Sensory Turn Research Articles

A Sensory Perspective on High-Ranked Women’s Dress in the 8th to 4th Century BC in the Mediterranean and Central Europe

In the late 20th century, the study of western science was dominated by a philosophical approach to evidence as text and meaning. In archaeology, material culture was treated like text, to be read through systems of signs, symbols, and indices put together in syntax. For studies of dress, this was influential in understanding dress as a cognitive system compiled to create identities and meaning. In this approach, textiles, fastenings, hairstyles, and gestures are presented as signs and symbols used to form a statement about identity, to be read by others. There was a focus on the visuality of dress and garments as non-verbal communication media, which was an important advance in studies of dress. Around the turn of the millennium, this position shifted. Critics of the textual approach argued that by emphasizing the cognitive experience, science had lost touch with the physicality of the world. In this turn to the senses, objects are physical matter and perceived through the senses; these sensations are the basis of actions and reactions. In addition, these sensations are not merely natural capabilities, they are learned and cultural. Archaeologists began to explore approaches where evidence was grounded in the sensory approaches, first through phenomenology, then as sensory archaeology. 6 The sensory approach to the past has since flourished.7 The sensory turn has important implications for the study of dress and identities. Where previously the visual sense as non-verbal communication predominated, sensory approaches draw on the full range of senses. Together with visuality and sound, touch (haptics), movements, body language, and gesture are factors in how dress is perceived. Sensations of full garment ensembles are created and cultural — soft cloth versus sharp and spiky metals, weight, elasticity or non-elasticity, and many more. The question is how to investigate that on the basis of the archaeological sources for dress. To address this challenge, in this paper we explore high-status women’s dress of the 8th to 4th centuries BC in the Mediterranean and Central Europe from a sensory perspective.

Embodied Transnational Belonging

This article, based on a collection of 53 interviews with people who migrated from Poland to Norway, discusses how transnational sentiments, nostalgia, and attachments to places and people materialize through the bodily experiences of the mobile subjects. It conceptualizes the notion of embodied transnational belonging, understood as a dynamic, bodily felt materialization of social, cultural, political, economic, and affective processes that assist the emplacement of mobile people in new localities, and that span the borders of nation-states. Theoretically, the article builds on the premises of the sensory turn in social sciences and utilizes the concepts from anthropology, health studies and migration and mobility studies interdisciplinarily. Methodologically, it employs photo elicitation interviews. It discusses how the concept of embodied transnational belonging can be used to extend the understanding of migrant persons’ transnationality. By doing so, it addresses a knowledge gap in transnational studies, attempting to theoretically open the conceptualization of transnational belonging to the bodily dimension. The article suggests that transnationalism is exercised on a level of a bodily experience of the migrant persons, and hence transnationality is not a solely mental/rational phenomenon, but also a bodily/physical one.

Illuminating palaeolithic art using virtual reality: A new method for integrating dynamic firelight into interpretations of art production and use

Approaches to Palaeolithic art have increasingly shifted beyond the traditional focus on engraved or depicted forms in isolation, to appreciating the sensorial experience of art making as integral to shaping the form of depictions and the meaning imbued within them. This kind of research appreciates an array of factors pertinent to how the art may have been understood or experienced by people during the Palaeolithic, including placement, lighting, accessibility, sound, and tactility. This paper contributes to this “sensory turn” in Palaeolithic art research, arguing that the roving light cast by the naked flame of fires, torches or lamps is an important dimension in understanding artistic experiences. However, capturing these effects, whether during analysis, as part of interpretation, or presentation, can be challenging. A new method is presented in virtual reality (VR) modelling – applied to Palaeolithic art contexts for the first time - as a safe and non-destructive means of simulating dynamic light sources to facilitate analysis, interpretation, and presentation of Palaeolithic art under actualistic lighting conditions. VR was applied to two Magdalenian case studies: parietal art from Las Monedas (Spain) and portable stone plaquettes from Montastruc (France). VR models were produced using Unity software and digital models of the art captured via whitelight (Montastruc) and photogrammetric (Las Monedas) scans. The results demonstrate that this novel application of VR facilitates the testing of hypotheses related to the sensorial and experiential dimensions of Palaeolithic art, allowing discussions of these elements to be elevated beyond theoretical ideas.

