Introduction

Abstract

The central theme of this volume is 'embodied being in the world'. The editors and contributors aim to show the organic links between different ways of knowing and experiencing reality - sensory impressions, emotions, reflections and memories - and thereby to question the boundary between the individual and the social, biological and cultural. The concept of 'embodiment' opens the field for anthropological reflection on human immersion in the world, while serving as a starting point for the analysis of broader social and cultural phenomena. 

Topics covered include the history of sensory anthropology and sensory ethnography, the sense of touch in the context of culture and biology, the understanding of sight and visuality by the congenitally blind, and the identity and social practices of deaf people. In addition, the authors explore the sensory experiences of fieldworkers and the sensory memory of Second World War witnesses in the former Eastern Galicia. 

The volume includes a translation of a chapter from Nadia Seremetakis' The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (1994), a key work in the anthropology of the senses.