Human Machine Addiction

 

Natasha Schull’s article “A Human-Machine Addiction,” highlights some essential components that influence online gambling game addiction. Schull outlines the different points of view of various key players, starting from the game designers and those who profit, to the addicts themselves who feel sucked into and trapped by the zone or trancelike state, and which has caused many to become dependent on the game as a means to cope with or escape their real-life issues.

Usually when people think about gambling addiction, or the subjects that are addicted to gambling, I assume the common response would be to place blame on the individual’s lack of strong will or, as mentioned in the article as solely an issue of an addict’s having an addictive personality, perhaps as a result of genetics, or rather their “psychological profiles and life circumstances”(17). Placing the blame on the addicts and their possible addictive genes is both easy and profitable for many. It benefits and protects the game designing companies and their profitable products and is much easier than looking at and admitting the fact that we as a society have a new form of gambling addiction issue that we need to help fix. Further, the pathologizing of such an addiction doesn’t really expose the core of the issue being “the interaction between people and things” (17) as Schull outlines. Schull’s article points out that research has shown that when it comes to certain kinds of repeated activities, the same neurological pathways are stimulated as the ones that drugs stimulate. Regardless of that fact, “the substanceless nature of so-called behavioural addictions has led to a lopsided focus on addicts (their genetics, psychological profiles, and life circumstances) by scientists and the public alike”(17)

While I find it fascinating that companies and corporations don’t feel somewhat responsible for this issue that has affected so many lives I can’t say I’m completely surprised.  We live at a time when our priorities are not about maintaining and preserving human life, happy homes and healthy planet but about profiting by any means necessary, I’m not shocked to hear about the lengths big corporations and greedy millionaires are willing go to just to get their wallets filled. As an article that I recently came across that addresses similar addictive issues with food points out, big corporations who were aware of their responsibility in making food products addictive, and thereby contributing to obesity and other health issues, turned a blind eye to the whole thing, and took advantage of the weak, simply in order to profit.

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food  (Click on link)

When it comes to the actual designers of the online sites, as Connie Jones, from the article explains, “Our game designers don’t even think about addiction—they think about beating Bally and other competitors. They’re creative folks who want machines to create the most revenue.” It seems to me that they have successfully disconnected themselves from the harmful effects their designs and products have on their consumers.

It is outrageous to hear that the American Gaming Association used the famous NRA slogan of “Gun’s Don’t Kill People, People Kill People,” as a way of deflecting any responsibility from the game providers, or the Association and placing the blame of addiction on the people who use their products. My outrage comes from the many times this same tone has been used to deflect any responsibility from say, rapists, and placing the blame instead on the victim for dressing too sexily. Blaming the victims of rape, of gun and domestic violence and of addicts is not, in my opinion, an effective way of dealing with societal issues. It is never as simple as either the victim, or the perpetrator.

As Latour describes it, there is a relationship between an object and subject that influences the dynamic of any situation, and that is “…why objects are never “simply inanimate”: You are different with the gun in your hand; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you… neither guns nor people kill; killing is an action they can only produce together, each mediating the other.” 20

Optical Illusions

Depending on which cultural lens one is looking through there are many ways of seeing. As Robert Desjarlais’ article (from last semester) “Lives and Deaths among the Nepal’s Yolmo Buddhists” which talks about 27 ways of seeing highlights, in the Yolmo Wa culture seeing goes beyond the eyes themselves. It is rather the deep interaction between the observer and the observed; and everything is also respectively communicating back. One of the metaphors used to describe this interaction is how seeing is like a flashlight bringing to light and awareness objects and people in darkness, like that of an extending arm touching with the eyes what was being observed.

This is similar to Laura Marks’ Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes as a mode of seeing the world as if we were touching it. Through this mode of interacting with the world, we can begin to understand our world as part of us and minimize the powered gaze between the observed and the observer. In this entangled space of mutual interaction between the observed and observer in a state of great vulnerability and openness, the possibility of effecting and being affected increases immensely. Imagine all that can be gained and experienced in this moment and time of giving up control in the hopes of experiencing something new. I know it’s easier said than done, as just the thought of giving up your power and gaze that asserts your position can be a scary thing.

