Sensing Cittàslow: Slow Living and the Constitution of the Sensory City

ABSTRACT

In 2004 Aylsham, Norfolk, became Britain's second Cittàslow Town (Slow City). Embedded within the slow living ideology of Cittàslow is the assumption that the “better” life it advocates involves heightened sensory experience and concomitant pleasure. In contrast to contemporary fast life, it wishes that “suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment [may] preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency” (The Slow Food Companion 2005: 6). In the first part of the paper I analyze how the sensory elements of slow living are represented in the Cittàslow and related Slow Food movement's literature. Then, based on my ethnographic fieldwork centered on Aylsham's Cittàslow events and projects, I examine how the routine and creative sensory practices of the individuals who produce and participate in Cittàslow policies and activities are constitutive of a “sensory city.”     

Sensuous stories in the Indian Ocean islands*

Abstract

Providing examples from the islands of the Indian Ocean Region, this article focuses on the multisensory nature of storytelling and listening. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in the region (1998–2016), the author proposes a sensuous epistemology that turns on listening to “sense”. She reveals that storytelling can be a profoundly sensuous experience that elicits emotional and physical responses in both the teller and listener. The sensuous quality of stories enable the listener to fully encounter politically inscribed, complex social experiences. Ultimately, the article advances a notion of listening as sense-work, thereby deepening sensory scholarship’s recent, politically reflexive analysis on listening to hear.     

Delicious molecules: big food science,the chemosenses,and umami

Abstract

Since the closing decades of the twentieth century, molecular techniques of mapping chemosensation (the chemical senses of taste and smell) have been woven into a universalizing, evolutionary explanation for human eating behavior. In a prominent example, umami (translated from Japanese as “savory deliciousness”) has come to be understood as the “fifth basic taste sensation,” elicited by the common flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG) along with other amino acids and ribonucleotides. Meanwhile, socialized associations of food desirability, undesirability, pleasure, and disgust have likewise come to be interrogated on the molecular level – in the oral cavity, in the brain, and throughout the gastrointestinal tract. In this paper, I abridge this molecularization of sensuous eating with the provocation that the sensory is affective is molecular is political. This phrase signals the stakes with which taste and smell are ontologized as fundamentally embedded in memory (and thus in affect and in culture); as conducted in train with corporate food and beverage research and development; and effected at molecular sites of transduction (chemical reception). It is to say that, in recent decades, the sensory and affective domains have been made molecular. And in the context of food science, that molecular knowledge is interested. This paper conducts a brief, critical accounting of how chemosensation is made knowable and actionable, and for what purposes. It suggests that the most authoritative knowledge of how taste and smell mediate human health (the sensory) is shaped by the corporate imperative to determine what chemical compounds humans register as pleasurable (the affective), and thus what food products humans can be relied upon to buy (the political). As a result, a lack of scientific consensus on wider questions of metabolism – of glutamate, for instance – is built into chemosensory science, which has privileged the work of product design.     

Odorous childhoods and scented worlds of learning: a sensory history of health and outdoor education initiatives in Western Europe (1900s-1960s)

ABSTRACT

This paper develops a sensory history of health and outdoor education initiatives which featured (non-)formal schooling, analyzing these as belonging to (a) scented and more generally sensed world(s) of learning. Working with photographs as sensory objects of affect, and using as examples Belgian and Luxembourg open-air schools and associated sanitary and social welfare provisions, the paper explores issues that have gone under-researched in sensory scholarship internationally: those of precise educational purposes, methods, processes and effects of sensory engagement, particularly pertaining to “smell”. Sensory practices and experiences and uses of senses generally are thereby traced in/as “situated, embodied” movements inextricably “enmeshed” with symbolism. The paper argues that while the educational goals underpinning the initiatives investigated and the approaches and practices characterizing these have changed, some (un)intended effects still have an impact today, for instance through Forest School as given shape in the United Kingdom. The concept of “odorous”, or rather “sensuous childhoods”, is proposed to denote ways that particular target groups have come to be imagined as in need of explicitly sensorial health and outdoor education.     

