Sensuous Curriculum

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter S. Gershon
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Input ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
Norms And Values ◽  
Five Senses ◽  
Everyday Experiences ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Educational Studies ◽  
Sensory Studies

Education is a sensory experience. This is the case regardless how a sensorium is constructed. A sensorium is how a group defines, categorizes, and conceptualizes the senses, a Western five-senses model for example. Regardless of the sociocultural norms and values a sensorium engenders, animals, human and nonhuman alike, experience their lives through the senses. From this perspective, anything that might be considered educational, regardless of context and irrespective of questions of what might “count” as schooling, is a sensory experience. Sensuous curriculum sits at the intersection of two transdisciplinary fields, curriculum and sensory studies. As its name suggests, sensuous curriculum is an expression of ongoing critical educational studies of, with, and through the senses. In so doing, sensuous curriculum brings to the fore the extraordinary nature of everyday experiences in educational ecologies, from entangled sociocultural norms and values to the ways that sensory input and interpretation inform every aspect of educational ways of being, knowing, and doing. Sensoria have always been tools for understandings, particularly for continually marginalized groups whose claims are often dismissed through Western, Eurocentric framings. For the notion and instantiation of framings require both a set of universally understood constructs and their applications as well as the necessity of the act: when framing, someone or something is always framed. Providing critical tools for the interruption of such constructs and their use, sensuous curriculum is a rich site of study in ways that are theoretically and materially significant, while offering often underutilized trajectories for the exploration of educational understandings.

Seeing, Touching, Holding, and Swallowing Tibetan Buddhist Texts

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 137-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Cantwell
Keyword(s):  
Tibetan Buddhism ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Tibetan Buddhist ◽  
Sacred Texts ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Rich Material ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
Book Culture

The iconic dimension of holy books has drawn increasing scholarly attention in recent years (e.g. Iconic Books and Texts, James Watts, ed., London, Equinox, 2013). Asian Buddhism provides rich material for considering the ritualization of engagement with sacred texts. In Tibetan Buddhism, this aspect of book culture is perhaps especially pronounced (see, for instance, Schaeffer 2009, especially Chapter 6; Elliott, Diemberger and Clemente 2014). This paper explores the topic in relation to the engagement of the senses in Tibetan context, through seeing, touching, holding and tasting texts. It would seem that it is not the sensory experience in itself, but rather the physical experience of a transmission and incorporation of the sacred qualities from the books into the person which is emphasized in these practices. Parallels and contrasts with examples from elsewhere are mentioned, and there is some consideration of the breadth of the category of sacred books in the Tibetan context in which Dharma teachings may take many forms.

Tobacco’s Appeal to the Senses and the Early Modern Smoker’s Still Life

2020 ◽  
pp. 123-150
Author(s):  
Julia Saviello
Keyword(s):  
Still Life ◽  
Sense Data ◽  
Complex Image ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Tobacco Pipes ◽  
Five Senses ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Cut Tobacco ◽  
Selection Of

Smell and taste – of the five senses these are the two most strongly stimulated by smoking tobacco. The article presents an in-depth analysis of the reflection of both these forms of sensory perception in textual and visual sources concerning the early consumption of the herb. In a first step, tobacco’s changing reception, first as medicine and then as stimulant, is traced through the years of its increasing distribution in Europe, starting in the middle of the 16th century. As this overview reveals, at that time the still little known substance gave rise to new forms of sense perception. Following recent studies on smell and gustation, which have stressed the need to take into account the interactions between these senses, the article probes the manifold stimulation of the senses by tobacco with reference to allegorical representations and genre scenes addressing the five senses. The smoking of tobacco was thematized in both of these art forms as a means of visualizing either smell or taste. Yet, these depictions show no indication of any deliberate engagement with the exchange of sense data between mouth and nose. The question posed at the end of this paper is whether this holds true also for early smoker’s still lifes. In the so-called toebakjes or rookertjes, a subgenre of stilllife painting that, like tobacco, was still a novelty at the beginning of the 17th century, various smoking paraphernalia – such as rolled or cut tobacco, pipes and tins – are arrayed with various kinds of foods and drinks. Finally, the article addresses a selection of such smoker’s still lifes, using the toebakje by Pieter Claesz., probably the first of its kind, as a starting point and the work by Georg Flegel as a comparative example. Through their selection of objects, both offer a complex image of how tobacco engages different senses.

The Changing Perception of the Five Senses

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-122
Author(s):  
Sara Benninga
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Scientific Instruments ◽  
Peter Paul Rubens ◽  
Courtly Culture ◽  
Southern Netherlands ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Five Senses ◽  
The Senses

This article examines the changing approach towards the representation of the senses in 17th-century Flemish painting. These changes are related to the cultural politics and courtly culture of the Spanish sovereigns of the Southern Netherlands, the Archdukes Albert and Isabella. The 1617–18 painting-series of the Five Senses by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens as well as the pendant paintings on the subject are analyzed in relation to the iconography of the five senses, and in regard to Flemish genre themes. In this context, the excess of objects, paintings, scientific instruments, animals, and plants in the Five Senses are read as an expansion of the iconography of the senses as well as a reference to the courtly material culture of the Archdukes. Framing the senses as part of a cultural web of artifacts, Brueghel and Rubens refer both to elite lived experience and traditional iconography. The article examines the continuity between the iconography of the senses from 1600 onwards, as developed by Georg Pencz, Frans Floris, and Maerten de Vos, and the representation of the senses in the series. In addition, the article shows how certain elements in the paintings are influenced by genre paintings of the courtly company and collector’s cabinet, by Frans Francken, Lucas van Valckenborch and Louis de Caullery. Through the synthesis of these two traditions the subject of the five senses is reinvented in a courtly context

