Sensuous Empires and Silent Calls of the Earth

Abstract

To speak of sensuous geographies as Other geographies is problematic. The senses do not work independently of culture and the sociopolitical implications of cultural identity formations—far from it! The senses are deeply implicated in the ways in which we make sense of the world as social beings: the way we understand or agree to understand—or compel each other to understand—the world. We sort stimuli according to the values or ideologies that govern our perception of reality. Ideas are in this way, literally, incorporated into the body’s perception of the world. We see and hear and smell what we think we see and hear and smell, or what preconceived Ideas of right and wrong, good and bad tell us that we see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. As the body and the sensory apparatus are generally made to operate in the service of shared sociocultural beliefs and political regimes of thought, the sensory world appears more often than not as a material confirmation of preconceived systems of meaning and value investments. Consider, for instance, the way certain smells may carry positive associations in some cultures and negative in others, or the way the perception of colors, like dark brown and light pink (or black and white), may be mediated by pre-perceptual values of good and bad, superiority and inferiority¹—or how our minds can instruct our bodies to perceive a certain image or sound or smell or touch as a sensory signal that an abstract border is in operation or has been crossed.

In the rarely freckled damps of our own rain forests, the ferns grow to grotesque size. Ferns whose design is that of our spinal cord … theories lead to the prejudices of anthropology. From that, the decline into history is easy.

Derek Walcott (“Isla Incognita”)