What does lockdown smell like? Understanding the COVID-19 pandemic through smell

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to understandings of COVID society by offering insights into the lived experience of lockdown. It reveals how larger social and economic impacts of the virus unfold in one suburban town in New Zealand. Employing “smellwalks,” it mobilizes smell as an empirical tool to understand lockdown experience. Drawing from the “sensory turn” this method recognizes smell as a way of knowing social existence and gleaning non-discursive and embodied insights into the global pandemic. This paper endeavors to develop sensory methodology within urban sociology by revealing how smell furthers understandings of place and modes of being during lockdown. It argues changes in suburban smells signal disruption to daily life as a result of the government’s social and economic pandemic-response measures. For instance, the empty cold smell of the mall usually warm and bustling with activity, conveys the isolation and loss of social connectedness produced by lockdown restrictions. Similarly, the dry smell of concrete dust created by the closure and demolition of a high-street bank reflects the slowing of the national economy. Attention to smell enables insight into new modes of being for residents that involve heightened anxiety around viral contagion and a slower, quieter, environmentally cleaner way of life.

Quali(a)tative Methods: Sense-Based Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities

This paper begins by tracing the sensory turn in the human sciences—most notably, history and anthropology—which, in turn, gave rise to the interdisciplinary field of sensory studies. The latter field is articulated around the concept of the sensorium (defined as the entire sensory apparatus, including the extension of the senses via diverse media, as an operational complex) and the notion of qualia (defined as those aspects of the material world, such as color and sound, that are contingent on the human perceptual apparatus—in contrast to the inherent or elementary properties of materials, such as number or form, which are not). Sense-based research in the human sciences is tied to sensing and making sense together with others. Its methodology of choice is sensory ethnography, or “participant sensation.” This method departs from the emphasis on observation in conventional qualitative research, as well as the latter’s reliance on such verbocentric methods as the questionnaire or focus group. Sensory ethnography highlights the primacy of the quali(a)tative dimensions of our being together in society. It extrapolates on Georg Simmel’s point: “That we get involved in interactions at all depends on the fact that we have a sensory effect upon one another” (as cited in Howes 2013). In part II of this paper, a critique is presented of the diminution of the quali(a)tative in the context of the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the cognitive revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and the scientization of the senses in the Sensory Evaluation Research Laboratory. These revolutions are problematized for their lopsidedness: the privileging of the infrasensible over the sensible and elemental (or atomistic) over the phenomenal in the case of the Scientific Revolution; the neuronal over the sensual and social in the case of the cognitive revolution; and, the unimodal (or one-sensation- and one-sense-at-a-time) over the multimodal, as well as the reduction of “significance” to the statistical, in the case of the research protocols of the sensory science laboratory. The paper concludes by presenting the results of a series of case studies in sensory ethnography that push the bounds of sense by leading with the senses and bringing the quali(a)tative back in.

Destinations in Mind: Portraying Places on the Roman Empire’s Souvenirs By Kimberly Cassibry. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2021. Pp. xvii + 278. $99. ISBN 9780190921897 (cloth).

<i>Destinations in Mind: Portraying Places on the Roman Empire’s Souvenirs</i> By Kimberly Cassibry. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2021. Pp. xvii + 278. $99. ISBN 9780190921897 (cloth).

The relational ontology of mobile touchscreens and the body: Ambient proprioception and risk during COVID-19.

