, touch and smell, each sections allows for comparisons which act as reminders that the experience of the city was a multi-sensual one, and that these experiences were as much intellectual as physical in their nature.
Coming to Our Senses
Author: Dierdra Reber
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540906
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Book Description
Coming to Our Senses positions affect, or feeling, as our new cultural compass, ordering the parameters and possibilities of what can be known. From Facebook "likes" to Coca-Cola "loves," from "emotional intelligence" in business to "emotional contagion" in social media, affect has displaced reason as the primary catalyst of global culture. Through examples of feeling in the books, film, music, advertising, cultural criticism, and political discourse of the United States and Latin America, Reber shows how affect encourages the public to "reason" on the strength of sentiment alone. Well-being, represented by happiness and health, and ill-being, embodied by unhappiness and disease, form the two poles of our social judgment, whether in affirmation or critique. We must then reenvision contemporary politics as operating at the level of the feeling body, so we can better understand the physiological and epistemological conditions affirming our cultural status quo and contestatory strategies for emancipation.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540906
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Book Description
Coming to Our Senses positions affect, or feeling, as our new cultural compass, ordering the parameters and possibilities of what can be known. From Facebook "likes" to Coca-Cola "loves," from "emotional intelligence" in business to "emotional contagion" in social media, affect has displaced reason as the primary catalyst of global culture. Through examples of feeling in the books, film, music, advertising, cultural criticism, and political discourse of the United States and Latin America, Reber shows how affect encourages the public to "reason" on the strength of sentiment alone. Well-being, represented by happiness and health, and ill-being, embodied by unhappiness and disease, form the two poles of our social judgment, whether in affirmation or critique. We must then reenvision contemporary politics as operating at the level of the feeling body, so we can better understand the physiological and epistemological conditions affirming our cultural status quo and contestatory strategies for emancipation.
Senses of Culture
Author: Sarah Nuttall
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 590
Book Description
Everyday life in South Africa has been dominated by the politics of racial identities, while such identities form and re-form around a range of cultural activities and practices. This book traces the important dimensions of cultural activity in late twentieth-century South Africa, offering a multidisciplinary assessment between culture and politics. It also explores the ways in which the place of culture is being rethought since South Africa's transition to democracy.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 590
Book Description
Everyday life in South Africa has been dominated by the politics of racial identities, while such identities form and re-form around a range of cultural activities and practices. This book traces the important dimensions of cultural activity in late twentieth-century South Africa, offering a multidisciplinary assessment between culture and politics. It also explores the ways in which the place of culture is being rethought since South Africa's transition to democracy.
The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture
Author: Phillip Vannini
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136652116
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136652116
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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.
Empire of the Senses
Author: David Howes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000515435
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Book Description
With groundbreaking contributions by Marshall McLuhan, Oliver Sacks, Italo Calvino and Alain Corbin, among others, Empire of the Senses overturns linguistic and textual models of interpretation and places sensory experience at the forefront of cultural analysis. The senses are gateways of knowledge, instruments of power, sources of pleasure and pain - and they are subject to dramatically different constructions in different societies and periods. Empire of the Senses charts the new terrains opened up by the sensual revolution in scholarship, as it takes the reader into the sensory worlds of the medieval witch and the postmodern mall, a Japanese tea ceremony and a Boston shelter for the homeless. This compelling revisioning of history and cultural studies sparkles with wit and insight and is destined to become a landmark in the field.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000515435
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Book Description
With groundbreaking contributions by Marshall McLuhan, Oliver Sacks, Italo Calvino and Alain Corbin, among others, Empire of the Senses overturns linguistic and textual models of interpretation and places sensory experience at the forefront of cultural analysis. The senses are gateways of knowledge, instruments of power, sources of pleasure and pain - and they are subject to dramatically different constructions in different societies and periods. Empire of the Senses charts the new terrains opened up by the sensual revolution in scholarship, as it takes the reader into the sensory worlds of the medieval witch and the postmodern mall, a Japanese tea ceremony and a Boston shelter for the homeless. This compelling revisioning of history and cultural studies sparkles with wit and insight and is destined to become a landmark in the field.
