Policing the image: the Breakwater prison albums,Cape Town,in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

This article is concerned with photographic albums produced at the Breakwater Convict Station in Cape Town in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While examining the extent to which this photographic project resonated with the global proliferation of Bertillonage and was part of an attempt to professionalize the penal system at the Cape, it argues that the photographs were the product of a distinct local and historically contingent negotiation of how photography would help constitute a particular subject of rule: the modern category of the prisoner. The article offers an analysis of the albums’ complicated position in the archive that circumvents a facile blending of these images/objects into the narrative of a colonial disciplinary regime of vision. Instead, it pays attention to the archival, semantic and aesthetic ambiguity of the photographs – and the ways in which colonial prison and police institutions attempted to contain these ambiguities – in order to reveal the intricacy of the imprisoned subjects’ growing exposure to an environment marked by the technological regulation of time, space and the body.     

Towards a social history of suffering: Dignity,misery and disrespect

ABSTRACT

This article examines the working-class audience in Soviet Ukraine and the changes in its reading appetites during the 1920s. Under the Soviet nationalities policy of korenizatsiia introduced in 1923, the print-runs of Ukrainian-language literary products increased significantly. Nonetheless, as this article argues, those numerous publications often did not reach Ukrainian readers and if they did, they could hardly satisfy the interest appetites of an ever-growing Ukrainian audience. As the book reviews collected in the second half of the 1920s showed, the worker readers were interested in a certain type of literature – entertaining, easy to comprehend, dealing with contemporary issues and characters – that was not yet available in Ukrainian. Nevertheless, once that literature began to emerge in the late 1920s, the interest in contemporary books in Ukrainian increased. By examining every aspect of reading in Ukrainian – production, dissemination and consumption of the printed word – this article highlights the decisive role of Soviet readership in determining future official Soviet Ukrainian literature. The case of Soviet Ukraine emphasizes regional specifics and introduces an important language component to the Bolshevik reading revolution of the 1920s to early 1930s, largely ignored in the scholarship.     

The Taste of the Eye and the Sight of the Tongue: the Relations between Sight and Taste in Early Modern Europe

This article examines the articulation between the senses of taste and sight through the representations of their organs, the tongue and the eye, in early modern Europe. The relationship between taste and sight first brings to mind gastronomical aesthetics, and the part played by the eye in the relish of beautifully presented dishes. The first part of this article is therefore devoted to exploring the taste of the eye (or the foretaste of sight) and highlights the harmony of taste and sight in early modern cuisine. However, the forms of reciprocity between taste and sight cannot be reduced to the sole figure of culinary aesthetics, which tends to blur the other multiple modalities that this sensorial association could reveal. The second part, the sight of the tongue (or the invisibility of taste), thus examines more complex layers of the relationship between the sense of sight and the taste organ, through a study of the representations of the tongue and of the gaping mouth in early modern visual culture. Drawing on early modern textual and iconographic resources and exploring: cookbooks; physiognomic works; conduct books; and also engravings and paintings related to the culinary arts, the seven deadly sins, and representations of madness and the fool in early modern visual culture, this essay argues that examining the representations of the sense organs is a suggestive way to explore the relationship between the senses.     

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.     

New Zealand’s engagement with the Five Ways to Wellbeing: evidence from a large cross-sectional survey

ABSTRACT

The Five Ways to Wellbeing were developed in 2008 as a set of simple daily practices for individuals to improve their wellbeing. While there is some evidence to support the association between individual practices and wellbeing, it is unknown whether engaging in multiple practices – and in certain combinations – is associated with higher levels of wellbeing. A survey was undertaken with 10,012 adults throughout Aotearoa, New Zealand, to assess individual wellbeing and participation in the Five Ways to Wellbeing (Connect, Give, Take Notice, Keep Learning and Be Active). Wellbeing was assessed with the Flourishing Scale (Md?=?46, IQR 39–49). Three objectives explored the cross-sectional association between the Five ways to Wellbeing and wellbeing: (1) multiple wellbeing practices and wellbeing, (2) clustering of multiple wellbeing practices, and (3) wellbeing practices as predictors of wellbeing. Results show that levels of wellbeing increased with each additional practice (rho?=?.53, p?<?.001), regardless of the combination. However, the most important predictors of wellbeing were Keep Learning (β?=?.23, p?<?.001) and Take Notice (β?=?.22, p?<?.001). Studies investigating ways to increase participation in the Five Ways to Wellbeing are warranted to promote wellbeing in Aotearoa.     