Thinking about the stakes in particular modes of observation, I was reminded of what Beau Lotto in his Ted Talk presentation on “Colour and Perception” stated that ‘no one is an outsider observer of nature and each of us are defined by our ecology’. Therefore everyone sees through their situated knowledge lens—the experiences that have shaped who they are, what they’ve experienced and learned throughout their life. One’s experiences are therefore limited by the lack of better articulation and being able to distinguish between reality and illusion until one learns to do so.

As Beau Lotto explains, optical illusions show us how we see the world and throughout human evolution, what humans see is based on what’s been useful to see, creating the reality we live in that gets passed down from generation to generation. This reminded me of the most fascinating thing I learned in my sensation and perception class last year, which was how much information our brain fills in from previous experiences. Like the in class demonstration on optical illusions, (such as the turning top with a half circle), while doing the experiment I felt confident that I knew the answers, but afterwards I realized how easily I was fooled and confused and that what I saw wasn’t always true. Somehow my brain (influenced from early life experiences), filled in the information that wasn’t there because what I saw was only half of the information. Optical illusions as discussed in class, rupture our expectations. They are a wake up call to the fact that there is more to what we see and we need to start asking questions about our sensory perceptions and in how and why we see and experience what we do.

However there are situations where optical illusions are useful in other ways, such as  virtual simulation for pilots or astronauts, and three-dimensional video games that allow for the feeling of immersion to be part of the game. These can provide knowledge about the reality of our world or realistic interpretations of our world. In this way we have access to a different channel that wouldn’t normally be accessible in reality.

Since the day we come into this world, our lives are constructed and entangled with our environment, the people in it and socializing agents like our parents, schools, friends, and government can attribute meaning to everything we interact with. These ultimately create the realities that we live in.

In Virgil’s story from Anthropologist on Mars, a man who lost his sight from young after many years gains a functioning eye after surgery and is expected to see the world through his new-found sight.  He fails to do so because the world he had constructed after being blind for many years has been through touch. Virgil, who lacks the experience (or good articulation) of creating meaning through his newly functioning eye, struggles to see the world as a sighted person and experiencing the world through time and space.

The world he learned to live in had until then consisted of people and objects that existed only after contact either through touch or sound. This was the reality and truth that he had lived in. This may not be the reality a sighted person lives in but it was still true to his world. Like the creator of the Truman Show stated in the movie, “we accept the reality of the world which we are presented.”

Throughout history, images, language, text and the world have become entangled in the way we understand them and give meaning to the things that we experience. We have learned how to attribute meaning to sensory information and behaviour, which informs us of the reality we live in.

Images have strong powers that awaken our senses, sometimes causing physiological responses to what we see and, depending on our individual experiences, the meanings we associate with images can vary. As highlighted in Bruno Latour’s article on Iconoclasm, throughout history, the act of breaking and destroying images has been motivated by self-righteousness and in the interest of domination especially in the religious context as a way to assert one’s position and power over another.

Response 2

In response to Sonya’s article on the Egg and the sperm blog, I think that awareness is but the first and empowering step in the process of deconstructing and de-naturalizing the social constructions of gender stereotypes within the scientific realm, which is usually afforded great merit for its accuracy and presenting what’s true and natural.  It seems to me that those who sit in the position of power and have throughout history have had the upper hand in constructing and defining the world we live in today. I think that it’s important to look at history and understand the origins of such social concepts and ideologies of gender and stereotypes, but also how much they have changed throughout history to serve the people who define it as fixed and natural.

Knowledge is power, borrowing a quote from Maya Angelou, “if we know better, we do better.”  I feel that if the status quo and the dominant narrative and message that informs our behaviour as to how to act like the ideal male and female isn’t questioned, we are no better than those who set the dominant narrative into a fixed state and calling it natural and biological.

Silence and ignorance is just as bad reinforcing the ideals of the dominant few.  We as individuals have the choice to respond differently in our own lives in ways that can challenge the dominant imageries of masculinity and femininity.  I think people forget how much power they hold in their interactions with their environment and the people in it. Sometimes it’s much easier for people to put the blame on others and relinquish their power of being able to change and question anything and everything.

Throughout history science has been used to marginalize people of color saying that they were biologically inferior to whites and were made to be slaves.  Many people have died believing this to be the case. Just like current science has disproved this notion, science can also be used to disprove the notions of gender stereotypes by becoming aware of the implications that imagery and representations of gender ‘norms’ through science, media and institutions, and question why and what can be done differently.

