ABSTRACT
This book presents contributions to Indian and Western theories, histories and anthropologies of the senses, as well as essays on the individual senses of seeing and hearing, tasting and smelling, and movement and touching in various contexts, and finally on the question of the unity of the senses. All contributions to this volume demonstrate the close relation of the senses with each other, and with notions of the body, emotion and cultural memory. The starting point chosen here is to research various historical and cultural perspectives on the senses in order to highlight the significance of the senses and the body in philosophical, religious and anthropological theories. This approach is even more important because, in the era of globalization, far-reaching changes are occurring to sensuousness and to the understanding of the senses, changes in which the new media, for example, plays an important role. In spite of these changes, the essays in this volume clarify the extent to which the senses are embedded in cultural traditions. This embeddedness of the senses in a particular cultural tradition and their experiences of the otherness of these traditions contribute not just to a better understanding of the historical-cultural significance of the senses in various regions of the world, but also to that of the senses in one’s own diversely differentiated culture. The classical Aristotelian pentarchy of the (five) senses, for example, which has long been accepted in Europe and partly in India, is by no means accepted everywhere. In two Indian traditions of thought, the school of Vasubandhu and Sāṃkhya, six and even 11 senses are presumed (see Malinar, in this volume). Similarly, various sense-perceptions discussed later question the Cartesian dichotomy and its dictum of the senses as the “windows to the world.”
