Sensorium

Abstract: General Introduction: Empires of the Senses Part I: The Prescience of the Senses 'Culture Tunes Our Neurons' 'The Mind's Eye: What the Blind See'--Oliver Sacks * 'Inside the Five Sense Sensorium'--Marshall McLuhan, formerly University of Toronto Part II. The Shifting Sensorium Historicizing Perception 'Remembering the Senses'--Susan Stewart, Princeton University * 'The Witch's Senses: Sensory Ideologies and Transgressive Femininities from the Renaissance to Modernity'--Constance Classen, Concordia University, Montreal * 'The Senses Divided: Organs, Objects, and Media in Early Modern England'--Carla Mazzio, University of Chicago * 'The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The 'New' Chemistry and the Transformation of Sensuous Technology'--Lissa Roberts, University of Twente, Netherlands * 'Charting the Cultural History of the Senses'-- Alain Corbin, Universites de Paris Part III. Sensescapes Sensation in Cultural Context 'McLuhan in the Rainforest: The Sensory Worlds of Oral Cultures'--Constance Classen, Concordia University, Montreal * 'Consciousness as 'Feeling in the Body': A West African Theory of Embodiment, Emotion and the Making of Mind'--Kathryn Linn Geurts, Hamline University, Minnesota * 'Places Sensed, Senses Placed: Towards a Sensuous Epistemology of Space'--Steven Feld, University of New Mexico, Albequerque * 'The Tea Ceremony: A Symbolic Analysis'--Dorinne Kondo, University of Southern California * 'Engaging the Spirits of Modernity: Temiar Songs of a Changing World'--Marina Roseman, Indiana University * 'Home Cooking: Filipino Women and Geographies of the Senses in Hong Kong'--Lisa Law, University of St Andrews Part IV. The Aestheticization of Everyday Life Aestheticization Takes Command 'A Tonic of Wildness: Sensuousness in Henry David Thoreau'--Victor Carl Friesen, Independent Scholar * 'Volatile Effects: Olfactory Dimensions of Art and Architecture'--Jim Drobnick, Parachute Magazine * 'HYPERAESTHESIA, or, The Sensual Logic of Late Capitalism'--David Howes, Concordia University, Montreal * 'Under the Jaguar Sun'--Italo Calvino * 'Michel Serres' Five Senses'--Steven Connor, Birckbeck College * 'Darwin's Disgust'--William Ian Miller, University of Michigan Law School Part V. The Derangement of the Senses The Senses Disordered 'Strindberg's 'Deranged Sensations"--Hans-Goran Ekman, University of Uppsala * 'Movement, Stillness: On the Sensory World of a Shelter for the 'Homeless Mentally Ill"--Robert Desjarlais, Sarah Lawrence College, New York * 'Dystoposthesia: Emplacing Environmental Sensitivities'--Christopher Fletcher, University of Alberta, EdmontonGeneral Introduction: Empires of the Senses Part I: The Prescience of the Senses 'Culture Tunes Our Neurons' 'The Mind's Eye: What the Blind See'--Oliver Sacks * 'Inside the Five Sense Sensorium'--Marshall McLuhan, formerly University of Toronto Part II. The Shifting Sensorium Historicizing Perception 'Remembering the Senses'--Susan Stewart, Princeton University * 'The Witch's Senses: Sensory Ideologies and Transgressive Femininities from the Renaissance to Modernity'--Constance Classen, Concordia University, Montreal * 'The Senses Divided: Organs, Objects, and Media in Early Modern England'--Carla Mazzio, University of Chicago * 'The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The 'New' Chemistry and the Transformation of Sensuous Technology'--Lissa Roberts, University of Twente, Netherlands * 'Charting the Cultural History of the Senses'-- Alain Corbin, Universites de Paris Part III. Sensescapes Sensation in Cultural Context 'McLuhan in the Rainforest: The Sensory Worlds of Oral Cultures'--Constance Classen, Concordia University, Montreal * 'Consciousness as 'Feeling in the Body': A West African Theory of Embodiment, Emotion and the Making of Mind'--Kathryn Linn Geurts, Hamline University, Minnesota * 'Places Sensed, Senses Placed: Towards a Sensuous Epistemology of Space'--Steven Feld, University of New Mexico, Albequerque * 'The Tea Ceremony: A Symbolic Analysis'--Dorinne Kondo, University of Southern California * 'Engaging the Spirits of Modernity: Temiar Songs of a Changing World'--Marina Roseman, Indiana University * 'Home Cooking: Filipino Women and Geographies of the Senses in Hong Kong'--Lisa Law, University of St Andrews Part IV. The Aestheticization of Everyday Life Aestheticization Takes Command 'A Tonic of Wildness: Sensuousness in Henry David Thoreau'--Victor Carl Friesen, Independent Scholar * 'Volatile Effects: Olfactory Dimensions of Art and Architecture'--Jim Drobnick, Parachute Magazine * 'HYPERAESTHESIA, or, The Sensual Logic of Late Capitalism'--David Howes, Concordia University, Montreal * 'Under the Jaguar Sun'--Italo Calvino * 'Michel Serres' Five Senses'--Steven Connor, Birckbeck College * 'Darwin's Disgust'--William Ian Miller, University of Michigan Law School Part V. The Derangement of the Senses The Senses Disordered 'Strindberg's 'Deranged Sensations"--Hans-Goran Ekman, University of Uppsala * 'Movement, Stillness: On the Sensory World of a Shelter for the 'Homeless Mentally Ill"--Robert Desjarlais, Sarah Lawrence College, New York * 'Dystoposthesia: Emplacing Environmental Sensitivities'--Christopher Fletcher, University of Alberta, Edmonton