So much can be gained by being open to understanding the world having access to power and strength but also intuition and feeling. By categorically limiting what men and women can do, we have hurt ourselves and the world. Too many kids have committed suicide because they didn’t act according to their gender, the way society expected them to. Within the scientific realm there is a need to label and pathologize behaviours to fit society’s expectations and traditions. What if we were to let everyone be themselves and not try to fit into a narrow unattainable box, wouldn’t we have fewer issues to fight about?

 

AWARENESS

Response 1

In response to Sabrina’s “Redefining what it is to be human” blog, I have to say that I agree that most people are obsessed with the idea of faces and human-like characteristics attributed to things that normally wouldn’t have those characteristics. This is the case, not just in the scientific world but also in our everyday environment – whether it’s cars, household appliances, images of God and so forth. I strongly believe that this process allows us humans to feel some kind comfort in making everything look or act like something that is already known to us.

When it comes to robots and artificial intelligence, I find it fascinating how there is this need for robots to act and look like us.  I wonder if it’s just a benign obsession for human faces and comfort or the obsession to create life itself in a mechanical way.  The thing that makes robots today seem harmless is that they are not independent from their programming or the human hand and don’t really have emotions or the ability to think for themselves. There is something exciting and scary about the possibility of one day engineering a robot to do just that, be a free agent in the world.

As a psychology student, I can’t help but question how far down the rabbit hole are scientists and engineers willing to go? And will it ever be too much or enough? Who’s power does it serve to manufacture such technology and what would be the trade offs and the consequences to human life and non-human life.

It might be that I have seen too many sci-fi movies, but what will happen when the robot expects to be treated equally to humans, will there be a robot revolution for equality?  Within the psychological and scientific paradigms, we have just scratched the surface in understanding human behaviour and the brain and emotions yet we are trying to recreate this unknown entity. We have made rapid progress in androids that look like us but have we humans evolved as much as the technologies we are creating?

In thinking about Freud’s approach of human behaviour being governed not only by the conscious but also by the unconscious, if we become too successful at engineering human like robots with the ability to do what we can, what will be the outcome of its unconscious motivation and behaviour ? Can it be controlled? How will the robot feel about the idea of being controlled?

Just the other day as I was telling my boyfriend about some of things I was learning in class pertaining to gaming, he brought up this concept of “uncanny valley.”

As defined on Wikipedia:

“The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotics and 3-D computer    animation which holds that when human replicas look and act  almost, but not  perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” refers to the dip in a graph of the comfort level of  humans as a function of a robot’s human likeness.”

It seems that some people are really freaked out by the idea of robots looking too much like humans while others are fascinated and plan to push the boundaries of creating life through technology.

Mimesis

 

 

 

 

 

 

In reading Anna Gibbs’ article “Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication”, I found it interesting how the idea of mimesis has been in the past attributed to the primitive or to children.  It seems to me that acquiring knowledge outside of cognitive reasoning and higher intellect is considered too emotional and primitive and therefore invalid.

Gibbs’s article takes the approach of, “drawing creatively on different forms of knowledge to ask what if one conceived the world in this way? What then becomes possible in the space opened up by such a “passionate fiction,” (189), demonstrating that a great deal can be learned by using a different mode of acquiring knowledge or really the interaction of all the senses working at once.

I took a class on “Infancy” last semester that also covered mimesis and Meltzolff’s idea of how infants come into this world with the innate ability to transfer perceptual information across the senses and communicate mimetically which enables them to perceive that another person is like them. In this class, I learned that infants imitate actions they cannot see themselves make, without having had experience with these behaviours. But as discussed in my infancy class, Meltzoff argues that at birth, infants store the information of the different sense modalities in an abstract form so that it can be picked up and understood by the different senses, which means, that, “information is represented in an abstract form that is accessible to all senses.” (Meltzoff, 1981) I found this to be fascinating especially because we all have this ability right from birth, which has helped us develop into fully functioning adults. Similar to what emotional ecology is, some things are written in our genes and rewritten into our culture. We are biologically equipped to survive in our environments.

