Sensory studies arises at the conjuncture (and within) the fields of anthropology • sociology • history • archeology • geography • communications • religion • philosophy • literature • art history • museology • film • mixed media • performance • phenomenology • disability • aesthetics • architecture • urbanism • design

Sensory Studies can also be divided along sensory lines into, for example, visual culture, auditory culture (or sound studies), smell culture, taste culture and the culture of touch, not to mention the sixth sense (however it might be defined)

Endorsement – A. Elisabeth Reichel

Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives: The Poetry and Scholarship of Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict

by A. Elisabeth Reichel

The poet-anthropologist cuts a dashing figure in the pages of this book. The lives of the triumvirate of Sapir, Benedict and Mead were both professionally and romantically intertwined (and complicated). A. Elisabeth Reichel delves beneath the intrigue to investigate the even more intriguing question of how they tangled with alterity, both medial and cultural, and intermedial and intercultural. Her close reading through a critical lens of the published and unpublished poems and correspondence of this trio brings out the underlying currents connecting their poetry to their anthropology, and vice versa. Given the recent vogue for “multimodal anthropologies,” Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives represents a groundbreaking contribution to the “archaeology” of the current conjuncture by exploring the first, tentative forays of these three illustrious figures across cultures via multiple media and genres.

– David Howes, author of The Sensory Studies Manifesto (forthcoming from The University of Toronto Press)