A01=Kathryn Geurts
africa
african community
anlo culture
anlo ewe
anlo society
anthropologists
Author_Kathryn Geurts
balance
Category=JBSL11
Category=JHMC
cultural anthropology
cultural knowledge
cultural meaning
cultural perspective
cultural traditions
demographic studies
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnographers
ethnography
ghana
hearing
innate senses
inner states
metaphorical senses
nonfiction
perception
philosophy
physical senses
sensorium
sensory perception
sight
smell
social cultural
social science
taste
touch
Product details
- ISBN 9780520234567
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 09 Jan 2003
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Adding her stimulating and finely framed ethnography to recent work in the anthropology of the senses, Kathryn Geurts investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. Geurts discovered that the five-senses model has little relevance in Anlo culture, where balance is a sense, and balancing (in a physical and psychological sense as well as in literal and metaphorical ways) is an essential component of what it means to be human. Much of perception falls into an Anlo category of seselelame (literally feel-feel-at-flesh-inside), in which what might be considered sensory input, including the Western sixth-sense notion of 'intuition', comes from bodily feeling and the interior milieu. The kind of mind-body dichotomy that pervades Western European-Anglo American cultural traditions and philosophical thought is absent. Geurts relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinesthesia, which most Americans would not even identify as a sense.
After this nuanced exploration of an Anlo-Ewe theory of inner states and their way of delineating external experience, readers will never again take for granted the 'naturalness' of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell.
Kathryn Linn Geurts is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Hamline University.