I remember when I was conducting my ethnographic account of the St. Lawrence Market last semester, whereby I was to experience my environment only using my vision, I found it challenging to separate my other senses from interacting with my vision. As Gibbs points out in her article, vision “… rarely operates in isolation from the other senses and its dependence on them indicates the important of sensory cross-modalization or synthasia in mimesis.” (202)

In thinking of mimesis as cross-modal communication, as highlighted in the article, the effect is not only on our physical bodies like morphing our color (blushing) or movement (smile) but also how we relate to what is seen and our ability to morph ideas. This is similar to our in-class demonstration of students acting out a scenario while others pick up the affect. It’s interesting how Gibbs puts it that, “At the heart of mimesis is affect contagion, the bioneurological means by which particular affects are transmitted from body to body”. (191)

Through the interaction of our sensory modalities in a mimetic sense, science, which is usually removed from the human hand, using affording the eyes as a means to acquire true knowledge can begin to openly understand the benefits of acquiring knowledge through a cross-modal channel like learning from nature and its ability to adapt and be transformed from its mutual interactions with its environment.

Watching Janine Benyus’s Ted Talk on “The promise of biomimicry” I was fascinated how simple her message and idea was. As she reminded us all, the thing that we have long forgotten, is that we live in a competent universe that has met its needs while at the same time making this planet its Eden. As she further explains, in talking about life’s genius’s referring to the organisms that have lived here on earth for thousands of years, they know their priorities and have them in order to ensure that their genes and offspring have a safe place to live in the future.

Janine’s work in biomimicry is getting people to remember that other organisms are doing something similar that has allowed them to live on this planet gracefully ensuring a place for their offspring. By borrowing what nature has done for so long, through mimicry, humans can begin to communicate with the environment and can learn to emulate nature in a conscious and empowered way. As Michael Taussig explains in Gibbs’ article, “The question of nature versus nurture is an artificial one, once we recognize the complex ways in which the human organism and its environments are “mutually enfolded and enfolded structures” and are each recomposed in and through their exchanges.” (190)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Giving up one of my senses!

Ignorance is Bliss!

 

 

 

 

Making a decision about giving up one of my senses (from the five senses model) is proving to be a difficult process. The world that I live in today is comprised of all my senses working together to create the reality that I have known for many years. So to give up one sense would mean not to experience this life the way I do now.  After reading Virgil’s story in Oliver Sacks’ An Anthropologist on Mars (about a man who lost his sight when he was young who then gets an operation and gains sight at the age of fifty, after forty years of being blind) I realize the process of losing the world I know is not as simple as I had imagined. I’m currently taking a psychology course at York on Infancy, which covers what infants are capable of understanding and knowing right from birth.  I’ve learned that while a great deal happens before birth, after birth our brain is constantly developing as well, connecting all the proper neurons to the right places and establishing some genetic blueprint to write our experiences on. As we get older and have more interaction with our environment and the people in it, our neurons are either strengthened by repetitive actions or pruned by the lack of them. Basically, neurons that fire together wire together.  In Virgil’s case as Oliver Sacks explains, because he was blind for so many years, the neurons in his visual cortex over time got pruned while the neurons for tactility strengthened and took over other parts of the brain to compensate for his inability to see.  I’m somewhat reassured that my brain would do what is necessary to help me cope with the world around me if I was to lose one of my senses. I’m also reading The Brain that Changes Itself, a book about neuroscience, which uses some of the new discoveries about the plasticity of the brain to tell personal stories of triumph and what I love about it, is how much we can influence our brains’ wiring. The personal stories are mostly about people with some kind of disability and the scientists who pushed the traditionally held assumptions of the unchanging brain in developing coping methods and approaches to help them regain some of their brain’s lost abilities.