In this article, we explore the tension between the significance of touch as a vital sensory modality of human experience and how, with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, proximity and (tactile) intimacy with other bodies in urban and domestic spaces becomes fraught with the risk of viral contagion. Informed by haptic media studies, the corporeal or sensory turn in contemporary theory, and phenomenology-informed mobile media studies, we examine the possible impacts for mobile device use of the risks of viral contagion associated with our routinized uses of haptic interfaces. We also examine the role and possibility of mobile haptics and the touchscreen in these contexts, and our capacity-via embodied and material metaphor-to extend corporeal reach through the mobile interface. Our contention is that, while the "stand in" for touch that mobile media offers may be perpetually incomplete, the "as-if" structure of habitual experience can play a significant role in narrowing the sensorial gap.

Criminal Sounds–Primitive Sounds: Sensory Conflict and the Racialization of Urban Space in Cartagena (Colombia) and Madrid (Spain)

This study reexamines how the racial construction of body/place is closely related to symbolic processes in the ordering of the sensory experiences of working‐class and poor neighborhoods. Specifically, it considers the role played by soundscapes in the aforementioned relationships within Andean communities in Madrid (Spain), and Palenquera communities in Cartagena (Colombia). The analytical framework of this article aims to rework the contributions of the sensory turn in sociology, so as to connect them with key categories taken from Critical Race Studies. To fulfill the aims of this work, a sensuous ethnography was carried out, including in‐depth interviews with inhabitants of working‐class and poor neighborhoods and activists from antiracist organizations. At the same time, the analysis was carried out into the cities’ local newspapers. The application of these conceptual frameworks and methodologies led to one main conclusion: sensory conflict related to sound in these cities is a fundamental manifestation of the racialization of space. The working‐class and poor neighborhoods of Cartagena and Madrid do not reproduce hegemonic urban sensory models but instead resist them on a daily basis.

Afterword

The sensory turn and the affective turn in contemporary scholarship both crystalised at roughly the same time but then diverged. This special issue reintegrates them. Conjointly, these twin approaches direct attention to the multiplicity, agency, and interactivity of the full spectrum of human faculties (i.e., how the senses and affects intersect with and may also disrupt the rule of reason) in addition to highlighting the extent to which ‘the perceptual is political.’ The resulting paradigm has precipitated a shift from the study of communities as ‘imagined’ to how they are sensed and/or felt, and from a focus on ‘the human condition’ to the intensive investigation of the multiple ‘national post-revolutionary conditions’ that define the current conjuncture. By foregrounding the aesthetics of politics, and tracking the eruption of dis-sensus (laughter, graffiti, dissent) within the con-sensus that states seek to foster in their citizenry, this special issue sounds a much-needed wake-up call.

Sensory Ethnography as a Methodological Resource for Qualitative Research

The article poses the problem of the possibility of including sensory ethnography in the methodological arsenal of qualitative sociological research. In order to substantiate the possibility of this step in sociological methodology development the author presents the theoretical origins of the sensory turn that took place in social and humanitarian knowledge. After that, the author reconstructs the process of sensory turn reception in cultural anthropology and sociology. According to the author, the sensory ethnography approach formation may be considered as one of the methodological consequences of sensory turn as well as extension of research problem set opportunities. Shifting the research focus towards the sphere of sensory experience and, as a result, including the sensory aspect of everyday life in research designs, are considered as the incentives to development of new methodological approaches, such as sensory ethnography.

Beyond the senses: perception, the environment, and vision impairment

AbstractThe ‘sensory turn’ in anthropology has generated a significant literature on sensory perception and experience. Whilst much of this literature is critical of the compartmentalization of particular ‘senses’, there has been limited exploration of how anthropologists might examine sensory perception beyond ‘the senses’. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with people who have impaired vision walking the South Downs landscape in England, this article develops such an approach. It suggests that the experiences of seeing in blindness challenge the conceptualization of ‘vision’ (and ‘non‐vision’). In place of ‘vision’ (as a sense), the article explores ‘activities of seeing’ – an approach that contextualizes the visual to examine the biographically constituted and idiosyncratic nature of perception within an environment. Through an ethnography of seeing with anatomical eyes and ‘seeing in the mind's eye’, it articulates an approach that avoids associating perception with anatomy, or compartmentalizing experience into ‘senses’.