论雁塔节场的再生

大雁塔是古城西安的标志性建筑。自唐代以来,就一直有传统的庙会在大慈恩寺内举行。同时这里也是文人墨客荟萃之地。今天,庙会的习俗已经离我们远去,但人们对于民俗节场的需求却仍然存在。新修建的大雁塔北广场以大雁塔为核心,结合主题水景、唐风仿古建筑群、万佛灯塔等景观,把人和环境协调在统一的文化氛围之下,使这里逐渐成为了西安南郊地区的一个颇具特色的文化交流场所。大雁塔北广场和以前的雁塔庙会有很多相似之处:都有大量的附近居民参与,都有一定的时间限制性。另外,在集会的同时,都穿插有大量的商业活动和少量的宗教活动。大雁塔北广场的存在,增强了当地的可识别性,使当地居民产生了归属感。每当广场喷泉表演开始时,昔日雁塔节场的盛况似乎又浮现了出来。     

The Sensory Dimensions of Gardening

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the multiple sensory dimensions of gardening and their synesthetic significance in an ethnographic study of gardens and gardening in England and Sweden. It challenges the notion that the different senses (vision, smell, sound, touch and taste) can be considered in hierarchical terms i.e. some as being more important than others in an assessment of the meaning and significance of gardening as an everyday practice. It argues that there is a significant difference between what people say and what they actually do and that when we study the latter the significance of all the senses in relation to each other is highlighted.     

Learning (to) taste: food,aesthetics, and education in early modern France

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the intersection between taste and education in the early modern period. The first part investigates the close connection between the sense of taste and the sin of gluttony, highlighting taste’s close association with food disorders in the late Middle Ages and early modernity. Silencing taste was by then a key aspect of the education of the body, which needed to be learned from the earliest age, at home as well as at school. The second part charts the rise of a moderate and honest gourmandise from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onward, accompanied by the invention of the polite bon goût and later the aesthetic taste of beauty, which contributed to a new social valorization of taste, while also complicating contemporary practices of learning (to) taste. Using a wide variety of early modern printed sources, including conduct books, religious and moral treatises, books of emblems, and treatises on the senses and on taste in particular, as well as aesthetic works, this paper sheds light on the multiple ways in which taste – of the body as much as of the mind – was used, learned, and displayed, hence revealing a transformation of the experience and understanding of taste throughout the early modern period, as well as its impact on educational practices.     

Sensing the Run: The Senses and Distance Running

ABSTRACT

To date, there has been little research into the sensuous dimensions of sporting activity. This paper seeks to address this lacuna and to expand the literature via an examination of one specific group: distance runners. Using data from a two-year collaborative autoethnography, the paper portrays the sensuous activity experienced by two runners as they traverse their routine training routes.     

The Japanese Touch

ABSTRACT

Touch, as it is conventionally conceived, appears to be lacking in everyday Japanese intimate relationships. Here, the “touching spaces” between Japanese people are explored, challenging assumptions about closeness and intimacy. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Japan, this review suggests that “finite” conceptions of touch, body, and subjectivity limit our understanding of experiences of closeness in a Japanese cultural context. Instead, how the space between people is inhabited, and the feelings in this space, seems much more significant. In sum, Japanese experiences of touch, particularly in a familial context, should best be seen as a tangible and sensuous connection that is not just felt in the body. Focusing on two body practices, this review explores the connection and embodied experience of closeness in the Japanese family vis-à-vis co-bathing and co-sleeping. It ends with a summary of the design of these sites of intimacy and some ways in which communication and bonding can be enhanced.     

