The Sixth Sense Reader (Sensory Formations) [Hardcover]

David Howes (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Sensory Formations | Publication Date: October 27, 2009

The assumption that we have five senses, each with its own domain, has a long history. But throughout the ages and across cultures there have been those who questioned the adequacy of the model of "the five senses" and posited the existence of additional faculties of perception. The Sixth Sense Reader covers a startling array of cases, ranging from kinesthesia and intuition to shamanic flight and extrasensory perception. With contributions from Anthropology, History, Religion and Biology, among other fields, this volume showcases many fascinating and provocative insights into the varieties of extra/sensory perception and experience. It concludes with an ABCDERIUM of so-called psychic and other powers, which provides a concise reference glossary and opens further avenues for investigation. The Sixth Sense Reader will prove vital to all those interested in probing the far borderlands of consciousness.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'Five is a handy number, but the world's cultures have imagined more than just five senses connecting human beings to the ambient world-and to their own bodies. The Sixth Sense Reader circles this intriguing phenomenon from a number of disciplinary vantage points, across a range of cultures and within an historical horizon that stretches from Aristotle to cyberpresence. Precisely because its subject cannot be taken for granted, The Sixth Sense Reader offers a particularly lively and provocative introduction to the new field of sensual culture.' - Bruce R. Smith, University of Southern California In this groundbreaking volume, leading scholars in history, anthropology and biology take the reader on a tour of the far borderlands of consciousness. From the world beneath to the world beyond the five senses, every potential avenue of sensation is opened up for investigation. anthropology.net

About the Author

DAVID HOWES is Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University and the general editor of the Sensory Formations series from Berg. He is the author of Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory, co-author (with Constance Classen and Anthony Synnott) of Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, and editor of Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, among other works.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 388 pages
• Publisher: Berg Publishers (October 27, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847882625
• ISBN-13: 978-1847882622
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,117,404 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excelent anthology dealing with Cultural Valuation of Extra Senses., December 3, 2009

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P. Nagy "revreader" (Chapel Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sixth Sense Reader (Sensory Formations) (Paperback)

The Sixth Sense Reader edited by David Howes (Sensory Formations: Berg)What is the sixth sense? Is it physical, mental or spiritual? Do we all possess it or is it unique to exceptional individuals? Might there be a seventh sense and an eighth sense as well? What role does culture play in determining the range of our perceptual abilities?
The search for a supplementary sense has taken many directions and yielded numerous possibilities for an additional faculty of perception - from magnetism and movement to dreaming and clairvoyance. Stimulating reflection and debate, The Sixth Sense Reader explores the cultural contexts which give rise to such reports of psychic and other powers that exceed the ordinary bounds of sense.
In this groundbreaking volume, leading scholars in history, anthropology and biology take the reader on a tour of the far borderlands of consciousness. From the world beneath to the world beyond the five senses, every potential avenue of sensation is opened up for investigation.
Excerpt:
The organization of the chapters in this volume is kaleidoscopic, constantly revolving, like the discussion in this introduction (with apologies to the reader who may, by this point, be feeling rather dizzy from all this talk of revolutions). Part I sets out various bearings on the sixth sense, commencing with the physiological: the discovery of the muscle, vestibular, and temperature senses (all of which would have been news to Aristotle, as Wade points out), and culminates in the mystical: the transcendence of the senses which, on Hollenback's account, shows a certain commonality across both history and cultures. In between these two extremes--the world beneath the five senses and the world beyond them--there are chapters on the sense of direction (Hudson) and perception at a distance (Bleek and Lloyd). The latter piece suggests that touch may not be the proximity sense it is commonly thought to be in the West, since it can act at a distance, too, according to the I Ixam San.
Part II, which is historical in orientation, opens with a chapter that delves into the "invention" of the five senses in the Western tradition (Vinge). This is followed by a chapter on the late eighteenth-century scientific investigation of mesmerism and the fateful discovery of the power of suggestion--fateful because it undermined the authority of the evidence of the senses (which the philosophers and scientists of that period took to be the foundation of all knowledge). This historical episode was a first in multiple ways (Riskin). The next chapter explores the eighteenth-century natural-philosopher-turned Christian-mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg's anatomy of the spiritual senses, and the reception of his revelations in mid-nineteenth-century America. This transplant gave birth to the first New Age movement in America (Schmidt). Subsequent chapters deal with the invention of telepathy and what this owed to telegraphy in the late nineteenth century (Thurschwell); the liberation of intuition and the repositioning of reason in the (second) New Age (Barcan); and, the mediation of the sixth sense in the phantom films of the late twentieth century (Thurschwell).
Part III, "Uncanny Sensations," consists of essays by a maverick biologist (Sheldrake) and a maverick anthropologist (Taussig) who, by virtue of their sense-minded approaches to the study of ESP and magic, respectively, reveal that these phenomena are perhaps not so uncanny as the title of this part implies. Their contributions mark a fundamental break with the conventional (psycho logistic) understanding of perception in the West.
Part IV, which is cross-cultural in orientation, picks up where Part I left off. It begins with Eliade's sensory genealogy of mystical experience. Eliade's comparative and (to his mind) historical survey is followed by a series of case studies, rich in ethnographic detail, of the varieties of extraordinary perception: Myerhoff on how the doors of perception are opened through peyote use among the Huichol; Ladennan on how the altered state of trance is modeled among the Malays; and Straight on how miraculous experience is possible among the Samburu. This part concludes with a chapter by Chidester on how the mass mediation of the senses has enabled shamanism to go global and also provided the medium for some to journey home.
The cultural history--anthropology of the sixth sense is replete with discontinuities, gaps, and restarts. In this respect it resembles the fugitive character of sense experience itself. It might be thought that all the different ideas of the sixth sense canvassed in this book are a testimony to the power of the human imagination, were it not that imagination is (or was, until the late eighteenth century) itself considered a sense, hence part of the perceptual kaleidoscope.
ABCDERIUM of Extra/Sensory Powers
The final section of this Reader consists of an ABCDERIUM of Extra/Sensory Powers. This feature is modeled after the "Abcderius" in Sensoriuro: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art (Jones 2006). An abcderium is "an Enlightenment-era format that uses the stochastic variable of the alphabet to generate categories for thinking. ... " (Jones 2006: 3). In Sensorium, the emphasis is on the generation of categories "for thinking the body through its technological mediations." Where this volume differs from Sensor/um is in the attention it brings to bear on the "techniques of the senses" (Mauss 2007; Howes 2000), which exist before and alongside the technological mediation of perception.
Some readers, glancing over the ABCDERIUM, may see it as little more than "chaos with an index" (Glenn 2005), and to them some further specification is owed. A considered opinion would suggest that speech, proprioception (or kinaesthesia), and ESP all enjoy equal rights to the title of the sixth sense, at least in the Western tradition (and insofar as humans are concerned), while mind would be the prime candidate in the Buddhist tradition. The sense of beauty enjoys the strongest claim to the title of the seventh sense (though humor is rising). There is also the lesser distinction of being considered a sixth sense, a seventh sense, and so forth. It is less clear how this distinction should be distributed among the various candidates. Perhaps what we need is another Thomas Tomkis to write a play in which each and every one of the senses in the ABCDERIUM could play a role, and be judged (but by whom?). Ultimately, however, the real importance of the category of the sixth sense lies not in its promotion of this or that faculty, but in its power to open up the boundaries of conventional perceptual paradigms to new possibilities of perception.