Culture and the senses [[electronic resource] ] : bodily ways of knowing in an African community / / Kathryn Linn Geurts

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910814521603321
• Autore: Geurts Kathryn Linn <1960->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Berkeley, : University of California Press, c2002
• ISBN: 1-282-76272-9; 9786612762727; 1-59734-564-4; 0-520-93654-X
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (350 p.)
• Collana: Ethnographic studies in subjectivity ; ; 3
• Classificazione: CP 2000
• Disciplina: 155.8/4963374
• Soggetti: Anlo (African people) - Psychology; Anlo (African people) - Socialization; Senses and sensation
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 285-307) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: 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
• Sommario/riassunto: 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.