Literature and the Senses

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly Dugan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Study ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Culture And Language ◽  
Sensory Studies

Sensory studies is an interdisciplinary field connecting insights from history, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, religion, literature, and art to the scientific study of human perception. Though research in this field draws upon a wide variety of methodologies and focuses on different historical periods and geographical areas, it is unified through a core tenet: that the human sensorium is as much a cultural, historical, and aesthetic phenomenon as it is an environmental and a biological one. Social mores, geographies, religious beliefs, and individual abilities shape perception in uniquely cultural ways. Put more succinctly, sensory studies, as a field, argues for the cultural study of the senses and the sensuous study of culture. And language is squarely at the center of scholarly questions about perception; literary studies thus provides useful methodological tools for understanding not only how we represent visceral experiences (such as sensation) to others through language but also how these strategies have changed over time. The study of literature and the senses emphasizes the important role of language in representing visceral experience and the important role of aesthetics and history in shaping literary representations.

Senses of Vibration

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelly Trower
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Cultural Imaginary ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Senses ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Brain

The study of the senses has become a rich topic in recent years. Senses of Vibration explores a wide range of sensory experience and makes a decisive new contribution to this growing field by focussing not simply on the senses as such, but on the material experience - vibration - that underpins them. This is the first book to take the theme of vibration as central, offering an interdisciplinary history of the phenomenon and its reverberations in the cultural imaginary. It tracks vibration through the work of a wide range of writers, including physiologists (who thought vibrations in the nerves delivered sensations to the brain), physicists (who claimed that light, heat, electricity and other forms of energy were vibratory), spiritualists (who figured that spiritual energies also existed in vibratory form), and poets and novelists from Coleridge to Dickens and Wells. Senses of Vibration is a work of scholarship that cuts through a range of disciplines and will reverberate for many years to come.

scholarly journals The empiricism of Michel Serres a theory of the senses between philosophy of science, phenomenology and ethics

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-245
Author(s):  
Petra Gehring
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Radical Empiricism ◽  
Michel Serres ◽  
Five Senses ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Working Method

The paper presents the philosophy of the French philosopher Michel Serres, with an accent on his working method and unusual methodology. Starting from the thesis that the empiricist trait of Serres? philosophy remains underexposed if one simply receives his work as that of a structuralist epistemologist, Serres? monograph The Five Senses (1985) is then discussed in more detail. Here we see both a radical empiricism all his own and a closeness to phenomenology. Nevertheless, perception and language are not opposed to each other in Serres. Rather, his radical thinking of a world-relatedness of the bodily senses and an equally consistent understanding of a sensuality of language - and also of philosophical prose - are closely intertwined.

scholarly journals The Efference Copy Signal as a Key Mechanism for Consciousness

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giorgio Vallortigara
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Input ◽  
Phenomenal Consciousness ◽  
Efference Copy ◽  
Sense Organs ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Evaluative Response ◽  
Sensory Structures ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Carbon Copy

Animals need to distinguish sensory input caused by their own movement from sensory input which is due to stimuli in the outside world. This can be done by an efference copy mechanism, a carbon copy of the movement-command that is routed to sensory structures. Here I tried to link the mechanism of the efference copy with the idea of the philosopher Thomas Reid that the senses would have a double province, to make us feel, and to make us perceive, and that, as argued by psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, the former would identify with the signals from bodily sense organs with an internalized evaluative response, i.e., with phenomenal consciousness. I discussed a possible departure from the classical implementation of the efference copy mechanism that can effectively provide the senses with such a double province, and possibly allow us some progress in understanding the nature of consciousness.

scholarly journals The configuration of happiness and unhappiness as part of the auditory landscape: the work of Albert Camus

Cahiers ERTA ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 57-79
Author(s):  
Sofia Chatzipetrou
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Auditory Perception ◽  
Albert Camus ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Field Recording ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Symbolic Universe

This essay aims to analyze the poetics of the soundscape in Albert Camus’ work, based in the notions of happiness and unhappiness. Our purpose will be to define the characteristics of the symbolism of auditory perception, which are elaborated on the double configuration between happiness and unhappiness. The fact that the symbolic universe of Camus outlines a total sensory experience does no longer need to be demonstrated. Starting from his first lyrical writings to the Notebooks, his writing appeals arouses all the senses. Through a comparative study of examples relating to happiness and unhappiness and while underlining the predominant place of silence in Camus’ aesthetics, we will come off to the conclusion that Camus’s work constitutes a real kind of field recording.

Sensuous Experience, Performance, and Presence in Third Intermediate Period Biography

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Frood
Keyword(s):  
Sacred Space ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Intermediate Period ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Third Intermediate Period

This chapter analyses biographical motifs relating to sensory experience found in inscriptions largely belonging to one tenth-century bc priestly family in Thebes. The four statues which are the focus of discussion (CG 42225; CG 42226; CG 42227; CG 42228) were dedicated in the temple precinct of Karnak by Hor IX for himself, his ancestor, and his wife. Inscriptions on a statue of Horakhbit I (CG 42231) from Karnak are also treated. Celebration of the senses is found in these texts through the fusion of biography with themes known from harpists' songs, a genre previously associated with tombs; the use of myrrh, a pleasurable and ritual substance; and through phraseology that mobilises the sensuous geographies of sacred space. Study of how such motifs relate to other features of biography across the statues offers insights into transformations of more than one genre and developments in the function of statues in temples.

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