From the softest caress to the harshest blow, touch lies at the heart of our experience of the world. Now, for the first time, this deepest of senses is the subject of an extensive historical ...exploration. The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch fleshes out our understanding of the past with explorations of lived experiences of embodiment from the Middle Ages to modernity. This intimate and sensuous approach to history makes it possible to foreground the tactile foundations of Western culture--the ways in which feelings shaped society._x000B__x000B_Constance Classen explores a variety of tactile realms including the feel of the medieval city; the tactile appeal of relics; the social histories of pain, pleasure, and affection; the bonds of touch between humans and animals; the strenuous excitement of sports such as wrestling and jousting; and the sensuous attractions of consumer culture. She delves into a range of vital issues, from the uses--and prohibitions--of touch in social interaction to the disciplining of the body by the modern state, from the changing feel of the urban landscape to the technologization of touch in modernity._x000B__x000B_Through poignant descriptions of the healing power of a medieval king's hand or the grueling conditions of a nineteenth-century prison, we find that history, far from being a dry and lifeless subject, touches us to the quick.
Le but de ce travail est d’établir la façon dont on parle des perceptions obtenues par les différents sens. Il s’agit d’identifier la désignation hyperonymique pouvant s’appliquer à l’ensemble des ...perceptions accessibles à un sens, et de savoir si ces désignations sont comparables pour les différents sens. Pour répondre au premier objectif, nous considérons d’abord les désignations hyperonymiques fournies par les travaux lexicographiques. Pour le second, nous considérons la distribution des hyperonymes identifiés dans trois corpus de français vernaculaire. Les résultats permettent d’établir que si les fonctionnements des désignations hyperonymiques de nos perceptions olfactives, auditives et gustatives sont dans l’ensemble comparables, ce n’est pas le cas de celles de nos perceptions tactiles et visuelles. Si ces résultats étaient confirmés à travers les langues, cela confirmerait l’idée que tous les sens n’ont pas la même importance comme source d’information dans le discours, séparant en particulier la vision des autres.
Hyperonimic designations of sensory perceptions
. The objective of this paper is to investigate the linguistic expression of our sensory perceptions. To achieve this goal, we focus on hyperonymic designations that describe perceptions from each of our senses. This raises the issue whether hyperonymic designations. apply to all senses. The method is first to look at lexicographical resources for French to establish and compare the hyperonymic designations for each sense. The second step is to examine the distribution of these hyperonymic designations in three online oral French corpora. The results of this inquiry allows us to establish that, if uses of sensory hyperonyms for taste, smell and hearing are comparable, it’s not the case for sensory hyperonyms of sight and touch. If these results were confirmed across languages, this would vindicate the view that all our senses do not have the same importance as sources of information: sight is clearly separated from the other senses.
The Invention of Taste provides a detailed overview of the development of taste, from ancient times to the present. At the heart of the book is an intriguing question: why did the sensory attribute ...of human taste become a social metaphor and aesthetic value for judging cultural qualities of art, fashion, cuisine and other social constructions? Unique amongst the senses, taste is at once a biologically derived sense, private, personal and individual, yet also a sensibility which can be acquired, shared, and communicated. Exploring the many factors that defined the evolution of taste – from medieval morals and medicine to social and cultural philosophy, the rise of aesthetics, birth of fashion, branding trends, and luxury worship in the age of mass consumption – Luca Vercelloni’s ambitious text provides readers with an outstanding introduction to the subject, making it the cultural history of taste. Now available for the first time in English, Taste features a new final chapter and a preface by series editor David Howes. Rich in detail and examples, this interdisciplinary work is an important read for students and researchers in sensory studies, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies, as well as gastronomy, fashion, design, and branding.
It is a commonly held belief that medieval Catholics were focussed on the 'bells and whistles' of religious practices, the smoke, images, sights and sounds that dazzled pre-modern churchgoers. ...Protestantism, in contrast, has been cast as Catholicism's austere, intellective and less sensual rival sibling. With iis white-washed walls, lack of incense (and often music) Protestantism worship emphasised preaching and scripture, making the new religion a drab and disengaged sensual experience. In order to challenge such entrenched assumptions, this book examines Tudor views on the senses to create a new lens through which to explore the English Reformation. Divided into two sections, the book begins with an examination of pre-Reformation beliefs and practices, establishing intellectual views on the senses in fifteenth-century England, and situating them within their contemporary philosophical and cultural tensions. Having established the parameters for the role of sense before the Reformation, the second half of the book mirrors these concerns in the post-1520 world, looking at how, and to what degree, the relationship between religious practices and sensation changed as a result of the Reformation. By taking this long-term, binary approach, the study is able to tackle fundamental questions regarding the role of the senses in late-medieval and early modern English Christianity. By looking at what English men and women thought about sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, the stereotype that Protestantism was not sensual, and that Catholicism was overly sensualised is wholly undermined. Through this examination of how worship was transformed in its textual and liturgical forms, the book illustrates how English religion sought to reflect changing ideas surrounding the senses and their place in religious life. Worship had to be 'sensible', and following how reformers and their opponents built liturgy around experience of the sacred through the physical allows us to tease out the tensions and pressures which shaped religious reform.