In deciding what sense I’d give up, I think about the experiences I’d be devastated to lose. Losing my sense of taste for example, would mean losing my ability to experience different cultures through food and flavors. Food for me is not only a necessity–it’s a way for me to experience the world. And because the sense of taste and smell are strongly associated, giving up my sense of smell is out of the question. So that leaves me with sense of hearing, touch and sight. Music feeds my soul in ways that I couldn’t express. I strongly believe that it has some kind of healing powers. Hearing is also more than just music. Hearing is also hearing others talking and using that as a way to connect with people. Hearing also creates a sense of depth for my visual experiences. Without hearing I wouldn’t experience the layers of sounds in the world, the richness or timbre of sounds, it would be a difference of experiencing something two-dimensionally versus in 3-D. I think all in all I will use Virgil’s story and experiences to make my decision.  His world as a blind man consisted of living in time only, where for sighted people it was living in time and space. Although he wasn’t able to see with his eyes, he was still able to see with his hands, by touching and attuning his sense of touch to everything he came across. Even his cane became an extension of his body, like extra receptors to help him navigate through the world.  As someone who can see, and has seen beautiful, scary, amazing rich experiences in the world, I’d feel that these experiences wouldn’t be as rich and fulfilling without my other senses playing a big part in experiencing my reality.  I don’t know what life as a blind person would be like nor how losing this sense would feel especially after knowing how much I’ve gained and experienced through seeing.  I’d be hopeful that my brain over time would compensate for my lack of sight and learn to get my other senses attuned to my new world. As stated in Sacks’ book, one has to die as a sighted person to be reborn as a blind person.  Although difficult to imagine and actually give up, if I had to choose I would choose losing my sight.

Knowledge is power, how you acquire it, depnds on your experiences through your senses!

Gamelan and Javanese Dancing

Collective consciousness and social interaction

Felicia Hughes-Freeland’s ethnography entitled “Consciousness in Performance: A Javanese Theory” was somewhat difficult to follow. Her writing at the beginning was not as clear to me as some of the other articles I have read. I understand how challenging the process of writing ethnography is especially finding the right words to express an experience that is not language-based, however I felt that she used a lot of unnecessary jargon to get her point across.  In order to help me make sense of what she was saying, I ended up watching some Javanese performances on YouTube, and thanks to that I was able to see Felicia’s point of how dancing was the exemplary form of being Javanese.  The gracefulness and fluid movement of their bodies was captivating to watch. It looked effortless yet held a lot of power. I found it fascinating how much the Sultan’s court dancing embodies self-control and power over its citizens as moral practice. Before 1918, it was only accessible to the upper class and elites, possibly as a way of separating themselves from the commoners.  And now it seems to be also used to separate the Javanese people from the ‘other’.  The Javanese seem to want to identify themselves as separate from the rest of the Indonesian nation by emphasizing the way they dance, interact and carry themselves in their society.

Court dancing facilitates social interaction and is a means of acquiring knowledge and education about what it means to be Javanese. Anyone who is Javanese is knowledgeable about what it means to be Javanese and embodies self-discipline and control. The dancing of this is an internal experience that radiates externally and like the knower and known, it can’t be separated. It is a consciousness that moves the whole community in a harmonious fashion everyone moving to the same rhythm and tone of everyday life within their space, while anyone out of beat can be easily identified. Just like a gamelan orchestra, every note and beat work together to make and co-ordinate a cultural consciousness. If everyone is conscious of how their behaviour affects the whole group rather than focus on their own selfish desires, this
can ensure some kind of unity for society. In Western society we idealise the individual, and personal desires and self- interest define our lives, while the Javanese culture idealise collective socio-centric experiences rather than personal ones.

The collective effort reminded me of the ‘gamelatron’ video and the singing we did in class of the gamelan notes to create harmony.  The ‘rasa’ (which refers to a feeling that enters the whole body and soul), which is the sixth tone in the gamelan orchestra, reminded me of ‘seselelame’ of ‘feeling in the flesh’. As I was singing the notes and watching the film of the gamelan and the still images, I felt a kind of peace in my body that I couldn’t really explain.  Each note could be felt in certain and specific places in the body that suggested different sensations in the self-body experience. To be Javanese was to be trained and educated in the art of ‘rasa’ in internalizing and creating harmony between the influence of others and the experience of self-discovery.

By comparing Western dancing to Javanese dancing  (an expression of consciousness and mastering of one’s inner disruptive desires) Felicia Hughes-Freeman was making an unfair assumptions about western acting or performance as only being about showing off and expressions of emotion rather than restraint and the mastering of one’s inner energies. Is she a performer? Has she ever experienced what it feels like to be one? Has she been trained in
Western performance? I’m not sure but I know a lot of people who would disagree with her on this point.