Review of the book Los sentidos del cuerpo: Un giro sensorial en la investigación social y los estudios de género. Center for Gender Research and Studies, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico City, 2019

This collective endeavour is a recent contribution that, according to the foreword writer and international figure of renown in sensory sociology David Howes, makes a remarkable contribution to the matureness of the sensory turn in social sciences. For Howes this is a book that expresses solidly the consolidation of a stance regarding what he considers an appropriate study of the body, emotions and senses; i.e. understanding them as constructions and configurations produced by a constant interrelation between people and the material and social world surrounding them. Howes takes up on the review of work lines that he considers fundamental for the maturation of the sensory turn as axes that in one way or another are present in the different contributions to the book. The Canadian researcher highlights the adequate handling of the methodological strategies and the high grade of theoretical sophistication in each chapter.

After Luther: Visual Culture, Materiality and the Legacy of 1517

Do historians look at Luther and the Lutheran Reformation differently in the aftermath of theLutherjahrof 2017, and its frenzy of academic and public activity? As recent publications on Luther demonstrate – notably Lyndal Roper's 2016 biographyMartin Luther: renegade and prophet– there is a still a great deal to say about Luther, and how his friendships, passions, prejudices and physical experiences shaped him. But while Luther was the monumental public figure of 2017, some of the most important work coinciding with the anniversary addressed instead Lutheranism as a movement, and the nature of religious identities in Luther's aftermath. It also demonstrated and furthered the impact of the visual and material turn in history and in Reformation studies. Building upon decades of scholarship on Lutheran visual images, recent Reformation scholarship has demonstrated in increasing depth how religious identity can and should be read through both material and visual culture. The three publications examined here – a monograph by Bridget Heal, a website by Brian Cummings, Ceri Law, Bronwyn Wallace and Alexandra Walsham, and the exhibition catalogueLuther! 95 treasures – 95 people– contribute to the material, sensory turn in Reformation and early modern scholarship, and in the latter two cases also reveal the impact of this upon public engagement with Reformation histories.

Researching at sea: Exploring the ‘swim-along’ interview method.

Interest in researching embodied experiences of activity connected to therapeutic landscapes, spaces or places has led to a range of evolving methods that aim to move beyond traditional sit-down, talk-based qualitative modes of researching. Following the sensory turn, this paper explores a novel 'swim-along' method used to interview people whilst swimming immersed in sea water. By juxtaposing this with insights gleaned from a subsequent sit-down interview, the paper examines implications for deepening our understanding of visceral, sensory, embodied experiences, the methods we can use to access them and how these structure researcher/participant interaction.

Чуттєва культура і музикознавство: аналіз есею Жоржа Кастнера «Les Voix de Paris» (1857)

Переосмислення ролі тілесного досвіду в процесі пізнання себе й навколишнього світу стало маркером «чуттєвого зрушення» в сучасній гуманітаристиці. У статті окреслено шляхи перетинів між «сенсуальними студіями» і музикознавством. На основі аналізу літературно-музичного есею Жоржа Кастнера «Голоси Парижа» (1857) ми дійшли висновку, що культурні практики повсякденності безпосередньо впливають на режими сприйняття композитора і можуть реалізовуватися у тканині музичного твору. Іншими словами, твір мистецтва виступає матеріальним втіленням чуттєвого буття його автора.

