Texture, Light and Sound: A Sensory History of Early Sydney. Hyde Park Barracks Museum, Sydney

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 344-347
Author(s):  
Meg Foster
Keyword(s):  
Sensory History ◽  
History Of

Out of War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariane C. Ferme
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Cultural Survival ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
Rural Landscapes ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
Sensory History ◽  
History Of

Out of War is an ethnographic engagement with the nature of intercommunal violence and the material returns of history during and after the 1991–2002 Sierra Leone civil war. The questions raised concern the nature and reckoning of time and reality, fact and fiction; the experience of violence and trauma; the reversibility of perpetrator and victim, friend and enemy; and past, present, and future in the colony and postcolony. The book is a reflection on West African epistemologies and ontologies that contribute to questions in counterpoint with those of international humanitarianism, struggling with the possibilities of truth and quandaries of justice. In the context of massive population displacements and humanitarian interventions, the ethnography traces strategies of psychological, political, and cultural survival and material dwelling in liminal spaces in the midst of the destruction of the social fabric engendered by war. It also examines the juridical creation of new figures of crimes against humanity at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone scene, in the aftermath of war, is visualized as a landscape of chronotopes, neologisms that summon the uncertainty of war: the sobel (“soldier by day, rebel by night”), pointing to the instability of distinctions between enemy and friend, or of opposing parties in the war (the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front [RUF] and soldiers in the national army), and the rebel cross, pointing to the possibility that the purported neutrality of the Red Cross masked partisan interests alongside the RUF. Chronotopes also testify to the difficulty of discerning between facts and rumors in war, and they freeze in time collective anxieties about wartime events. Finally, beyond the traumas of war, the book explores the returns of material traces in counterpoint to the more “monumental” presence of Chinese investments in Africa today, and it explores the forgotten sensory history of another China (Taiwan versus the People’s Republic of China) and another Africa inscribed in ordinary agrarian practices on rural landscapes, and in the fabric of domestic life, particularly since the non-aligned movement emerged from the Bandung conference in 1955.

Educating

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-159
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Rotter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Sensory History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
History Of Empire

The chapter provides a sensory history of empire in the two countries, India and the Philippines, at the turn of the twentieth century. By that point, the process of visualizing Indian and Filipino subjects was well underway by their colonizers. The chapter looks at sight and sound and how they can be used to narrate the story at this point. The dynamics of Anglo-American soundscapes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transferred readily and deliberately to sites of empire, to India and the Philippines. In particular, it looks at the music in the two empires at this time.

Sensing Food in the New Deal Era

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camille Bégin
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Economic Order ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
Sensory History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Depression ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
Food Writing

This introductory chapter examines taste as a symbolic, cultural, affective, and as economic currency always in circulation, and that, once mobilized, allows eaters to identify and differentiate themselves along race, class, gender, and ethnic lines. The concept of sensory economies is a plural one and allows exploring sensory experiences of food as the result of social, cultural, and financial exchanges always remade. The chapter looks at the cultural, social, and sensory history of New Deal food writing: the multisensory culinary material produced by employees of the Federal Writers's Project (FWP). Throughout, workers produced comforting snapshot pictures aimed at providing cultural confidence to a country in the midst of one of the worst economic depression of its history and giving legitimacy to the new political, social, and economic order of the liberal New Deal state.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 199-204
Author(s):  
Jacob M. Baum
Keyword(s):  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Sensory History ◽  
History Of

The conclusion concisely summarizes the findings of the study, reiterating the tension between continuity and change in the sensory history of the German Reformation and reflecting on the significance of the broader lessons of this particular period.

Empires of the Senses

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Rotter
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Sensory History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Senses ◽  
History Of Empire ◽  
The Right ◽  
Right Order

This book offers a sensory history of the British in India from the formal imposition of their rule to its end and the Americans in the Philippines from annexation to independence. A social and cultural history of empire, it focuses on quotidian life. It analyzes how the senses created mutual impressions of the agents of imperialism and their subjects and highlights connections between apparently disparate items, including the lived experience of empire, the otherwise unremarkable comments (and complaints) found in memoirs and reports, the appearance of lepers, the sound of bells, the odor of excrement, the feel of cloth against skin, the first taste of a mango or meat spiced with cumin. Men and women in imperial India and the Philippines had different ideas from the start about what looked, sounded, smelled, felt, and tasted good or bad. Both the British and the Americans saw themselves as the civilizers of what they judged backward societies and believed that a vital part of the civilizing process was to put the senses in the right order of priority and to ensure them against offense or affront. People without manners who respected the senses lacked self-control; they were uncivilized and thus unfit for self-government. Societies that looked shabby, were noisy and smelly, felt wrong, and consumed unwholesome food in unmannerly ways were not prepared to form independent polities and stand on their own. It was the duty of allegedly more sensorily advanced westerners to put the senses right before withdrawing the most obvious manifestations of their power.

Taste of the Nation

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camille Bégin
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cues ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Pepper ◽  
Regional Food ◽  
Sensory History ◽  
Gender Ideals ◽  
Food Cultures ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chili Peppers ◽  
Restaurant Meals

During the Depression, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) dispatched scribes to sample the fare at group eating events like church dinners, political barbecues, and clambakes. Its America Eats project sought nothing less than to sample, and report upon, the tremendous range of foods eaten across the United States. This book shapes a cultural and sensory history of New Deal era eating from the FWP archives. From “ravioli, the diminutive derbies of pastries, the crowns stuffed with a well-seasoned paste” to barbeque seasoning that integrated “salt, black pepper, dried red chili powder, garlic, oregano, cumin seed, and cayenne pepper” while “tomatoes, green chili peppers, onions, and olive oil ma[de] up the sauce,” the book describes in mouth-watering detail how Americans tasted their food. They did so in ways that varied, and varied widely, depending on race, ethnicity, class, and region. The book explores how likes and dislikes, cravings, and disgust operated within local sensory economies that it culls from the FWP's vivid descriptions, visual cues, culinary expectations, recipes, and accounts of restaurant meals. The book illustrates how nostalgia, prescriptive gender ideals, and racial stereotypes shaped how the FWP was able to frame regional food cultures as American.

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