I understand the need to be one with your own community and society as I was born into a collective society myself, one where the needs of the community were to be placed far above one’s personal needs.  The Javanese people have their own history and motive for identifying
themselves as they do and I respect that. But I can also see the dangers that this type of thinking can lead to. What happens when we don’t want to conform anymore because what may be moral and right to one person or the whole group is not for another? I remember watching a show about this young Japanese girl who was gay but had the hardest time coming out to her loved ones because, like in the Javanese culture, conformity was idealised and anyone who deviated from that brought great shame and dishonour to their family.  What of the many gay people murdered in Africa for being gay and not fitting in? Throughout history, many have been killed for the supposed greater good. Who gets to decide who is worthy of being a citizen or not? Where do we draw the line on conformity? (This reminds me of the Milgram experiment on obedience)

Five Collective poems about our sensorium!

The World is your Oyster!

Seselelame, Feel it!

How do you know what you are feeling?

How do you feel anything at all if you choose to ignore the signs right in front of you?

hunger is a feeling you get inside the body.

the feeling of butterflies in the stomach when one gets nervous.

the feeling of having somebody walking behind you

One day after school I merely stepped on a book and had this sensation as if I had done something wrong.

It’s something that your instinct feels.

A feeling is a knowing, desire or understanding that comes from within a person

I finally know what that unknown feeling was that went through my body that day and I finally have a name to that feeling

I never realized my words had a way of influencing my perception,

until I paused to scream

…….

how can an object tell a story without speaking

Can we find the poetry in an object?

When you are able to hold that object and really feel it and be illuminated by it you can find a whole other meaning

…….

Create a new sensory experience…

Why is it that once we get out of Kindergarten it is expected that learners should abandon most of their sensorium to focus on learning with only our eyes and ears? Is that practical? Is that wise?

This places our 5 senses model in a very fragile place, is it truly the only way of knowing?

How can you create something that doesn’t exist or maybe something no one else has experienced except for yourself, is this still considered a valid sense?

if one from the Yolmo Wa culture can lose his or her appetite or get sick simply by another person’s gaze, or perceive a rock as a spiritual threshold, or feel the presence of a god or saint through a mystical appearance of sweet odour, why is that I can’t sense or experience any of that?

Is it possible that when we feel a shock in our body that it can trigger other senses and emotions without us being conscious of it happening?

If I were to start being more conscious of my experiences would they be more pleasant or more frightening?

is each individual emotion a different sense?

…….

The act of clapping sends a quiver in my body and at the same time I am either cheering in happiness or screaming in frustration.

I feel my tongue as it moves around, and I can feel the vibrations in my mouth as I talk or hum or even when I cough

when I finally could enjoy a proper burger, multiple BURGASMS were experienced

……..

who really is the judge of what scents mean?

I started to dislike the scent of roses after going to my grandparent’s funerals.

I would always associate this scent to death and sorrow.

For me to smell meant something nose alone does. No other sense made any sense then

there is no middle ground for the sense of smell, it is either existent and important, or existent but frowned up if put in use

To smell ourselves a lover or oneself

History of Scents/ ‘Seselelame’ feeling in body/ Sensescape

As discussed in lecture, it’s interesting to see how the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions used the Greco-Roman five-senses-model of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, as distinct from each other and placing a hierarchical emphasis on seeing as the main way of acquiring knowledge, thus creating the socio-cultural constructions that impact the world to this day. It’s evident how our ways of experiencing the world: How we know what we know, our power relations and the social construction of what is deemed important and valid has been shaped by history.

