Format:
Online-Ressource
ISBN:
9780520936546
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.
Content:
Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Transliteration and Orthography -- Map of Southeastern Ghana -- INTRODUCTION: Cultural Construction of Sensoriums and Sensibilities -- 1. Is There a Sixth Sense? -- 2. Anlo-Land and Anlo-Ewe People -- PART ONE: Conceptualizing Sensory Orientations in Anlo-Land -- 3. Language and Sensory Orientations -- PART TWO: Moral Embodiment and Sensory Socialization -- 4. Kinesthesia and the Development of Moral Sensibilities -- 5. Sensory Symbolism in Birth and Infant Care Practices -- PART THREE: Person and Identity -- 6. Toward an Understanding of Anlo Forms of Being-in-the-World -- 7. Personhood and Ritual Reinforcement of Balance -- PART FOUR: Health, Strength, and Sensory Dimensions of Well-Being -- 8. Anlo Cosmology, the Senses, and Practices of Protection -- 9. Well-Being, Strength, and Health in Anlo Worlds -- CONCLUSION: Ethnography and the Study of Cultural Difference -- 10. Sensory Experience and Cultural Identity -- Notes -- Glossary -- A -- B -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- K -- L -- M -- N -- S -- T -- V -- X -- Y -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Illustrations.
Note:
Includes bibliographical references and index
Additional Edition:
ISBN 9780520234567
Additional Edition:
Druckausg. Geurts, Kathryn Linn, 1960 - Culture and the senses Berkeley : University of California Press, 2002 ISBN 9780520234567
Additional Edition:
ISBN 0520234553
Additional Edition:
ISBN 0520234561
Additional Edition:
Print version Culture and the Senses : Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community
Language:
English
Subjects:
Psychology
Keywords:
Ahlŏ
;
Ghana
;
Ethnologie
;
Kultur
URL:
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kxp/detail.action?docID=224214
