culture and the senses

recent note: i like this giddy post, and the idea of 'fifty ways to walk':

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I'm excited about a recent tantalizing find at the library. I haven't looked into the book at all yet, but the back-of-the-book description is exciting as it is. Culture and the Senses, by Kathryn Linn Geurts (University of California Press, 2002). I've typed up a sizeable chunk of it below, and I've bolded the bits I'm most interested in:

. . . 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 (physically and psychologically as well as literally and metaphorically) 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. She demonstrates this through a careful analysis of language, then by focusing on the attention given to balance and the body in childcare and the way child raising instantiates properties of balance as moral code. The body's ways of knowing extend to culturally relative ways of moving and walking, so that the repertoire of more than fifty "ways to walk," for instance, literally embodies socialization and identity, status and well-being. . . .

The phrase "ways to walk" cues in my mind a reference to an Anselm Hollo poem. I'll have to look up the exact lines, but the title is, I think, "Preface," and it goes something like this: "the poet Vallejo discovered new ways of walking / while living in Paris . . . / the following poems are a record of his discoveries"

this is our time

at the library today, i found this:

The next fifty years are a special time. Between now and 2050 we'll see the zenith, or very nearly, of human population. With luck we'll never see any greater production of carbon dioxide or toxic chemicals. We'll never see greater species extinction or soil erosion.

So it's the task of those of us alive right now to deal with this special phase, to squeeze us through these next fifty years. That's not fair—any more than it was fair that earlier generations had to deal with the Second World War or the Civil War or the Revolution or the Depression or slavery. It's just reality.

We need in these fifty years to be working simultaneously . . . on our ways of life, on our technologies, and on our population.

The period in question happens to be our time. That's what makes this moment special, and what makes this moment hard.

—Bill McKibben, from the facing page of The Complete Guide to Environmental Careers in the 21st Century, by the Environmental Careers Organization, published by Island Press, Washington D.C., 1999,

marketplace

...what modernism and Western capitalist expansion meant to traditional peoples. In the New World, people became items of commerce, their talents, their labors, and their produce thrown into the market place, where their best hope was to bring a decent price.

--Nathan Huggins, Black Odyssey, 1977.

i found this as one of the (three) epigraphs to The Making of New World Slavery by Robin Blackburn.

i thought, our best hope is still that our talents and labors will bring a decent price.