The chapter written by Classen traces the history of scent from pre-modern times and the attribution of different scents to sanctity or immoral ways to the decline of the olfactory sense and the further deodorizing trend through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  The ‘Breath of God, Sacred Histories of Scent’ by Classen was a reading that I found at times both interesting and also shocking and confusing. The power that scents held during pre-modern times especially with the Christian church attributing stench to sin/hell and perfume to sanctity/heaven was really interesting. The sweet scents and fragrance of Saints like St. Lydwine, St. Teresa of Avila and Benoite, were attributed to their purity, holiness, spirituality and devotion to God. These pure acts were manifested through self-denial such as celibacy, fasting and also lack of sleep. While initially this seemed not too dissimilar to current Western societal thinking as far as the hierarchy of good smells and bad smells goes, by the time Classen’s got to the detailed description of St. Lydwine’s physical condition: her being bedridden for many years, with open wounds and sores, it began to be difficult to keep an open mind about it all.  The account of everything smelling sweet, spiced and perfumed, especially her vomiting her internal organs and wormy open sores was rather hard to take. The sweet fragrance of the saints’ corpses, according to the reading, was used to explain and praise a woman’s lifetime devotion to the sacrifice of the flesh and to her holy marriage with Christ remaining a virgin and not having ever engaged in ‘immoral’ acts. It seemed to me like a very clear expression of that era’s assigned gender roles where men’s status was clearly above that of women’s. The site of a woman’s vocation was her body, whereas men could travel and preach the word of God, thus showing the power assigned to men in the public sphere.  This gender structure is still evident in the Catholic Church today where women cannot become priests- it is a role only available to men.

Guerts’ ethnography, ‘On Rocks, Walks, Talks in West Africa: Cultural Categories and Anthropology of the Senses’, was probably something I could engage with more, as it came from an African culture—which is familiar to me. Speaking more than one language I have often found it challenging to describe or translate a feeling or a state of mind into English. The distinct categories of either emotion/cognitive, or body/sensation as described by Guerts often felt too limiting.  If what makes us human can be easily defined by the five-senses-model of each sense being separate from the other, then how does one account for people with emotional intelligence, or those of us who come from a completely different culture with our own language and a different way of experiencing the world. The saying ‘seselelame’ meaning ‘feeling in the body’ is such a beautiful concept as it deviates from the rigid five senses model of experiencing the senses separately. It is rather a combination of the cognition, state of being, knowing and feeling in body and vocation or destiny.  ‘Seselelame’ is a meaning system that gives power to the body as a vital gateway to understanding the world and the processes in which one arrives at the truth.  It has the power to transform the state of being and guide you through the world–much like intuition. Guerts’ own experience with the rock demonstrates how easily she was able to disregard the meaning of her encounter with it. After exploring the Anlo-Ewe meaning system and language attributed to experiences like hers Guert was able to put herself in the Anlo-Ewe’s way of thinking in experiencing the world. As an anthropologist, and using the method of ‘participant-observer’ Guert was able to describe her own experiences in exploring the world in the Anlo-Ewe tradition as well as the experiences of the people within the culture. The idea of ‘lugulugu’, which is the bodily motion that refers to the person’s character, is something that I’m familiar with in my culture, because I remember growing up, my mother used to tell us kids to walk properly and not to walk in a shifty way.  Similar to the Anlo-Ewe culture in Ghana, my mother also believed that if we walked in a certain fashion we would be seen in a negative light by our community– as certain walks signified personalities and destinies. I’m not sure if it extends to all Ethiopian culture but I know that to this day, many people that I’ve talked to from there, attribute certain physical disabilities to bad Karma, God’s punishment for your sins, or the devil’s work (which is the part of my culture that I have a hard time understanding).  Guerts’ ethnography gave me a great insight into the Anlo-Ewe culture and made me think further about the meaning systems we attribute to the sensorium different from the Western-European notions of the senses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

tHE mUSEUM aS sENSESCAPE 

bY CLASSEN AND HOWES

The assertion of power through distance and lack of contact–from creator to looker, sight over other senses and civilized over primitive.