Negotiating dilemmas in the practices of street‐level welfare work

Hjörne E, Juhila K, van Nijnatten C. Negotiating dilemmas in the practices of street‐level welfare work Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 303–309 © 2010 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and International Journal of Social Welfare. The theme of this mini‐symposium is based on the core ideas of two influential books published about 30 years ago, namely Michael Lipsky's Street‐Level Bureaucracy – Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services (1980) and Jeffrey Prottas's People‐Processing – The Street‐Level Bureaucrat in Public Service Bureaucracies (1979). In these books, three dilemmas were identified that have great importance for welfare workers' position as mediators between institutions and citizens: autonomy versus control, responsiveness versus standardisation, and demand versus supply. In this editorial, we discuss these dilemmas with regard to the present context of street‐level welfare work, which is strongly influenced by managerialist policies (also called new public management). It is emphasised that in the era of managerialism, the dilemmas should be approached as empirical matters: how they are present, talked into being and negotiated in naturally occurring practices of street‐level welfare work, and with what consequences.     

Autonomy,Choice and Control for Older Users of Home Care Services: Current Developments in Swedish Eldercare

In Sweden, a policy shift towards more individualized eldercare, with an emphasis on consumer choice, has taken place. The aim of this study was to analyze the processes and practices of individualized eldercare, focusing on preconditions for older peoples’ choice and control. Data consist of qualitative interviews with users of home care services (n – 12) and staff (n – 12) and participant observations (n – 7) of meetings between staff and older people. The choice and control available to older users emerged as decisions about ‘what’ care and services, ‘who’ should provide the care and services, and ‘how’ the care and services should be performed. Three approaches to enable older people choice and control over their home care services were revealed: test and revise, services elaborated in close collaboration between users, care managers and home care staff; choices in the moment, users could choose services at each occasion; and quality improvement through competition, competing providers develop attractive services. The findings could guide policy makers in combining the strengths of these approaches to enable older people in need of support to become co-producers in designing, managing, as well as consuming, care and services. Future quantitative research is needed to achieve generalizable knowledge about the strengths and weaknesses of different ways to organize eldercare services.     

The aesthetic life of artificial flavors

Abstract

Artificiality is usually understood as that which is man-made and is in contraposition to the natural. The term itself is increasingly recognized as a negative pole, while the label of “natural” is exploited as guarantee of healthiness in marketing food campaigns. This article takes issue with the natural/artificial debate by emphasizing the aesthetic side of artificial flavorings – chemical substances designed to alter or enhance the taste of processed foods. Here, I reconsider the conception of artificiality as a poor imitation of nature and instead underline the link between technology and aesthetics, by examining the practice of flavorists. Through ethnographic detail I call for moving the synthetic out of the “inauthentic” and argue that the attempt to mimic natural flavors through synthesis is not only an act of imitation and resemblance (as critics exclusively contend) but can also be thought as an act of representation and interpretation (as my fieldwork illuminates).     

Exemplary sound and hearing in sensory treatises from the early modern Spanish-speaking world

This essay considers sound in sensory treatises from the seventeenth-century Hispanic world: Jerónimo Becerra’s Estvdioso discvrso philosophica anathomia, y theatro ingenioso de los organos y sentidos interiores, y exteriores del hombre (Mexico, 1657); Tratado de los bienes del silencio y males de la lengua, attributed to rector of the Colegio de Manila Diego de S. I. Bobadilla (Manila, 1645) and Diego Calleja’s Talentos logrados, en el buen uso de los cinco sentidos (Madrid, 1700). My purpose is to draw out the authors’ engagement with aural discourses that intersect with other areas of early modern thought. Above all, I underscore the reconciliation of existing ideas about sound’s spiritual significance with developments in medicine and anatomy. The study is the first in-depth examination of each of the three treatises it considers. It advances our understanding of seventeenth-century sound culture and underscores the need for re-reading cultural production from this time period through an aural lens.     

Sensuous Pageantry

ABSTRACT

This article proposes an exploration of taste through the lens of certain events organized by the Slow Food movement. It aims, first, to situate Slow Food discourses in the practices carried out in particular sites, and second, to account for sensuous relations established between people and food in events such as fairs, festivals, and markets. In redirecting attention to the specificity of sensory practices of the organization, the article contributes to a little-explored field in Slow Food studies. It shows how micro-practices enrich and continuously shape the Slow Food principle of sensory education. Research from fairs, festivals, and markets in England and Italy provides insight into the interactions and strategies of producers, organizers, and visitors, and evaluates modalities of taste-making and taste formation. The article introduces the concept of sensuous pageantry in order to explore multiple ways of engaging with various sensory orders pertaining to the what, who, and how of tasting. It is argued that sensuous pageantry, an often overwhelming and dominant sense of taste and sensing at fairs, brings multiple sensory orders together and creates tensions which alternately undermine or reinforce those sensory orders. As such, fairs offer distinctive conceptual insights for a sociology of taste and the senses, which aims to assess emerging sensory constitutions as potential catalysts and drivers of change.     

