Download or read book The Life of the Senses written by François Laplantine and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-31 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Both a vital theoretical work and a fine illustration of the principles and practice of sensory ethnography, this much anticipated translation is destined to figure as a major catalyst in the expanding field of sensory studies.Drawing on his own fieldwork in Brazil and Japan and a wide range of philosophical, literary and cinematic sources, the author outlines his vision for a ‘modal anthropology’. François Laplantine challenges the primacy accorded to ‘sign’ and ‘structure’ in conventional social science research, and redirects attention to the tonalities and rhythmic intensities of different ways of living. Arguing that meaning, sensation and sociality cannot be considered separately, he calls for a 'politics of the sensible' and a complete reorientation of our habitual ways of understanding reality.The book also features an introduction to the sensory and social thought of François Laplantine by the editor of the Sensory Studies series, David Howes.
Download or read book A Natural History of the Senses written by Diane Ackerman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-12-07 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diane Ackerman's lusciously written grand tour of the realm of the senses includes conversations with an iceberg in Antarctica and a professional nose in New York, along with dissertations on kisses and tattoos, sadistic cuisine and the music played by the planet Earth. “Delightful . . . gives the reader the richest possible feeling of the worlds the senses take in.” —The New York Times
Download or read book A Tour of the Senses written by John M. Henshaw and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2012-01-20 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A blend of research findings and real-world anecdotes about people’s sensory experiences enlivens this historical view of the science behind perception.” —Science News Ever wonder why some people have difficulty recognizing faces or why food found delicious in one culture is reviled in another? John M. Henshaw ponders these and other surprising facts in this fascinating and fast-paced tour of the senses. From when stimuli first excite our senses to the near-miraculous sense organs themselves to the mystery of how our brain interprets senses, Henshaw explains the complex phenomena of how we see, feel, taste, touch, and smell. He takes us through the rich history of sensory perception, dating back to Aristotle’s classification of the five main senses, and helps us understand the science and technology behind sensory research today. A Tour of the Senses travels beyond our human senses. Henshaw describes artificial sensing technologies and instruments, unusual sensory abilities of the animal kingdom, and techniques for improving, rehabilitating, and even replacing sense organs. This entertaining introduction to sensory science is a clever mix of research findings and real-world stories that helps us understand the complex processes that turn sensory stimuli into sophisticated brain responses. “A Tour of the Senses is a fun book, which may be of interest to anyone who’s ever wondered how the eye or ear works.” —American Journal of Human Biology
Download or read book The Sensational Past How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses written by Carolyn Purnell and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch—as they were celebrated during the Enlightenment and as they are perceived today. Blindfolding children from birth? Playing a piano made of live cats? Using tobacco to cure drowning? Wearing “flea”-colored clothes? These actions may seem odd to us, but in the eighteenth century, they made perfect sense. As often as we use our senses, we rarely stop to think about their place in history. But perception is not dependent on the body alone. Carolyn Purnell persuasively shows that, while our bodies may not change dramatically, the way we think about the senses and put them to use has been rather different over the ages. Journeying through the past three hundred years, Purnell explores how people used their senses in ways that might shock us now. And perhaps more surprisingly, she shows how many of our own ways of life are a legacy of this earlier time. The Sensational Past focuses on the ways in which small, peculiar, and seemingly unimportant facts open up new ways of thinking about the past. You will explore the sensory worlds of the Enlightenment, learning how people in the past used their senses, understood their bodies, and experienced the rapidly shifting world around them. In this smart and witty work, Purnell reminds us of the value of daily life and the power of the smallest aspects of existence using culinary history, fashion, medicine, music, and many other aspects of Enlightenment life.
Download or read book Coming to My Senses written by Alyssa Harad and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-07-05 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sudden love affair with fragrance leads to sensual awakening, self-transformation, and an unexpected homecoming At thirty-six—earnest, bookish, terminally shopping averse—Alyssa Harad thinks she knows herself. Then one day she stumbles on a perfume review blog and, surprised by her seduction by such a girly extravagance, she reads in secret. But one trip to the mall and several dozen perfume samples later, she is happily obsessed with the seductive underworld of scent and the brilliant, quirky people she meets there. If only she could put off planning her wedding a little longer. . . . Thus begins a life-changing journey that takes Harad from a private perfume laboratory in Austin, Texas, to the glamorous fragrance showrooms of New York City and a homecoming in Boise, Idaho, with the women who watched her grow up. With warmth and humor, Harad traces the way her unexpected passion helps her open new frontiers and reclaim traditions she had rejected. Full of lush description, this intimate memoir celebrates the many ways there are to come to our senses.
Download or read book What a Plant Knows written by Daniel Chamovitz and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-05-22 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the secret lives of various plants, from the colors they see to whether or not they really like classical music to their ability to sense nearby danger.
Download or read book The Empire of the Senses written by Alexis Landau and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-02-09 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year The Empire of the Senses is an enthralling tale of love and war, duty and self-discovery. It begins in 1914 when Lev Perlmutter, an assimilated German Jew fighting in World War I, finds unexpected companionship on the Eastern Front; back at home, his wife Josephine embarks on a clandestine affair of her own. A decade later, during the heady, politically charged interwar years in Berlin, their children—one, a nascent Fascist struggling with his sexuality, the other a young woman entranced by the glitz and glamour of the Jazz Age—experience their own romantic awakenings. With a painter’s sensibility for the layered images that comprise our lives, this exquisite novel by Alexis Landau marks the emergence of a writer uniquely talented in bringing the past to the present.
