Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory

by David Howes

Overview

With audacious dexterity, David Howes weaves together topics ranging from love and beauty magic in Papua New Guinea to nasal repression in Freudian psychology and from the erasure and recovery of the senses in contemporary ethnography to the specter of the body in Marx. Through this eclectic and penetrating exploration of the relationship between sensory experience and cultural expression, Sensual Relations contests the conventional exclusion of sensuality from intellectual inquiry and reclaims sensation as a fundamental domain of social theory.
David Howes is Professor of Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472026227
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	02/22/2010
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	643 KB

Table of Contents

Contents List of Illustrations Foretaste Acknowledgments Part I. Making Sense in Anthropology Chapter 1. Taking Leave of Our Senses: A Survey of the Senses and Critique of the Textual Revolution in Ethnographic Theory Chapter 2. Coming to Our Senses: The Sensual Turn in Anthropological Understanding Part 2. Melanesian Sensory Formations Chapter 3. On the Pleasures of Fasting, Appearing, and Being Heard in the Massim World Chapter 4. On Being in Good Taste: Gustatory Cannibalism and Exchange Psychology Chapter 5. The Visible and the Invisible in a Middle Sepik Society Chapter 6. Comparison of Massim and Middle Sepik Ways of Sensing the World Part 3. Libidinal and Political Economies of the Senses Chapter 7. Oedipus In/Out of the Trobriands: A Sensuous Critique of Freudian Theory Chapter 8. The Material Body of the Commodity: Sensing Marx Notes References Index