Tasting off-flavors: food science,sensory knowledge and the consumer sensorium

Abstract

In food science and technology, understanding off-flavors has a significance with both technical and commercial implications. In the food industry in the United States, it is a widely held truism that consumers will not buy a product if they do not like the way it tastes or if it contains unpleasant flavors. But how can science determine when food is off putting, and how do scientists learn to address bad tastes in their experimental and technical practice? Based on ethnographic work with food scientists in the United States, this paper is a reflexive account of learning to taste off-flavors, a form of sensory learning that utilizes the scientist’s own body as a kind of instrument. The paper argues that a particular understanding of the consumer sensorium emerges through food scientists’ approach to off-flavors. This is an image of the consumer as a chemically receptive sensory system that is highly sensitive to compounds at trace levels. By utilizing the sensitivity of their own senses, food scientists exploit the relationship between distaste, memory and sensory perception as a form of training to produce future aesthetic memories of off-flavors that can be deployed in a technical context.     

Calligraphy and Modern Chinese Writers

迄今为止，中国现代文学研究已取得了举世瞩目的成就，但趋于“饱和”的状态 也使其陷入了举步维艰的境地。因此，寻找新的学术增长点就变得异常重要和紧迫。 “书法文化”与“中国现代作家”的关系，几近是一个研究空白，以往很少引人注 意，这是令人遗憾的。事实上，许多中国现代作家都与书法文化有着不解之缘，他们 在书法收藏、书法创作、书学探讨上都做出了重要贡献；反过来，书法文化也对现代 文学的存在方式、文本形式、情感表达、思维方式以及审美趣味等产生了深刻的影 响。另外，通过对书法文化与中国现代作家关系的考察，还可引发我们进一步深入思 考文学、书法、文化、教育等相关问题，以便有助于新世纪的中国文学和文化获得更 大的发展空间。

关键词: 书法文化?中国现代作家?学术创新?第三种文本?书学

Research on modern Chinese literature has achieved results that have attracted wide attention. However, its state of near “saturation” has placed it in a dilemma with no clear way forward. Finding new academic growth points has become exceptionally important and urgent. The relationship between the “culture of calligraphy” and “modern Chinese writers” is virtually a research blank and has so far attracted regrettably little attention. In fact, many modern Chinese writers have had close ties with calligraphy, making important contributions to its collection, creation and scholarly exploration. Conversely, the culture of calligraphy has exerted a profound influence on such things as the mode of existence, textual forms, emotional expression, ways of thought and aesthetic tastes of modern literature. Moreover, an examination of this relationship may stimulate us to reflect more deeply on literature, calligraphy, culture, education and related issues, which may help us gain a larger space for the development of Chinese culture and literature in the new century.     

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.     

Psychotherapy as Sacrament: The Therapist as Prayerful Reader,the Client as Sacred Text

The author suggests a number of corollaries between practices of contemplative Christianity and concepts found in psychodynamic psychotherapy. The act of looking upon the suffering of another – so central to both contemplative Christianity and psychotherapy – is compared to the monastic spiritual practice of lectio divina, the meditative reading of sacred texts. The practice of psychodynamic psychotherapy is conceptualized as a vocation to the contemplative life.     

“Feeling for Beauty”

ABSTRACT

May Morris (1862–1938), renowned craftswoman and daughter of William Morris, had an unconventional Victorian childhood in a home where all the members of the family were engaged in various forms of aesthetic labor, either as amateurs or professionals, and shared an aesthetic philosophy that blended the artisanal and the experimental from which would develop the Arts and Crafts movement. This article will examine the fragmentary recollections of her childhood recorded by May Morris in the introductions she wrote for the twenty-four-volume edition of The Collected Works of William Morris as a rich resource for Victorian sensory history because of the emphasis she places on the development of the child's sensorium, especially in relation to touch as the vital sense that linked family intimacy with creative activity. Employing the term “tactile aesthetics,” I show how, in the Morris household, the pleasurable sensual apprehension of the objects or materials worked by the hands of the craftsperson was inseparable from the complex feelings of connection with others. In such an environment, a feeling for beauty comprised a vital component of habitus, the embodied knowledges and aptitudes that, according to Pierre Bourdieu, are acquired from earliest childhood through the practices of everyday life within a specific social setting.     

Perfumer,chemist, machine: gas chromatography and the industrial search to “improve” flavor

Abstract

Drawing from published accounts of the use of gas chromatography (GC) in the food industry, found in industry-specific journals, this article examines the role of GC in changing how perfumers and flavorists think about and shape the sense-able world. It shows that the development of a novel twist on GC – the use of an expert’s nose as a detecting device directly connected to the exit gasses of the gas chromatograph, rather than an instrumental detector – opened the door to a new way of categorizing aromatic molecules that changed the purpose of expert practices of smelling within the industrial context. The marriage of human and machine not only offered those tasked with developing the perfect flavor the tools for gaining information about what aspects of a flavor they wished to keep, it also helped identify what aspects they ought to discard or obfuscate in their search to improve the natural world of tastes and smells.