In Empire of the Senses the senses are considered as cultural systems. Bringing together classic pieces by key thinkers - from Marshall McLuhan and Alain Corbin to Susan Stewart and Oliver Sacks - as well as newly commissioned articles, this path-breaking book provides a comprehensive overview of the "sensual revolution," where all manner of disciplines converge. Its aim is to enhance our understanding of the role of the senses in history and across cultures by overturning the hegemony of vision in contemporary theory and demonstrating that all senses play a role in mediating cultural experience. It asks provocative questions that most of us take for granted. Are there, for example, only five senses, or is this assumption a Western construct? This radical contribution to revisioning cultural studies will be essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the full complexity of how we experience our world.
Introduction -- The mind's eye : what the blind see / Oliver Sacks -- Inside the five-sense sensorium / Marshall McLuhan -- Remembering the senses / Susan Stewart -- The witch's senses : sensory ideologies and transgressive femininities from the Renaissance to modernity / Constance Classen -- The senses divided : organs, objects, and media in early modern England / Carla Mazzio -- The death of the sensuous chemist : the 'new' chemistry and the transformation of sensuous technology / Lissa Roberts -- Charting the cultural history of the senses / Alain Corbin -- McLuhan in the rainforest : the sensory worlds of oral cultures / Constance Classen -- Consciousness as 'feeling in the body' : a West African theory of embodiment, emotion, and the making of mind / Kathryn Linn Guerts -- Places senses, senses placed : toward a sensuous epistemology of environments / Steven Feld -- The tea ceremony : a symbolic analysis / Dorinne Kondo -- Engaging the spirits of modernity : temiar songs of a changing world / Marina Roseman -- Home cooking : Filipino women and geographies of the senses in Hong Kong / Lisa Law -- A tonic of wildness : sensuousness in Henry David Thoreau / Victor Carl Friesen -- Volatile effects : olfactory dimensions of art and architecture / Jim Drobnick -- Hyperesthesia, or, The sensual logic of late capitalism / David Howes -- Under the jaguar sun / Italo Calvino -- Michel Serres' five senses / Steven Connor -- Darwin's disgust / William Ian Miller -- Strindberg's 'deranged sensations' / Hans-Göran Ekman -- Movement, stillness : on the sensory world of a shelter for the 'homeless mentally ill' / Robert Desjarlais -- Dystoposthesia : emplacing environmental sensitivities / Christopher Fletcher.