Kathryn Linn Geurts
Weatherhead
Resident Scholar 2000-2001
Culture and the Senses: Embodiment, Identity,
and Well-Being in an African Community
When Kathryn Geurts first arrived in Ghana, West Africa, to study sensing among
the Anlo-Ewe speakers, she took the five-senses model with her. "I assumed
it would be meaningful to them," she recalls, but her questions about
touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing were puzzling to many Ewe people, especially
those who spoke no European languages. "They had no over-arching term
for those five modes of experience," says Geurts.
Through a structural analysis of the nearly thousand-year-old
Anlo-Ewe language, Geurts eventually identified linguistic categories for the
perception of experience that link emotion, disposition, and vocation to physical
sensation. Many Anlo-Ewe people consider abilities such as speaking and balance
to be "senses." In addition, Geurts explains, "they have a complex
category called seselelame, translated as 'feel-feel-at-flesh-inside'
or feeling in the body. In some contexts, it serves as a meta-sense uniting multiple
sensory modes. In others, seselelame is used to describe specific experiences
we might call 'intuition.'" Geurts notes that although research in cutting-edge
science has come to recognize the limitations of the strict five-sense categories, "the
validity of this model has not really been questioned as to its cross-cultural
relevance."
In her book, Culture and the Senses: Embodiment,
Identity and Well-being in an African Community, Geurts explores the relationship
between sensory orientations and cultural difference in psychological functioning. "I
argue that sensory orders are culturally relative and that child socialization
involves the acquisition of culturally distinct ways of perceiving that play
a vital role in how people experience and 'know' the world around them."
As an example, Geurts explains that balance, both literally
and figuratively, is considered by many Anlo-Ewe people to be an essential component
of what it means to be human. Infants are encouraged to "Do agba!" or "Balance" when
learning to sit up, toddlers balance small bowls and pans on their heads, and
school children carry books and desks on their heads—all
progressing toward an adult orientation "in which balance is considered
a defining characteristic of mature persons."
"That sort of analogical relationship—between
sensory experiences cultivated at an early age, and perceptions of self and other,
sensibilities about society, the world, and the universe—is
the central subject of my book," says Geurts.
Affiliation at time of award: Assistant Professor of
Anthropology, California State University, Bakersfield
Return to Resident Scholars
2000-2001.
