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Culture and the Senses Prof. Kathryn Geurts

Culture and the Senses By Prof. Kathryn Geurts

Culture and the Senses by Prof. Kathryn Geurts


$54.99
Condition - Very Good
5 in stock

Summary

Investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. This book relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinesthesia, which most Americans would not even identify as a sense.

Culture and the Senses Summary

Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community by Prof. Kathryn Geurts

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.

About Prof. Kathryn Geurts

Kathryn Linn Geurts is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Hamline University.

Table of 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 Bibliography Index Illustrations

Additional information

GOR013306746
9780520234567
0520234561
Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community by Prof. Kathryn Geurts
Used - Very Good
Paperback
University of California Press
20030109
330
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

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