Sense and Senses

Catalog description

What does it mean to study the senses? One way to approach this is to recognize, as anthropologists do, that sensory perception, which is experienced by the individual as a physical and biological capacity to engage with the world around us, is also always a cultural act. This class explores how gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class are embodied in sensory perceptions and everyday social interactions. Students will examine how our physiological capacities are engaged and reproduced in social, economic and political relations of power which are the outcome of complex historical trajectories. Discussions include a broad range of scholarly debates on the senses and sensory perception drawn from the anthropology of the senses, human geography, cultural history, film, museum studies, impairment and disability studies, literature, and art. The class will focus in particular on how corporeal practices involving food, art, music and movement are perceived, mediated and expressed through the senses.