Download or read book Reformation of the Senses written by Jacob M. Baum and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We see the Protestant Reformation as the dawn of an austere, intellectual Christianity that uprooted a ritualized religion steeped in stimulating the senses--and by extension the faith--of its flock. Historians continue to use the idea as a potent framing device in presenting not just the history of Christianity but the origins of European modernity. Jacob M. Baum plumbs a wealth of primary source material from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to offer the first systematic study of the senses within the religious landscape of the German Reformation. Concentrating on urban Protestants, Baum details the engagement of Lutheran and Calvinist thought with traditional ritual practices. His surprising discovery: Reformation-era Germans echoed and even amplified medieval sensory practices. Yet Protestant intellectuals simultaneously cultivated the idea that the senses had no place in true religion. Exploring this paradox, Baum illuminates the sensory experience of religion and daily life at a crucial historical crossroads. Provocative and rich in new research, Reformation of the Senses reevaluates one of modern Christianity's most enduring myths.
Download or read book The Senses written by Fiona Macpherson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Collection of Classic and Contemporary Articles on the Philosophy of the Senses --
Download or read book Senses of Place written by Steven Feld and published by James Currey. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The articles collected here consider the construction of place in both a physical and conceptual sense. They discuss how places are created by, and help to create, the people who live in them.
Download or read book Our Senses written by Rob DeSalle and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively and unconventional exploration of our senses, how they work, what is revealed when they don't, and how they connect us to the world Over the past decade neuroscience has uncovered a wealth of new information about our senses and how they serve as our gateway to the world. This splendidly accessible book explores the most intriguing findings of this research. With infectious enthusiasm, Rob DeSalle illuminates not only how we see, hear, smell, touch, taste, maintain balance, feel pain, and rely on other less familiar senses, but also how these senses shape our perception of the world aesthetically, artistically, and musically. DeSalle first examines the question of how perception and consciousness are formed in the brain, setting human senses in an evolutionary context. He then investigates such varied themes as supersenses and diminished senses, synesthesia and other cross-sensory phenomena, hemispheric specialization, diseases, anomalies induced by brain injuries, and hallucinations. Focusing on what is revealed about our senses through the extraordinary, he provides unparalleled insights into the unique wonders of the human brain.
Download or read book Coming to Our Senses written by Morris Berman and published by Echo Point Books & Media. This book was released on 2015-12-04 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious and provocative analysis of the relationship between culture, mind, and body in the history of Western society, Morris Berman s influential classic "Coming to our Senses" has been engrossing audiences with its carefully-researched and thoughtful exploration of somatic experience for decades. Finally back in print for a new generation of readers, Berman s treatise on the West s historic denial of physicality is relevant as ever in a society increasingly plagued by addiction, depression, and distraction. Berman deftly weaves threads of history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis into an elegant and accessible argument about the ways our physical experience of the world relates the culture in which we exist. To make his case, Berman draws on studies of infant behavior with mirrors; analyzes symbolic expressions of human-animal relationships ranging from cave-wall etchings to Disney cartoons; investigates esoteric breathing techniques and occult rituals; and examines the nature of creativity. Berman also illuminates Christianity s origins in early Jewish meditation techniques, explains how the notion of romantic love evolved out of medieval Christian heresy, how modern science grew out of Renaissance mysticism, and how Nazism was the most recent episode in a recurring cycle of orthodoxy and heresy. A demanding and radical work of history, social criticism, and philosophy, "Coming to our Senses" is a beautifully-written and vastly important book."
Download or read book Drawing and the Senses written by Caroline O. Fowler and published by Harvey Miller. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of drawing and philosophy in artistic practice, important not only for art history but also for literature studies, intellectual history, religious history, history of the book,and history of science. 00Leon Battista Alberti wrote in 'De pictura' (1435) that painting is divine because, ?as they say of friendship, a painting lets the absent be present.? Absence and Presence in Early-Modern Drawing Pedagogy examines this relationship between absent and present objects and subjects in early-modern artistic pedagogy. This book studies the intersections among artistic treatises, natural philosophy and theology from 1400-1700, arguing that drawing pedagogy sought to teach the painting of histories that stimulated in the viewer the sensation of being present before the historical moment, the person, the still life. The manifestation of presence remained not only in the sensation of sight but also in all the sensory perceptions of touch, taste, smell and the sixth sense of sensing, the experience of existence. This book demonstrates the pedagogical means by which artists sought to teach the simulation of presence (and the sensorial perception of absence
Download or read book Empire of the Senses written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empire of the Senses brings together pathbreaking scholarship on the role the five senses played in early America. With perspectives from across the hemisphere, exploring individual senses and multi-sensory frameworks, the volume explores how sensory perception helped frame cultural encounters, colonial knowledge, and political relationships. From early French interpretations of intercultural touch, to English plans to restructure the scent of Jamaica, these essays elucidate different ways the expansion of rival European empires across the Americas involved a vast interconnected range of sensory experiences and practices. Empire of the Senses offers a new comparative perspective on the way European imperialism was constructed, operated, implemented and, sometimes, counteracted by rich and complex new sensory frameworks in the diverse contexts of early America. This book has been listed on the Books of Note section on the website of Sensory Studies, which is dedicated to highlighting the top books in sensory studies: www.sensorystudies.org/books-of-note
Download or read book Sentient written by Jackie Higgins and published by Picador. This book was released on 2022-05-12 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enthralling examination of some of the most remarkable creatures in the animal kingdom, and what they tell us about what it means to be human.
Download or read book The Power of Your Senses written by Russell Jones and published by . This book was released on 2021-07-22 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at how we can unlock the true potential of our five senses and use them to vastly improve every single part of our lives.
Download or read book A Cultural History of the Senses in Antiquity written by Jerry Toner and published by Bloomsbury Academic. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. A Cultural History of the Senses in Antiquity 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.