I found this reading to be very interesting as it allowed me to understand the one thing I’ve had difficulty grasping about museums and the ultimate rule of not touching any of the artifacts and collections on display.  My very first experience of an exhibition was back in Ethiopia, my mother took us kids to see a very popular exhibition of ‘Lucy’ who was the oldest and earliest hominid skeleton. I unfortunately don’t remember much about that experience especially the significance of the finding.  However I remember going to a museum here in Canada and being told by my elementary school teacher not to touch anything on display or make too much noise. This reading was able to explain some of the reasons behind my experience then and the ones I have today.  I had no idea that before the nineteenth century museums allowed their visitors to touch the artifacts and experience them in that respect. Wow. I mean how much I wish that option was available to us now. I’ve always wondered what the paintings, sculptures and masks felt like or even smelled like. In our first class we were asked whether touch transported us in time, I remember my initial response was yes, but yes in combination with other senses.  To be able to touch, smell and experience artifacts from different cultures I believe will in one small way allows us to connect with the past, the people and the meaning systems that might have been attributed to the object.  The idea that museums were created as a mark of conquest and contact with other cultures and the meaning systems of power and dominance are not often thought about when visiting a museum. Classen and Howes bring to light the notion of suppressing indigenous and what they call ‘primitive’ artifacts from different worlds and cultures to fit into a more civilised sight-privileged Western world.  Even what is deemed important and worthy of display has to be fitting of the Western notion of aesthetics. I was also shocked that collectors and some anthropologists believed that they could keep other cultures’ artifacts in better condition and safer than the cultures who made it. This seems quite ignorant to me. If anything, those who created the artifacts or the descendants of that culture would probably get more out of them rather than those who, from a position of privilege simply view them on display. Based on this reading, Western museums seem like a collection of prizes or badges from all the places visited and conquered, suppressing much of the cultural respect and understanding of the people who created them. As highlighted in the text it seems to me that museums reinforce Western ideologies’ power and dominance, and the privilege of sight, and a disregard for anyone else’s view or experience outside of theirs.  How much information and experience of different times and peoples are we missing out on by not really using our other senses (maybe the senses the artifacts were made to be experienced with) like touch, smell and even taste to transport us in time and into how things used to be.  It seems that Western societies follow Lorenz Oken’s sensory hierarchy of the human race with the Europeans as the ‘eye man’ on top; the Asians as ‘ear men’ the Natives as  ‘nose men’ the Australians as ‘tongue men’ and Africans as the ‘skin men’ being all the way on the bottom. We have all of these senses that privilege us as humans to experience the world and we have the ability to learn from other cultures and to experience different worlds and times in many different ways. So who is the blind man? Are we in Western society the ones that are blind? Are we the ones more primitive than our counterparts? How can we navigate a world full of so much to give to us, beings so controlled and even disabled by using only our sight?

Imagine the possibilities, the new worlds waiting to be discovered!

Working with the senses

an unlit light bulb was my object for exploration

As I received this light bulb as the object for my exploration the first thing I did was leave the classroom so I could really experience it. I knew the function of the light bulb but I wanted to use all of my sensorium to get a new feel for it. I wanted the right words to express what I was feeling.  I held it in my hand immediately noticing how cold it felt to the touch.  It had the same shape as a pear but looked opaque on the big curved portion of the bulb while the smaller bottom portion was silver and aluminium looking. I decided to really bring it close to my face and noticed my reflection and how I had some fly away hair. I then smelled it and tasted it. I’ve never before tasted or smelled a light bulb. It felt cold and bland to the tongue with no odour on the opaque part but the aluminium part tasted and smelled like rust although it didn’t look rusty. With my right index finger, I slowly traced the swirly aluminium part thinking about the team or person that designed it and wondered what inspired them to make it look the way it did. I shook it and heard nothing, so I tapped it with my nails and heard a much thicker sound than I expected. I closely watched my reflection as I played with the bulb, throwing it from the right hand to the left and seeing how the shape of the reflection changed. It triggered a childhood memory of a haunted house, with clown mirrors that distorted your reflection making you look funny and weird. As I was watching my face expand and get distorted, I stuck out my tongue and chuckled to myself. I turned to thinking about the shattering sound of the bulb against the window in front of me. I wanted to break it but I didn’t because it didn’t belong to me and the clean up would be too much, not to mention the potential victims sitting right in front of me. I placed the bulb on the floor and pushed it, watching it orbit around itself. I tried to make it stand but it wouldn’t balance. While reaching to pick it up I notice my hands were bigger than my entire body in the reflection of the bulb like Mickey Mouse’s white gloves. I could also see the stained glass windows reflecting in the bulb and people passing by. It felt like I had my own little snow globe in my hands watching the world in action.

While the solo exploration of the light bulb allowed me to do whatever came to mind, the reflection portion was more challenging. I felt that I didn’t have the proper terms and right wording to explain what I was experiencing. Some experiences are just difficult to put into words; whereas, while walking my partner through the exploration I could let her into my thought process and have her experience it herself.  It was a give and take as she asked me why I did certain things and whether I thought of looking at my object in a different way.  I felt more engaged with her through the walk through, as at times it also triggered some feelings and memories for her rather than just relating to my experience.