Introduction
Common Senses and Critical Sensibilities
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3040506 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Erica Fretwell (0009-0006-8627-2729, corresponding author), Erica Fretwell Erica Fretwell |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 1 |
| Publication date | 2018-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Resilience A Journal of the Environmental Humanities (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2330-8117 • E-ISSN: 2330-8117 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.5250/resilience.5.3.0001 |
| OpenAlex | W2889321034 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 8 |
IntroductionCommon Senses and Critical Sensibilities Erica Fretwell (bio) The senses are sparking interest in the humanities. Long the purview of neurology, they now circulate among history, media and communications, philosophy, performance studies, and other fields. For those in literary studies, the current move might seem obvious—making claims in the name of the aesthetic, a word that has its etymological origins in Greek, meaning "of or relating to sense perception." Yet the senses present problems with which scholars in the humanities are still grappling. Take, for instance, nineteenth-century natural historian Lorenz Oken's hierarchy of "varieties of Men," from least to most developed, "according with the development of the sensorial organs": 1. The Skin-Man is the Black, African. 2. The Tongue-Man is the Brown, Australian-Malayan. 3. The Nose-Man is the Red, American. 4. The Ear-Man is the Yellow, Asiatic-Mongolian. 5. The Eye-Man is the White, European.1 Since the late twentieth century, scholarship has forcefully challenged these mutually sustaining hierarchies of human "type" and sensory capacity. Yet European classificatory systems have been difficult to shake. For the emergence of single-sense studies troublingly reproduces Oken's sociosensory hierarchy: first visual studies and then sound studies, with the allegedly primitive senses of taste, touch, and smell yet to be formalized as distinct objects of interdisciplinary study.2 In this way, Western models of human, aesthetic, and epistemological value continue [End Page 1] to underwrite field formations. We would do well, then, to reexamine the colonial logic of the five-sense canon (taste, touch, sound, sight, and smell) and to revisit the classical notion, dating back to Aristotle, of distinct sensations. Building on foundational work on sensory experiences while remediating disciplinary blind spots, this special issue aims to advance a new critical sensorium, one that is not only redistributed—ocular- and Eurocentric hierarchies flattened—but also decolonized: a sensorium in which (white) Man is displaced as the prime locus of sensation. Sensory scholarship has been gaining traction since the end of the twentieth century and nowhere more so than in anthropology. A number of anthropologists—Kathryn Geurts, Paul Stoller, and C. Nadia Seremetakis, to name a few—built on Marshall McLuhan's and Walter Ong's groundbreaking work on the cultural organization of the sensorium to redefine the senses as cultural modes of experience and cultural artifacts as sensory modes of historical memory.3 The establishment of the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University by David Howes, Anthony Synnott, and Constance Classen in 1988 formalized this "sensory turn." But this turn can be said to have started not in cultural anthropology but from an adjacent field: sensory ecology.4 In The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, psychologist J. J. Gibson's theory of affordances argued that sensation was a world-making phenomenon, where perceptual clues in the environment indicate possibilities for action. Following suit, Paul Rodaway's "sensuous geography" defined sensory experience as a dynamic interplay between self and world, while David Abram's ecophenomenology delineated the coeval biological and imaginative processes through which humans and nonhumans emerge.5 The inheritances of sensory ecology are apparent today in the new materialisms and environmental humanities: Stacey Alaimo's powerful notion of transcorporeality as bodily immersion within a landscape of interactions; the poetics of human-jellyfish interactions that Eva Hayward uncovers; and in a previous issue of this journal, Hsuan Hsu's study of artwork that deploys smell to "reconceptualize museums as spaces of environmental enmeshment."6 Such vibrant thinking suggests that in the heightened urgency of ecological crisis, the challenge today is to unloose sensation from the human while attending to its biopolitical deployment in the management of life and death across populations. [End Page 2] As these critical genealogies suggest, the senses have undergone radical revaluation in the humanities and social sciences over the last thirty years. "Common Senses and Critical Sensibilities" extends this work by reconsidering the senses not simply as objects of study but as methodologies: as a means of navigating and investigating the cultural materials, affective forces, and epistemological paradigms through which humans and nonhumans continue to both emerge and engage each other. This issue asks what it might
Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Field (mathematics · Hierarchy · Meaning (existential · Natural (archaeology · Perception · Plank · Scholarship · Taste · White (mutation · Australian Indigenous Culture and History · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Rhetoric and Communication Studies
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |