ABSTRACT
In the anthropology of the senses and sensory anthropology, two leitmotifs can easily be discerned: the Western hierarchy of the senses, on the one hand, and Western dualisms, on the other. The preoccupation with these persists, either in the form of direct, upfront critique and efforts to overturn them, or in the form of epistemological procedures, as well as ontological claims, that supposedly disregard and circumvent them. This chapter deliberates on the reasons for their return, firstly by outlining the way in which these “nodal points” are talked (and thought) about in the work of the two central figures of the two anthropological approaches to the sensory, and secondly, by suggesting that implicit in this is a “sensory fantasy”, structuring their (perception of) reality. In between, a brief (quasi-)ethnographic excursion to Ljubljana is made to outline the relationship between sensory “theory” and “practice”. The chapter concludes by arguing for a traversing of the fantasy and thus for an Aufhebung of the anthropology of the senses and sensory anthropology.
