PERCEPTION:

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Lecture 11

• PERCEPTION
• VISION AND OTHER SENSES

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Vision and sight

• Vision and sight are the ways of orienting in the
  world
• These are primary sources
• Assumption that in all societies the world is
  perceived by the way of the sense of sight.

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Visualism

• Visual bias in modern western societies is
  sometimes called visualism or ocularcentrism
• Everyday idioms I see what you mean,
  far-sighted, perspective, etc.
• Visualism goes back a long way in the history of
  thought.
• Aristotle ranking of senses. The lowest were
  taste and touch animal senses. Smell, hearing
  and sight were regarded human senses. Sight was
  the highest of senses, according to Aristotle.

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• Have you ever thought about experiences of a
  blind person in our own society?
• How do they get to know the world around them?
• For the sighted ones the world comes all at once,
  but for the blind people it is a repetitive
  tactile exploration of space around them.
• We use the word blindness as a byword for
  defectiveness, disorientation and ignorance.
• Being blind certainly means exclusion from many
  things in a society where everything is focused
  on the visual.

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Dialogue in the Darkan exhibition to discover
the unseen

• The concept is simple Visitors are lead by blind
  guides in small groups through specially
  constructed darkened rooms, in which scents,
  sounds, wind, temperatures and textures conveys
  the characteristics of daily environments, for
  example a park, a city or a bar. In the dark, the
  daily routine becomes a new experience. A
  reversion of roles is created sighted people are
  torn out of their familiar environments blind
  people provide them with security and a sense of
  orientation transmitting a world without
  pictures. The impact is remarkable Dialogue in
  the Dark have been presented in the last years
  in 17 countries throughout Europe, Asia and
  America.

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• Yet other senses were significant too
• Constance Classen on olfactory (relating to
  smell) distinction in 19th and 20th century
  Europe.
• The principal olfactory distinction was between
  classes

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• BUT
• Every culture has its own sensory model based on
  the relative importance it gives to the different
  senses. The sensory model is expressed in the
  language, beliefs, and customs of a culture.

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Two ethnographic studies

• In many non-western societies, the sense of sight
  is not privileged over the other senses.
• Paul Stollers ethnography of the Songhay people,
  in Niger, West Africa
• Alfred Gells study of the Umeda of Papua New
  Guinea

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The Songhay people

• Two musical instruments a single-stringed violin
  and a gourd drum
• Instruments are played at the spirit-possession
  ceremonies
• Noises are produced by the instruments. Spirits
  are believed to exist as the sounds, not separate
  beings that produce sounds.
• In sorcery the sound heals or damages the
  person.

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The Umeda people

• The environment is dense and virtually unbroken
  forest.
• Therefore vision is not the primary sense.
  Instead hearing and sense of smell are more
  significant.
• The world is apprehended dynamically.

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• Concept of presence for Umeda
• Audible but invisible object is entirely
  present
• Hiding implies concealment of auditory clues

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• Not only animals and plants but also landscape
  features such as mountains, ridges, knolls, and
  pools are grasped in the first place as movements
  rather than static forms.

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Phonological iconism

• The shaping of the word, in sound, bears some
  correspondence to the sound-shape of the thing to
  which the word refers.
• There is nothing tree-like in the sound of the
  word tree.
• But in words such as bang, crash, hiss,
  there seem to be a relation between word-sound
  and meaning. Onomatopoeia. Relation between sound
  and meaning is iconic.
• According to Gell, the language of the Umeda is
  iconic through and though.

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Wolfgang Kohlers experiment
maluma
takete
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• Psychologists have a term for this phenomenon
  synaesthesia (the production of a mental sense
  impression relating to one sense by the
  stimulation of another sense)
• But Gell argues that in this case it is not
  synaesthesia, but onomatopoeia. Figures are
  interpreted dynamically, in motion.

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Vision and hearing

• With vision , it is as though we stand outside
  the world
• Vision sets up a distance between the spectator
  and the object seen

• With hearing we are immersed within the world
• Sound penetrates the individual and creates a
  sense of communication and participation

Thus auditory culture is a culture of
sympathy, according to Gell. Stoller states
sound penetrates the individual and creates a
sense of communication and participation
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Anthropology of senses

• A recent field of research in anthropology
• Not to compare cultures in terms of their
  different worldviews
• But compare in terms of relative weighing of the
  senses through which the people of one culture
  perceive the world around them
• The key question of the anthropology of senses
  What is the world like to a culture that takes
  actuality in less visual, more auditory and
  olfactory, gustatory or tactile terms than those
  to which we are accustomed? (David Howes)

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• Inuit hunter is heavily dependent on his powers
  of vision. But does he imagine himself standing
  outside the world, looking from it afar? Inuit
  are immersed in a dynamic environment where they
  are participants rather than observers.