Researching the Senses as Knowledge

ABSTRACT

Research in the growing field of sensory studies has begun to identify the sensory aspects of experience, particularly in our engagement with material culture. What is yet to receive much attention is how the senses are acquired and used by individuals and communities, and how they inform action. Adopting barth's argument that cultural phenomena are most productively examined as different kinds of knowledge, this article argues that the senses can be examined as any other knowledge source. This article demonstrates the value of examining the senses as knowledge through an account of learning to hear medically. This example is taken from a broader ethnographic study of the aural practices and experiences of ninety-two musicians, doctors, adventurers, and Morse code operators. It argues that hearing is learned, specialized, and specific to the places we go, the people that surround us, and the things that we do. To seek out the sources and value of this taken-for-granted aspect of our experience, it argues that the senses can be analyzed in terms of their foundations, their acquisition, and practice.     

Learning to make sense: interdisciplinary perspectives on sensory education and embodied enculturation

ABSTRACT

In this introductory essay we examine through a ‘temporally inflected lens’ some of the complex entanglements of learning, senses, and sense making; body-sensory experience and practice; and culture and society. We thereby aim to bring into dialogue inter-/multisensorial approaches to education as a project and praxis and processes of ‘enculturation’, which have always, in one way or the other, involved ‘embodied’ learning (and imaginaries thereof), rather than mere ‘mental processing’. We first situate the ‘turn’ to the senses, across a range of disciplinary fields, brought on by a growing interest in ‘modes of meaning-making’, including the visual, aural, audio-visual, material, bodily, and spatial. Secondly, we investigate the explanatory potential of enculturation and embodiment as seemingly entangled notions. From this, we derive the concept of ‘embodied enculturation’ for the study of situated, historical entanglements of sensory learning and education. We link this proposed research paradigm to incisive scholarship on ‘cultural learning’ through sensorial lenses, after which we tease out six key questions or concerns emerging from a review of relevant, recent research. These key concerns help to contextualize state-of-the-art ‘sensuous education scholarship’ introduced in the final section of the article and elaborated further in the ensuing contributions to this special issue.     

Sonic Envelopes

ABSTRACT

This article examines ways in which an individual's experiences of spatial environments are informed by physical and psychic perceptions of sound. It explores how sonic images, memories, voices, spaces and events constitute “sonic envelopes.” These aesthetic figures are developed out of the late-nineteenth-century writings by the philosopher Henri Bergson and from contemporary audio-walks by the artist, Janet Cardiff. Each shows that sound, space and time are embodied in the individual's powers of sensory perception. Bergson and Cardiff's sonic envelopes may therefore enable reevaluations of the relationships between sound, space and time that connect the individual to his or her environment.     

A touch of luck and a “real taste of Vegas”: a sensory ethnography of the Montreal Casino

ABSTRACT

In recent years, there has been an explosion of “experiential design” in casinos, driven in part by research suggesting that curating gambling sensescapes can lure patrons to spend more time – and money – inside the casino. Building on the promise of existing casino ethnographies, this paper argues that a sensory ethnographic approach to the study of gambling environments can offer valuable insight into the experiential design and mood management of the casino. We use sensory ethnography to explore the ambiance of the Montreal Casino, particularly during the casino’s “Vegas Nights” promotion. How does the casino feel (and how does it touch back)? What rhythms flow through its neon labyrinth? What does “getting a real taste of Vegas,” well … taste like? Moreover, we position this ambiance at the center of the casino’s “push-and-pull” approach to problem gambling – where this government-affiliated sensory extravaganza must toe a tenuous line between attraction and responsibilisation. In addition, we examine how the ambiance of the casino is co-produced by patrons and employees. Ultimately, we argue that the casino floor is unlike a sensory research laboratory – for here, sensations mix and mingle, and it takes a sensory ethnographer to quite literally “make sense” of the casino ambiance and its impact on visitor experience.     