Sensing the music: oral mnemonics as a technique of affective sensitization in Japanese “court music”

Inspired by a broader “sensory turn” in anthropology, research on Japanese traditional performing arts has recently acknowledged the intense physicality of doing fieldwork with actors and musicians. Moving from the similarly situated perspective of ethnographic apprenticeship, this article shows how shōga, the oral mnemonic system used in Japanese court music (gagaku), can function as a technique of affective sensitization. While past studies have successfully explained the efficacy of similar “acoustic-iconic mnemonic systems,” untangling their concealed logic, this research highlights the ways in which shōga operates on the level of affect, enabling practitioners to feel with each other. Analyzing how members of the group Nanto Gakuso use it to detect resonances between the kinaesthetic qualities of playing and dancing, the article maintains that shōga is employed not only as a mnemonic device, but also as a sophisticated means of embodied music transmission.

Intimate media: new queer documentary and the sensory turn

ABSTRACT The heightened visibility of LGBTQ documentaries is often viewed within critical contexts of New Queer Cinema: B. Ruby Rich’s intervention which highlighted an urgency among a new kind of practice, identifying trends across queer film and video. This article explores contours of new queer documentary which played an important role in New Queer Cinema, re-examining ways that queer nonfiction film and video evolved out of distinctive relations to the history and traditions of the documentary form, its established practices, and commonly-held social functions. This approach underlines ways that this work’s often intense evocations of sexuality and bodily sentience as experienced across private and public space marked a crucial moment in what David Howes calls a transdisciplinary sensorial revolution. Keeping mobile and productive cross-pollinations of practice and theory in frame, this article explores emerging vocabularies for the cinematic experience by distilling components, here summed up as intimacy, gesture, and magnitude, of new queer documentary that operated not in opposition to but as part of a transvaluation of documentary’s long-established associations. With a focus on the fraught politics of new queer documentary in US contexts, these concepts are analysed through key filmmakers, including Barbara Hammer, Tom Joslin, and Marlon Riggs.

Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200–1750 ed. by Ryan D. Giles and Steven Wagschal

Reviewed by: Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200–1750 ed. by Ryan D. Giles and Steven Wagschal Jean Dangler Ryan D. Giles and Steven Wagschal, editors. Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200–1750. u of toronto p, 2018. 360 pp. this ambitious volume aims to shed light on the representation of the nonvisual senses, a theme rarely broached in the field of nonmodern Iberian studies, despite recent scholarship on sight and the emotions, or what the editors Ryan D. Giles and Steven Wagschal call the "sensory turn" (4) in the humanities and social sciences. This less trodden path of the other four senses constitutes fertile ground for exploration, particularly given the different roles that senses such as smell or sound played in the shifting sociohistoric circumstances covered by the book's more than five-hundred-year timeframe. The volume greatly illuminates the varying roles of the nonvisual senses, especially olfaction and touch. The book is divided into five parts, arranged by theme: part 1, "Sensing Religion," begins the volume with two essays on medieval literature by Giles ("The Breath of Lazarus in the Mocedades de Rodrigo") and Víctor Rodríguez-Pereira ("Sabrosa olor: The Role of Olfaction and Smells in Berceo's Milagros de Nuestra Señora"); part 2, "Cognition and the Senses," comprises three essays by Julia Domínguez ("The Internal Senses in Don Quixote and the Anatomy of Memory"), Robert K. Fritz ("Taste, Cognition, and Redemption in Guzmán de Alfarache"), and Wagschal ("The Aesthetics of Disgust in Miguel de Cervantes and Maria de Zayas"); part 3, "Perception," offers three articles by E. Michael Gerli ("Sight, Sound, Scent, and Sense: Reading the Cancionero de Palacio"), Carolyn A. Nadeau ("Treating Sensory Ailments in Early Modern Domestic Literature"), and Charles Victor Ganelin ("Cervantes's Exemplary Sensorium, or the Skinny on La española inglesa"); part 4, "Sensing Empire," encompasses four contributions by Emily C. Francomano ("The Senses of Empire and the Scents of Babylon in the Libro de Alexandre"), Josiah Blackmore ("Portuguese Scenes of the Senses, Medieval and Early Modern"), [End Page 277] Henry Berlin ("Eucharistic Thought and Imperial Longing in Portugal from Amadeus da Silva's Apocalypsis Nova [1502] to Antonio Vieira's História do Futuro [1663–1667]"), and Lisa Voigt ("Festive Soundscapes in Colonial Potosí and Minas Gerais"); and part 5, "Sensing the Urban," contains two essays by Frederick A. De Armas ("Celestial Visions and Demonic Touch: García's Inventions in La verdad sospechosa") and Enrique García Santo-Tomás ("Motherhood Interrupted: Sensing Birth in Early Modern Spanish Literature"). Most of the contributors are renowned scholars whose essays offer useful and compelling insights into their respective topics. One of the volume's stated goals is to directly contribute to the field of Iberian studies, broadly characterized by relationships between diverse linguistic, geopolitical, and social groups (4). However, the absence of explicit work on a wide range of languages and cultures—such as the Andalusi milieu, Iberian Jewish writers, and literature in Catalan, which was so impressively prolific in manuscripts and in print through the sixteenth century—is notable. Along with the volume's chief focus on texts in Castilian, two essays examine literature in Portuguese and one takes up colonial contexts at Potosí and Minas Gerais. The editors offer little explanation about their reasoning for the volume's temporal bookmarks of 1200 and 1750. They briefly survey the historical trajectory of thought on the senses from Plato and Aristotle to humoral theory and sixteenth-century ideas that resonate with elements of cognitive studies today (4–5), although the concise review does not clarify the reasons behind the chosen timeframe. It would be useful to know why and how the dates and materials were selected, since only three essays (Giles, Rodriguez-Pereira, and Francomano) and part of a fourth (Blackmore) pertain to materials prior to approximately 1450. Furthermore, the editors do not elucidate why two of the three medieval offerings (Giles and Rodriguez-Pereira) narrowly focus on religion, a qualification that seems, however inadvertently, to initially delimit and reduce the senses in medieval studies to a faith-based, Christian classification and portrayal. There are many...

