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

Abstract

Culture and Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community. By Kathryn Linn Geurts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. xvi, 315; 21 photographs; map. $54.95/£37.95 cloth; $21.95/£15.95 paper. How different are people? Surely we all share at least a common mental and physical apparatus. But how we put that apparatus to use, and recognize and evaluate its various capabilities, can be very different. The relationship between a common human physical framework and ways in which that framework is mobilized to create very different experiential, sensual, and apprehended worlds for different groups of people was laid out as a problem for anthropology in eighteenth century by Johann Gottfried von Herder, but set aside in much of twentieth-century anthropology in favor of analyzing cultures in terms of symbolic assemblages. In this monograph, Kathryn Geurts explores ways that Anlo-Ewe people of Ghana understand their physical sensorium, array of senses (which Americans tend to see as five in number), feelings, and bodily orientations through which they experience world and themselves. The sensorium includes such things as kinesthetic sense of balance, most manifest in carrying things on head but more broadly understood; a sense of collapsing physically into a rest-recovery mode that recalls collapse of a founding ancestor fleeing danger and locating current territory; and a morally-laden cleanliness/dirtiness matrix that is established at birth and clings odoriferously to people throughout life, or to money and its potential in other circumstances. The set of sensory experiences and mythopoetic tales that Geurts describes to account for a different apperceptual world is somewhat random, but is unified in continual reference to concept of seselelame, or inside-the-flesh embeddedness of sensing-knowing. Geurts unwraps concept of seselelame through its etymological signification (feel-feel-at-flesh-inside), as she does many of concepts and sensations presented in book. This analytical move, along with explanations based on historical stories and myths (often offered to her by special informants or guides), implies a true originary meaning that may be unevenly applied, and allows for Geurts' suggestion at end of book that Anlo-ness-being in multiethnic world of Ghana and bey on-is anchored primarily in self-experience provided by a persistent sensorium and its modes of attention. The effect is, in end, a picture of what the AnIo feel and attend to (although Geurts refers to subjects of her study as Anlo-speakers, and never the AnIo) as something set apart from other peoples' sensoria. …