ABSTRACT
The senses are crucial to the understanding of material culture, history, and more. The term sensiotics “playfully pokes” those engaged in linguistically based semiotics. Despite the fact that semiotics claims to be the study and interpretation of signs and symbols in all forms and media, it is in practice shaped by linguistics and the study of texts and then adapted to other media such as the visual arts, where it has made a major impact on art history and visual and material culture studies. Sensiotics is a shift from products to processes, from ends to means. It is a move to an active, embodied subjectivist perspective that incorporates elements of phenomenology— intersubjectivities, dialectics, and reciprocities. A Yoruba sensorium is the culturally and historically shaped world of the senses experienced and understood by Yoruba people in interaction with various arts, whether visual or performed.
