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

Informationen zum Autor Kathryn Linn Geurts is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Hamline University. This study demonstrates how sensory orders vary due to cultural tradition, and provides an in-depth, ethnographic account of the sensorium of a West African people--Anlo-Ewe speakers in southeastern Ghana, whose indigenous sensory order includes balance, kinesthesia, proprioception (feeling the body), and even speech. Zusammenfassung Investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. This book relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinesthesia, which most Americans would not even identify as a sense. Inhaltsverzeichnis Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration and Orthography Map of Southeastern Ghana INTRODUCTION. Cultural Construction of Sensoriums and Sensibilities 1. Is There a Sixth Sense? 2. Anlo-Land and Anlo-Ewe People PART ONE. Conceptualizing Sensory Orientations in Anlo-Land 3. Language and Sensory Orientations PART TWO. Moral Embodiment and Sensory Socialization 4. Kinesthesia and the Development of Moral Sensibilities 5. Sensory Symbolism in Birth and Infant Care Practices PART THREE. Person and Identity 6. Toward an Understanding of Anlo Forms of Being-in-the-World 7. Personhood and Ritual Reinforcement of Balance PART FOUR. Health! Strength! and Sensory Dimensions of Well-Being 8. Anlo Cosmology! the Senses! and Practices of Protection 9. Well-Being! Strength! and Health in Anlo Worlds CONCLUSION. Ethnography and the Study of Cultural Difference 10. Sensory Experience and Cultural Identity Notes Glossary Bibliography Index Illustrations

Product details

• Authors: Kathryn Geurts, Kathryn Linn Geurts, Prof. Kathryn Geurts
• Publisher: University Of California Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 09.01.2003
• EAN: 9780520234567
• ISBN: 978-0-520-23456-7
• No. of pages: 330
• Series: Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity; Ethnographic Studies in Subjec; Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Psychology > Theoretical psychology; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Miscellaneous; SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Indigenous Studies, Archaeology, Relating to indigenous peoples, Social and cultural anthropology