Sensual Relations : Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory

Offers a full-bodied approach to the study of culture in which each sense serves as a potent register of meaning | 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. Frontmatter LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (page ix) FORETASTE (page xi) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (page xxv) PART 1. 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 (page 3) CHAPTER 2. Coming to Our Senses The Sensual Turn in Anthropological Understanding (page 29) PART 2. Melanesian Sensory Formations CHAPTER 3. On the Pleasures of Fasting, Appearing, and Being Heard in the Massim World (page 61) CHAPTER 4. On Being in Good Taste Gustatory Cannibalism and Exchange Psychology (page 95) CHAPTER 5. The Visible and the Invisible in a Middle Sepik Society (page 124) CHAPTER 6. Comparison of Massim and Middle Sepik Ways of Sensing the World (page 160) PART 3. Libidinal and Political Economies of the Senses CHAPTER 7. Oedipus In/Out of the Trobriands A Sensuous Critique of Freudian Teory (page 175) CHAPTER 8. The Material Body of the Commodity Sensing Marx (page 204) NOTES (page 235) REFERENCES (page 249) INDEX (page 273)

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.

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. [from publisher's advertisement]