Abstract: In this article, I focus on the practice of listening to tape-recorded sermons among contemporary Muslims in Egypt as an exercise of ethical self-discipline. I analyze this practice in its relation to the formation of a sensorium: the visceral capacities enabling of the particular form of Muslim piety to which those who undertake the practice aspired. In focusing on both the homiletic techniques of preachers and the traditions of ethical audition that inform the contemporary practice of sermon listening, I explore how sermon listeners reconstruct their own knowledge, emotions, and sensibilities in accord with models of Islamic moral personhood. Normative models of moral personhood grounded in Islamic textual and practical traditions provide a point of reference for the task of ethical self-improvement. [embodiment, senses, disciplinary practice, reception, media, sermons, Islam]

Abstract: Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community. By Kathryn Linn Geurts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. xvi, 315; 21 photographs; map. $54.95/£37.95 cloth; $21.95/£15.95 paper. How different are people? Surely we all share at least a common mental and physical apparatus. But how we put that apparatus to use, and recognize and evaluate its various capabilities, can be very different. The relationship between a common human physical framework and the ways in which that framework is mobilized to create very different experiential, sensual, and apprehended worlds for different groups of people was laid out as a problem for anthropology in the eighteenth century by Johann Gottfried von Herder, but set aside in much of twentieth-century anthropology in favor of analyzing cultures in terms of symbolic assemblages. In this monograph, Kathryn Geurts explores the ways that Anlo-Ewe people of Ghana understand their physical "sensorium," the array of senses (which Americans tend to see as five in number), feelings, and bodily orientations through which they experience the world and themselves. The AnIo sensorium includes such things as the kinesthetic sense of balance, most manifest in carrying things on the head but more broadly understood; a sense of collapsing physically into a rest-recovery mode that recalls the collapse of a founding ancestor fleeing danger and locating current AnIo territory; and a morally-laden cleanliness/dirtiness matrix that is established at birth and clings odoriferously to people throughout life, or to money and its potential in other circumstances. The set of sensory experiences and mythopoetic tales that Geurts describes to account for a different AnIo apperceptual world is somewhat random, but is unified in the continual reference to the concept of seselelame, or the inside-the-flesh embeddedness of sensing-knowing. Geurts unwraps the concept of seselelame through its etymological signification ("feel-feel-at-flesh-inside"), as she does many of the concepts and sensations presented in the book. This analytical move, along with explanations based on historical stories and myths (often offered to her by special informants or guides), implies a "true originary meaning" that may be unevenly applied, and allows for Geurts' suggestion at the end of the book that Anlo-ness-being AnIo in the multiethnic world of Ghana and bey on-is anchored primarily in the self-experience provided by a persistent sensorium and its "modes of attention." The effect is, in the end, a picture of what "the AnIo" feel and attend to (although Geurts refers to the subjects of her study as Anlo-speakers, and never "the AnIo") as something set apart from other peoples' sensoria. …

Abstract: Artists and writers reconsider the relationship between the body and electronic technology in the twenty-first century through essays, artworks, and an encyclopedic "Abecedarius of the New Sensorium." The relationship between the body and electronic technology, extensively theorized through the 1980s and 1990s, has reached a new technosensual comfort zone in the early twenty-first century. In Sensorium, contemporary artists and writers explore the implications of the techno-human interface. Ten artists, chosen by an international team of curators, offer their own edgy investigations of embodied technology and the technologized body. These range from Matthieu Briand's experiment in "controlled schizophrenia" and Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller's uneasy psychological soundscapes to Bruce Nauman's uncanny night visions and Francois Roche's destabilized architecture. The art in Sensorium-which accompanies an exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center-captures the aesthetic attitude of this hybrid moment, when modernist segmentation of the senses is giving way to dramatic multisensory mixes or transpositions. Artwork by each artist appears with an analytical essay by a curator, all of it prefaced by an anchoring essay on "The Mediated Sensorium" by Caroline Jones. In the second half of Sensorium, scholars, scientists, and writers contribute entries to an "Abecedarius of the New Sensorium." These short, playful pieces include Bruno Latour on "Air," Barbara Maria Stafford on "Hedonics," Michel Foucault (from a little-known 1966 radio lecture) on the "Utopian Body," Donna Haraway on "Compoundings," and Neal Stephenson on the "Viral." Sensorium is both forensic and diagnostic, viewing the culture of the technologized body from the inside, by means of contemporary artists' provocations, and from a distance, in essays that situate it historically and intellectually. Copublished with The MIT List Visual Arts Center.