The Senses Still
Author: C. Nadia Seremetakis
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226748771
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 164
Book Description
What has happened to regional experiences that identify and shape culture? Regional foods are disappearing, cultures are dissolving, and homogeneity is spreading. Anthropologist and award-winning author of The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani, C. Nadia Seremetakis brings together essays by five scholars concerned with the senses and the anthropology of everyday life. Covering a wide range of topics—from film to food, from nationalism to the evening news—the authors describe ways in which sensory memories have preserved cultures otherwise threatened by urbanism and modernity. The contributors are Susan Buck-Morss, Allen Feldman, Jonas Frykman, C. Nadia Seremetakis, and Paul Stoller. C. Nadia Seremetakis is Advisor to the Minister of Public Health in Greece and visiting professor at the National School of Public Heath in Athens. She is the author of The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani, available from the University of Chicago Press.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226748771
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 164
Book Description
What has happened to regional experiences that identify and shape culture? Regional foods are disappearing, cultures are dissolving, and homogeneity is spreading. Anthropologist and award-winning author of The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani, C. Nadia Seremetakis brings together essays by five scholars concerned with the senses and the anthropology of everyday life. Covering a wide range of topics—from film to food, from nationalism to the evening news—the authors describe ways in which sensory memories have preserved cultures otherwise threatened by urbanism and modernity. The contributors are Susan Buck-Morss, Allen Feldman, Jonas Frykman, C. Nadia Seremetakis, and Paul Stoller. C. Nadia Seremetakis is Advisor to the Minister of Public Health in Greece and visiting professor at the National School of Public Heath in Athens. She is the author of The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani, available from the University of Chicago Press.
The City of the Senses
Author: K. DeFazio
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230370357
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199
Book Description
Offers an innovative, interdisciplinary approach which opens up new ways of understanding urban culture and space. The author approaches the city as essentially a 'material' place where people live, work, and participate in social practices within historical limits set not by sensory experience or cultural meanings but material social conditions.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230370357
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199
Book Description
Offers an innovative, interdisciplinary approach which opens up new ways of understanding urban culture and space. The author approaches the city as essentially a 'material' place where people live, work, and participate in social practices within historical limits set not by sensory experience or cultural meanings but material social conditions.
Senses of the Empire
Author: Eleanor Betts
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317057287
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
The Roman empire afforded a kaleidoscope of sensations. Through a series of multisensory case studies centred on people, places, buildings and artefacts, and on specific aspects of human behaviour, this volume develops ground-breaking methods and approaches for sensory studies in Roman archaeology and ancient history. Authors explore questions such as: what it felt like, and symbolised, to be showered with saffron at the amphitheatre; why the shape of a dancer’s body made him immediately recognisable as a social outcast; how the dramatic gestures, loud noises and unforgettable smells of a funeral would have different meanings for members of the family and for bystanders; and why feeling the weight of a signet ring on his finger contributed to a man’s sense of identity. A multisensory approach is taken throughout, with each chapter exploring at least two of the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. The contributors’ individual approaches vary, reflecting the possibilities and the wide application of sensory studies to the ancient world. Underlying all chapters is a conviction that taking a multisensory approach enriches our understanding of the Roman empire, but also an awareness of the methodological problems encountered when reconstructing past experiences.
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317057287
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
The Roman empire afforded a kaleidoscope of sensations. Through a series of multisensory case studies centred on people, places, buildings and artefacts, and on specific aspects of human behaviour, this volume develops ground-breaking methods and approaches for sensory studies in Roman archaeology and ancient history. Authors explore questions such as: what it felt like, and symbolised, to be showered with saffron at the amphitheatre; why the shape of a dancer’s body made him immediately recognisable as a social outcast; how the dramatic gestures, loud noises and unforgettable smells of a funeral would have different meanings for members of the family and for bystanders; and why feeling the weight of a signet ring on his finger contributed to a man’s sense of identity. A multisensory approach is taken throughout, with each chapter exploring at least two of the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. The contributors’ individual approaches vary, reflecting the possibilities and the wide application of sensory studies to the ancient world. Underlying all chapters is a conviction that taking a multisensory approach enriches our understanding of the Roman empire, but also an awareness of the methodological problems encountered when reconstructing past experiences.