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
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
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

Editorial Reviews

"Howes's Sensual Relations is a must for anyone interested in anthropology coming to its senses. This remarkable book is a subtle and most eloquent contribution to theories of culture and the interplay of the senses, a full-bodied solution to the dry regimes of western mentality, textuality, and visuality. A model of anthropology's radical engagement with the sensuous."

--Jacques Chevalier, Carleton University

— Jacques Chevalier, Carleton University

"Howes' exploration of the varying primacy of each of the senses in two Melanesian societies and in the West is a pleasure to read. His intelligence, enormous command of the literature, and the way he so convincingly chooses his arguments keep the reader fascinated throughout the whole of the book."

--Carol Laderman, The City University of New York

— Carol Laderman, The City University of New York

"The notion of sensual relations as social relations offers Howes a densely saturated framework for important new theoretical insights into Marx, Freud, and the lived reality of the Melanesian peoples."

--Julia Harrison, Trent University

— Julia Harrison, Trent University

From the Publisher