TY - BOOK ID - 77958197 TI - Culture and the senses : bodily ways of knowing in an African community PY - 2002 SN - 1282762729 9786612762727 1597345644 052093654X 9780520936546 9780520234550 0520234553 9780520234567 0520234561 0520234553 0520234561 0585466297 9780585466293 9781282762725 9781597345644 PB - Berkeley : University of California Press, DB - UniCat KW - Senses and sensation KW - Anlo (African people) KW - Sensation KW - Sensory biology KW - Sensory systems KW - Knowledge, Theory of KW - Neurophysiology KW - Psychophysiology KW - Perception KW - Ahonlan (African people) KW - Anglo (African people) KW - Ethnology KW - Ewe (African people) KW - Socialization. KW - Psychology. KW - africa. KW - african community. KW - anlo culture. KW - anlo ewe. KW - anlo society. KW - anthropologists. KW - balance. KW - cultural anthropology. KW - cultural knowledge. KW - cultural meaning. KW - cultural perspective. KW - cultural traditions. KW - demographic studies. KW - ethnographers. KW - ethnography. KW - ghana. KW - hearing. KW - innate senses. KW - inner states. KW - metaphorical senses. KW - nonfiction. KW - perception. KW - philosophy. KW - physical senses. KW - sensorium. KW - sensory perception. KW - sight. KW - smell. KW - social cultural. KW - social science. KW - taste. KW - touch. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77958197 AB - 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. ER -