Empire of the Senses

The Sensual Culture Reader

Edited by

DAVID HOWES

OBERG
Oxford • New York
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

I n t r o d u c t i o n : E m p i r e s o f t h e Senses 1

P a r t I: T h e Prescience o f t h e Senses

'Culture Tunes Our Neurons' 21

1 The Mind's Eye: What the Blind See

Oliver Sacks 25

2 Inside the Five Sense Sensorium

Marshall McLuhan 43

P a r t II: T h e Shifting Sensorium

Historicizing Perception 55

Remembering the Senses

Susan Stewart 59

4 The Witch's Senses: Sensory Ideologies and Transgressive

Femininities from the Renaissance to Modernity
Constance Classen 70

5 The Senses Divided: Organs, Objects, and Media in Early

Modern England
Carla Mazzio 85
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6 The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The 'New' Chemistry

and the Transformation of Sensuous Technology
Lissa Roberts

7 Charting the Cultural History of the Senses

Alain Corbin

P a r t III: Sensescapes

Sensation in Cultural Context

8 McLuhan in the Rainforest: The Sensory Worlds of

Oral Cultures
Constance Classen

9 Consciousness as 'Feeling in the Body': A West African

Theory of Embodiment, Emotion and the Making of Mind
Kathryn Linn Geurts

10 Places Sensed, Senses Placed: Toward a Sensuous Epistemology

of Environments
Steven Feld

11 The Tea Ceremony: A Symbolic Analysis

Dorinne Kondo

12 Engaging the Spirits of Modernity: Temiar Songs of a

Changing World
Marina Roseman

13 Home Cooking: Filipino Women and Geographies of the

Senses in Hong Kong
Lisa Law

P a r t IV: T h e A e s t h e t i c i z a t i o n o f Everyday Life

Aestheticization Takes Command

14 A Tonic of Wildness: Sensuousness in Henry David Thoreau

Victor Carl Friesen

15 Volatile Effects: Olfactory Dimensions of Art and Architecture

Jim Drobnick
 CONTENTS VII

16 HYPERESTHESIA, or, The Sensual Logic of Late Capitalism

David Howes 281

17 Under the Jaguar Sun

Italo Calvino 304

18 Michel Serres' Five Senses

Steven Connor 318

19 Darwin's Disgust
William Ian Miller 335

P a r t V: T h e D e r a n g e m e n t o f t h e Senses

The Senses Disordered 357

20 Strindberg's 'Deranged Sensations'

Hans-Göran Ekman 361

21 Movement, Stillness: On the Sensory World of a Shelter for

the 'Homeless Mentally Ill'
Robert Desjarlais 369

22 Dystoposthesia: Emplacing Environmental Sensitivities

Christopher Fletcher 380

Sensory B i b l i o g r a p h y

Forming Perceptions 399

Fifty Ways to Come to your Senses 404

List of Contributors 407

Copyright Acknowledgments 409

Index 413