Culture and the Senses Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community

Home About The Book Kathryn Linn Geurts James O'Neal Buy The Book Links Contact

Photographs:

Back Tying Balance Festival Industry Children Market Tree Root Perfume Land & Livelihood Women At Work Voodoo

Culture and the Senses
Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community

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. She demonstrates this through a careful analysis of language, then by focusing on the attention given to balance and the body in childcare and the way child-raising instantiates properties of balance as moral code. The body's ways of knowing extend to culturally relative ways of moving and walking, so that the repertoire of more than fifty "ways to walk," for instance, literally embodies socialization and identity, status and well-being. 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 The Book ||Kathryn Linn Geurts ||James O'Neal ||Buy The Book ||Links ||Contact||
||Back Tying ||Balance ||Festival ||Industry ||Children ||Market ||Tree Root Perfume ||Land & Livelihood ||Women At Work ||Voodoo||