Michelle Bigenho: Senses, Culture, and Power
This course will be taught in fall 2003.
Music is a powerful form of human expression, but the sources and directions of that power are often left unexplained. "Music is beyond words" becomes the adage to parallel "seeing is believing." In many Western cultures sense experiences have been finitely numbered, hierarchically ordered and assumed to be "naturally" so. Vision is to be trusted while listening remains shrouded in mystery. Drawing on the disciplines of anthropology, musicology, philosophy, and history, this course explores the senses cross-culturally, thereby questioning the "naturalness" of these modes and orderings of sense experiences. Structures of power are founded on these principles, structures which pit literacy against orality as vision is pitted against the other senses. By situating the senses within issues of power, and on that fine line between nature and culture, this course will include discussions about how the senses work in relation to music performance, health and healing, signs and symbols, and language in colonial encounters. Some of the readings are selected from: Stoller's Sensuous Scholarship, Classen's Worlds of Sense, Desjarlais' Shelter Blues, Keil and Feld's Music Grooves,Taussig's Mimesis and Alterity, Foucault's History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish, and Haraway's "Situated Knowledges."
This course is taught at the 200-level.