Dr Matthew Milner is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Early Modern Studies and Digital Humanities at McGill University, Canada
Contents: Introduction: towards thinking about sensation in Tudor religion; The senses and sensing in 15th-century England; Religiosity and sensing in pre-Reformation England; The senses and worship: provision for liturgy in late-medieval England; Sensing pre-Reformation English liturgy; Sensory landscapes of Reformation England; Perception, polity, and gostly thynges in Reformation England; Sensible reformation in mid-Tudor England; Sensing and worship in Elizabethan England; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.
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.
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.
Although somewhat marginal in relation to the other senses, smell is the most potent way of anchoring ourselves to the world. We subconsciously find our place in it by sniffing our body, the body of ...the one next to us, the room in which we are, the culture with which we are familiar. There is an incessant olfactory flow consisting of bodies, human and nonhuman, that are agents of generation, consumption, diffusion, reproduction and dissolution of odours. As they move or pause, as they cluster with others or try to move away, these bodies constantly partake in this olfactory flow, this dense planetary swirl that leaves nothing outside. The law aims at presenting itself as rational and objective. Smell, on the other hand, is one of the least integrated senses in the legal edifice, in comparison to, say, seeing and hearing. This can be attributed mainly to the fact that sense-making of smell and law are different, even antithetical. Smell operates undercurrent, tickling the olfactory antennas of individual and collective bodies while habitually hiding behind other sensory volumes. Law, on the other hand, has an interest in appearing present, universal, constant. Olfactory sense-making relies on its elusiveness; legal sense-making invests in its obviousness. Yet, the two can interact in most unexpected ways, as this volume amply shows. If anything, smell airs the way in which law conceptualises and contextualises its own actuality. Smell brings law forth by allowing it to show its underbelly, its elusive sense-making that is invariably sacrificed in preference to the necessity of legal impressions of constancy. However, smell’s fragmentary, discontinuous and unstable nature, despite all the ordering that goes to it, poses a peculiar challenge to the law. This volume sets out to investigate this juncture.
Humans have a myriad of sensory receptors in different sense organs that form the five traditionally recognized senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. These receptors detect diverse ...stimuli originating from the world and turn them into brain‐interpretable electrical impulses for sensory cognitive processing, enabling us to communicate and socialize. Developments in biologically inspired electronics have led to the demonstration of a wide range of electronic sensors in all five traditional categories, with the potential to impact a broad spectrum of applications. Here, recent advances in bioinspired electronics that can function as potential artificial sensory systems, including prosthesis and humanoid robots are reviewed. The mechanisms and demonstrations in mimicking biological sensory systems are individually discussed and the remaining future challenges that must be solved for their versatile use are analyzed. Recent progress in bioinspired electronic sensors shows that the five traditional senses are successfully mimicked using novel electronic components and the performance regarding sensitivity, selectivity, and accuracy have improved to levels that outperform human sensory organs. Finally, neural interfacing techniques for connecting artificial sensors to the brain are discussed.
Unconventional electronics and sensors inspired by biological sensory systems have proved impeccable sensing performance and accuracy for diverse external stimuli. From systems inspired by human receptors to those inspired by nontraditional receptors, recent advances in bioinspired electronics for artificial sensory systems are reviewed. Together, these progressive efforts provide practical approaches for creating artificial organs, such as prosthesis and humanoid robots.
Understanding the senses is indispensable for comprehending the Middle Ages because both a theoretical and a practical involvement with the senses played a central role in the development of ideology ...and cultural practice in this period. For the long medieval millennium, the senses were not limited to the five we think of: speech, for example, was categorized among the senses of the mouth. And sight and hearing were not always the dominant senses: for the medical profession, taste was more decisive. Nor were the senses only passive receptors: they were understood to play an active role in the process of perception and were also a vital element in the formation of each individual’s moral identity. From the development of specifically urban or commercial sensations to the sensory regimes of holiness, from the senses as indicators of social status revealed in food to the Scholastic analysis of perception, this volume demonstrates the importance of sensory experience and its manifold interpretations in the Middle Ages. A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages 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.
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