Sensorial Investigations: A History of the Senses in Anthropology, Psychology, and Law

Sensorial Investigations offers a history and survey of the current state of the field of sensory studies. It presents the effects of the sensory turn within and across research in the human sciences: as manifest in the disciplines of anthropology, history, archaeology, and psychology. This shift involves a move to an awareness of the sensorial not only as an object of study but also as a methodological orientation and evidence for certain ways of understanding the formation and constitution of the senses as a cultural manifestation. The book has a number of sections that present a variety of essays, covering, in order: the sensory turn in anthropology, the senses in psychology, and the influence of sensory anthropology in the emergence of the history of the senses. A final section offers a historically situated, cross-cultural comparison of cultural “first contact” events and seeks to unpack the cultural and sensorial exchanges that...