The Social Meaning of the Senses
The Social Meaning of the Senses

Author: Paul Eisewicht

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-08-21

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 3658385804

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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 Senses in Self, Society, and Culture
The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture

Author: Phillip Vannini

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-18

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1136652116

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

Sensory Experiences
Sensory Experiences

Author: Danièle Dubois

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2021-12-15

Total Pages: 626

ISBN-13: 9027258902

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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

Author: David Howes

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2010-02-22

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0472026224

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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

Author: David Howes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-30

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1317929470

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

Senses of Place
Senses of Place

Author: Steven Feld

Publisher: James Currey

Published: 1999-01-01

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780852559000

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The articles collected here consider the construction of place in both a physical and conceptual sense. They discuss how places are created by, and help to create, the people who live in them.

A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age
A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age

Author: David Howes

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2014-10-23

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1474233163

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the 20th century, many aspects of life became 'a matter of perception' in the wake of the multiplication of media, stylistic experimentation, and the rise of multiculturalism. Life sped up as a result of new modes of transportation – automobiles and airplanes – and communication – telephones and personal computers – which emphasized the rapid movement of people and ideas. The proliferation of synthetic products and simulated experiences, from artificial flavors to video games, in turn, created heady virtual worlds of sensation. This progressive mediation and acceleration of sensation, along with the sensory and environmental pollution it often spawned, also sparked various countertrends, such as the 'back to nature' movement, the craft movement, slow food and alternative medicine. This volume shows how attending to the sensory dynamics of the modern age yields many fresh insights into the intertwined processes which gave the 20th century its particular feel of technological prowess and gaudy artificiality. A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age presents essays on the following topics: the social life of the senses; urban sensations; the senses in the marketplace; the senses in religion; the senses in philosophy and science; medicine and the senses; the senses in literature; art and the senses; and sensory media.

Culture and the Senses
Culture and the Senses

Author: Prof. Kathryn Geurts

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2003-01-09

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 052093654X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

The Senses of Democracy
The Senses of Democracy

Author: Francine R. Masiello

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2018-05-02

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 1477315047

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

A Cultural History of the Senses in Antiquity
A Cultural History of the Senses in Antiquity

Author: Jerry Toner

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Published: 2016-05-17

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780857853394

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The ancient world used the senses to express an enormous range of cultural meanings. Indeed the senses were functionally significant in all aspects of ancient life, often in ways that were complex and interconnected. Antiquity was also a period where the senses were experienced vividly: cities stank, statues were brightly painted and literature made full use of sensory imagery to create its effects. In a steeply hierarchical world, with vast differences between the landed wealthy, the poor and the slaves, the senses played a key role in establishing and maintaining boundaries between social groups; but the use of the senses in the ancient world was not static. New religions, such as Christianity, developed their own way of using the senses, acquiring unique forms of sensory-related symbolism in processes which were slow and often contested. The aim of this volume is to provide an overview of these structures and developments and to show how their study can yield a more nuanced understanding of the ancient world. The Cultural History of the Senses set delves into the sensory foundations of Western civilization, taking a comprehensive period-by-period approach which provides a broad understanding of the life of the senses from antiquity to the modern day. Each of the volumes explores the following topics: The Social Life of the Senses; Urban Sensations; The Senses in the Marketplace; The Senses in Religion; The Senses in Philosophy and Science; Medicine and the Senses; The Senses in Literature; Art and the Senses; and Sensory Media. Superbly illustrated, this six-volume set is the most authoritative and comprehensive historical survey of the senses available.