[csaa-forum] Transforming Cultures 2010 Annual Lecture, David Howes, Professor of Anthroplogy at Concordia Univer

[ilaria.vanni at gmail.com]

Please be invited to the


'Sensory Critique-Transformation and Social Change'

3 August, 6 for 6.30 pm, UTS Building 6 (702-730 Harris St), Level 3, Room  
22

RSVP is required: Transforming.Cultures at uts.edu.au

Abstract
The utopianist Charles Fourier denounced the sensory ills of the  
civilization of his day and put forward a program for the education of the  
senses that would lead to the establishment of a culture of harmonious  
sensual and social relations called Harmony.
Fourier's influence can be discerned behind Karl Marx's critique of the  
alienated state of the senses under industrial capitalism and his dream of  
the emancipation of the senses (following the abolition of private  
property) in communist society. Marshall McLuhan entertained a similarly  
utopian vision of the fusion of the senses (as of people) in the “global  
village” created by advances in electronic communications technology, in  
contrast to the separation of the senses (as of people) under the old  
regime of print technology.
These three revolutionary theories are of interest for the way in which  
they conceive the social and the sensorial as intertwined. The  
transformation of culture entails the transformation of the senses, and  
vice versa, they proclaim.
The first part of this talk will be devoted to an appreciation of these  
theories, the second part to an assessment of how they fail to explain the  
contemporary scene (insofar as the senses, like society, remain divided in  
ways they did not anticipate), and the third part to piecing together a  
theory which can account for the emergence of two sensory social movements  
that seem particularly diagnostic of our times: the movement to have  
“Environmental Sensitivities” (ES) recognized as a disease, and the Slow  
City (or Cittàslow) movement. The paper concludes with some general  
reflections on the relationship between sustainability and the senses.

Biography David Howes
David Howes is Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal.  
He is also the Director of the Special Individualized Programs at  
Concordia, which enable select students to design their own  
interdisciplinary master's or doctoral degree curricula. He has carried out  
fieldwork in the anthropology of the senses in Melanesia and Argentina and  
within the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. He is a Founding Editor of The  
Senses and Society, General Editor of the Sensory Formations series, and  
the Director of the Concordia Sensoria Research Team. His latest book is  
The Sixth Sense Reader (Berg, 2009).

All welcome. See you there.

[Please distribute widely through your networks]

Cornelia Betzler
Transforming Cultures Research Centre
Project Officer Indian Ocean & South Asia Research Network
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
University of Technology, Sydney | PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007 |  
Australia
Ph.: +61 2 9514 2768
www.tfc.uts.edu.au
www.iosarn.com
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