ABSTRACT

The narrative of sensory loss is a subtext that engages certain stereotypical motifs and premises of questionable value. The subject of loss always speaks to the enticing theme of a fall, a debasement, a movement of high to low which immediately organizes any history into a teleology. Buck-Morss’s essay begins with Husserl who approaches perception as an intuitive mental act that can be inspected by thought. At issue and the stumbling block to any universal “perceptualism,” such as the phenomenological reduction, is the apprehension of the object as “given.” Many studies of material culture and commensality in cultural anthropology focus on classificatory analysis of objects and substances and their diverse uses. The finds in Vergina, Greece, made by the archaeologist Manolis Andronikos, uncovered the tombs of Macedonian royalty including the remains of Philip H. Vergina was a sacred, politico-religious site of the Macedonian kingdom.