The Post office feud: sensing urban disturbance in late eighteenth-century Copenhagen

Abstract

The so-called Post Office Feud was one of a series of popular protests and riots which took place in Copenhagen during the last decades of the eighteenth century. Compared to other similar events in the period, only a few, indirect hints to any explicit political discontent come through in contemporary representations of the disturbance, or in the subsequent investigations carried out by the authorities. On the contrary, it was the textualisation of sensory and emotional experiences that dominated the testimonials and written statements ensuing from the Post Office Feud. This article examines how the police, students, and other Copenhageners attached meaning to the disturbance by explaining the escalating violence in urban public space with reference to various sensory experiences.     

Puzzling pieces: a sensory design learning tool

ABSTRACT

This article gives an account of an activity that is part of a collection of instructional materials for learning about sensory aspects of design for products, environments, and services. It describes the participants’ experiences and reflections in a workshop at DeSForM, the 10th Conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement. The article highlights the participants’ engagement with one of the exploratory activities, Puzzling Pieces, that was in the process of being developed. The unique ways in which the attendees translated theoretical multi-sensory design perspectives into activities for heightening multi-sensory awareness and consciousness of sensory interactions suggest that this activity may be a useful tool for finetuning the sensory design process.     

Fantasy Lands and Kinesthetic Thrills

ABSTRACT

This article proposes that Coney Island's enclosed amusement parks aided in the transformation of spectacle as total-body experience. By studying the ways that Coney Island's unique beachside resort produced entertainment that appealed to all of the senses, we seek to “make sense” of the amusement area in its historical and geographic specificity. Even in its early years of development the beachside resort was touted (and critiqued) in the popular press as a carnivalesque atmosphere that escalated the senses. With the opening of Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland Coney Island's enclosed amusement parks provided dream worlds of technological and architectural wonder that invited kinesthetic. Coney Island reconfigured the dizzying effects of urbanism, modernity and the capitalist machine as entertainment, inviting pleasure seekers to experience the shock of modernity as fun. Mechanical amusements celebrated and fostered thrill seekers as sensuous beings who experienced leisure not just through their eyes but with and through their entire bodies. Though the impossibilities of recreating the sensorial experiences of pleasure seekers at Coney Island remains a methodological limitation, this article contributes to literature that understands the senses as lived, embodied phenomena that are products of culture.     

“My enlightenment is born and propagated through my guts”: alimentary art

This article focuses on cases studies where artists prepare, display, and serve food to audiences both within museums and galleries, and in less formalized settings. A brief overview of gastronomic art practices is provided. Surrealism (Salvador Dalì, Meret Oppenheim), Italian Futurism, and the Food Art movement (Daniel Spoerri) in Germany are discussed in relation to contemporary practices by Karen Tam and collaborative duo Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed. These case studies deliberately harness the materiality of food and, in so doing, occasion bodily, gustatory experiences for their audiences. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s text “Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium” (1999) provides a theoretical framework for the discussion.     

Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies

ABSTRACT

Sound studies and Deaf studies may seem at first impression to operate in worlds apart. We argue in this article, however, that similar renderings of hearing, deafness, and seeing as ideal types—and as often essentialized sensory modes—make it possible to read differences between Sound studies and Deaf studies as sites of possible articulation. We direct attention to four zones of productive overlap, attending to how sound is inferred in deaf and Deaf practice, how reimagining sound in the register of low-frequency vibration can upend deafhearing dichotomies, how “deaf futurists” champion cyborg sound, and how signing and other non-spoken communicative practices might undo phonocentric models of speech. Sound studies and Deaf studies emerge as fields with much to offer one another epistemologically, theoretically, and practically.     

Reinsurance and the liability insurance crisis

Insurance-industry accounts of the liability insurance crisis of the mid-1980s often cite disruption of supply in reinsurance markets as an important contributing factor. Economic theories of the crisis have not explored this explanation for the severity of the crisis. This article investigates the extent to which events in reinsurance markets affected liability insurance market outcomes. It documents significant shocks to reinsurance supply in the early 1980s and finds evidence of subsequent disruptions to the price and availability of reinsurance. Regression analysis of liability insurance profitability over the time period supports the hypothesis that problems in reinsurance markets played an important role in the crisis.