An Interrogation of Sensory Anthropology of and in Japan

Sensory anthropology has quickly become a dynamic and expansive field of contemporary scholarship, with ethnographers increasingly interested in diverse sensory cosmologies as indicative of a “sensory turn” in anthropology. However, there has also been a tendency for these scholars to work in a linguistic silo, and overlook the potential contributions of local knowledge and scholarship. In this article, we begin to address this gap by bringing Japanese and English language scholarship on the senses in Japan into conversation to interrogate linguistic and cultural divides. Critical examination of these intertwined academic traditions not only provides new intellectual resources, it challenges assumed categories of analysis and deepens our understanding of cultural sensory formations.

Race, embodiment and later life: Re-animating aging bodies of color

This theoretical essay examines the intersections between race, ethnicity and old age from an inter-disciplinary lens. Drawing on cultural gerontology (especially embodied aging studies) and post-colonial perspectives on aging, it explores how an emphasis on the body and embodiment can serve as a conceptual lens for understanding racialized aging bodies. A tentative framework for analysis is proposed. The concept of exile explores how bodies of color and older bodies are denigrated through the hegemonic (white, youth-centered, masculinist) gaze. Re-animation can take place by transcending double-consciousness: ‘seeing beyond’ the dominant gaze. Othering and otherness are explored in relation to both raced and aging bodies. The limits of ethnic aging are scrutinized at an epistemic level, simultaneously informing, and obscuring the understanding of lived experiences of racialized ethnic minorities in old age. Visible and invisible difference provide a way of unpacking the simultaneous hypervisibility of older (female) bodies of color, and their invisibility in institutional and policy discourses. De-coloniality is considered, by exploring ways to resist hegemonic power through embodied ways of knowing. This article concludes by exploring how recent methodological innovations – especially the visual and sensory turn – can offer new ways of understanding the lived experiences of aging bodies of color.