Synopses & Reviews
In
Empire of the Senses the senses are considered as cultural systems. Bringing together classic pieces by key thinkers--from Marshall McLuhan and Alain Corbin to Susan Stewart and Oliver Sacks--as well as newly commissioned articles, this path-breaking book provides a comprehensive overview of the "sensual revolution," where all manner of disciplines converge. Its aim is to enhance our understanding of the role of the senses in history and across cultures by overturning the hegemony of vision in contemporary theory and demonstrating that all senses play a role in mediating cultural experience. It asks provocative questions that most of us take for granted. Are there, for example, only five senses, or is this assumption a Western construct? This radical contribution to revisioning cultural studies will be essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the full complexity of how we experience our world.
Review
"This is a timely collection that fills an important gap in our archive of the body. Readers and students across many disciplines will find it useful in making sense of a rapidly growing field of knowledge."--Veit Erlmann, University of Texas at Austin.
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
David Howes is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal.
Table of Contents
General Introduction
Empires of the Senses
Part I: The Prescience of the Senses
"Culture Tunes Our Neurons"
1. Oliver Sacks, "The Mind's Eye: What the Blind See"
2. Marshall McLuhan, "Inside the Five Sense Sensorium"
Part II. The Shifting Sensorium
Historicizing Perception
3. Susan Stewart, "Remembering the Senses"
4. Constance Classen, "The Witch's Senses: Sensory Ideologies and
Transgressive Femininities from the Renaissance to Modernity"
5. Carla Mazzio, "The Senses Divided: Organs, Objects, and
Media in Early Modern England"
6. Lissa Roberts, "The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The 'New'
Chemistry and the Transformation of Sensuous Technology"
7. Alain Corbin, "Charting the Cultural History of the Senses"
Part III. Sensescapes
Sensation in Cultural Context
8. Constance Classen, "McLuhan in the Rainforest:
The Sensory Worlds of Oral Cultures"
9. Kathryn Linn Geurts, "Consciousness as 'Feeling in the Body':
A West African Theory of Embodiment, Emotion and
the Making of Mind
10. Steven Feld, "Places Sensed, Senses Placed: Towards a Sensuous
Epistemology of Space"
11. Dorinne Kondo, "The Tea Ceremony: A Symbolic Analysis"
12. Marina Roseman, "Engaging the Spirits of Modernity: Temiar Songs
of a Changing World
13. Lisa Law, "Home Cooking: Filipino Women and Geographies of
the Senses in Hong Kong"
Part IV. The Aestheticization of Everyday Life
Aestheticization Takes Command
14. Victor Carl Friesen, "A Tonic of Wildness: Sensuousness in
Henry David Thoreau"
15. Jim Drobnick, "Volatile Effects: Olfactory Dimensions of Art
and Architecture"
16. David Howes, "HYPERAESTHESIA, or, The Sensual Logic of
Late Capitalism"
17. Italo Calvino, "Under the Jaguar Sun"
18. Steven Connor, "Michel Serres' Five Senses"
19. William Ian Miller, "Darwin's Disgust"
Part V. The Derangement of the Senses
The Senses Disordered
20. Hans-Göran Ekman, "Strindberg's 'Deranged Sensations'"
21. Robert Desjarlais, "Movement, Stillness: On the Sensory World
of a Shelter for the 'Homeless Mentally Ill'"
22. Christopher Fletcher, "Dystoposthesia: Emplacing
Environmental Sensitivities"
Sensory Bibliography
Forming Perceptions
50 Ways to Come to Your Senses