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Culture and the senses : bodily ways of knowing in an African community (2002)

Geurts, Kathryn Linn, 1960-

Berkeley :University of California Press,

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Details

UID:

edocfu_9959245609902883

Format: 1 online resource (350 p.)

Edition: 1st ed.

ISBN: 1-282-76272-9 , 9786612762727 , 1-59734-564-4 , 0-520-93654-X

Series Statement: Ethnographic studies in subjectivity ; 3

Content: 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.

Note: Description based upon print version of record. , Front matter -- , Contents -- , Acknowledgments -- , Note on Transliteration and Orthography -- , Map of Southeastern Ghana -- , 1. Is There a Sixth Sense? -- , 2. Anlo-Land and Anlo-Ewe People -- , 3. Language and Sensory Orientations -- , 4. Kinesthesia and the Development of Moral Sensibilities -- , 5. Sensory Symbolism in Birth and Infant Care Practices -- , 6. Toward an Understanding of Anlo Forms of Being-in-the-World -- , 7. Personhood and Ritual Reinforcement of Balance -- , 8. Anlo Cosmology, the Senses, and Practices of Protection -- , 9. Well-Being, Strength, and Health in Anlo Worlds -- , 10. Sensory Experience and Cultural Identity -- , Notes -- , Glossary -- , Bibliography -- , Index , English

Additional Edition: ISBN 0-520-23455-3

Additional Edition: ISBN 0-520-23456-1

Language: English

Subjects: Psychology

RVK:

CP 2000

DOI: 10.1525/9780520936546