Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community
Kathryn Linn Geurts
Abstract
This book investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. It was 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 ... More
This book investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. It was 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. The book relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinesthesia, which most Americans would not even identify as a sense.
Keywords:
cultural meaning system,
Anlo-Ewe,
southeastern Ghana,
five-senses model,
balance,
balancing,
seselelame,
intuition,
cultural traditions
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2003 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780520234550 |
| Published to California Scholarship Online: May 2012 |
DOI:10.1525/california/9780520234550.001.0001 |
