Sensonario

Rough, a

Lydia Raquel Miranda

National Council of Scientific and Technical Research

National University of La Pampa

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The idea of ​​the rough, intuitively, It is associated with the sense of touch and the field of matter: The possibility of touching and palpating the concrete is what determines the consciousness and experience of objects and surfaces in beings., that can feel smooth, soft, flexible, soft, thin, delicate, lukewarm, light, clean, polished... the, quite the opposite. Nevertheless, touch goes beyond the tactile and kinesthetic dimension provided by the hand and body movements: the haptic experience, in general, conjugates many, if not all, the senses and, thus, promotes various emotions in the person who experiences it. further, As Le Breton states in the taste of the world. An anthropology of the senses, touch is not only physical but also semantic, that is to say, it always entails a meaning that arises from the integral contact with what and others. Certainly, the skin, global headquarters of the sense of touch, unlike the specific location of the other senses, implies a bodily totality that connects, at all times, the person with his surrounding world and, So, manifests itself as a sensitive whole that puts affectivity and sensoriality into play every time something or someone is touched.

Perhaps for this reason it should not be surprising that the Oxford Latin Dictionary register fifteen acceptances for asper ~ era ~ erum, a, Latin term from which the Spanish adjective “rough, a”: 1) unpleasant to the touch, stand, when referring to a surface; but also applies to trachea (rough arteries) and to other parts of the body as a sign of illness or injury (when coughing or thirst is accompanied by coarseness or heartburn), and to the beard or the mane that scratch. It is also used to define some elements: coarse grain, coarse sand; 2) and relieve, inlaid, and the perfect condition of the coins; 3) sharp, jagged, pointed (irregularly); bristly (The hair, for instance), thorny; 4) hard to get through, unequal, rugged, in bad condition (land, roads, islands); uncultivated, wild (forests); hard, hectic (mares, fast, torrents); violent, dangerous (when it involves movement); 5) harsh to the ear, strident, scratchy; 6) seco, spicy, acrid to taste and smell; 7) sharp, stinging (pain or anxiety); 8) tuscan, vulgar, ordinary, rude, careless (people and styles); 9) violent, feroz, cruel, wild, blunt (humans and animals); fought or fought bitterly (battles, wars); 10) wrathful, exasperated, furious, intense (with much hate); 11) person who behaves or speaks in a rude manner, severe, bitter and hostile; also qualifies harshly expressed words or actions, bitterness, hate or hostility; 12) uncompromising, gloomy, strict, rigorous, severe (judgments, doctrines, studies, mainly from the stoics); 13) hard to bear, oppressive, grave, unfavorable, adverse; this meaning also designates unlucky climatic phenomena (winter, the storms); 14) that operates energetically, fast, effective (remedies); drastic, serious (situation); 15) difficult to perform or to treat; uncomfortable, strange, fearsome.

For his part, he Etymological Dictionary of the Latin Language define the term rough as "rocky", “rough” or “rough” to the touch (somewhat uneven); applied to other senses it refers to something “hard”, either to taste (spicy, bitter, acre, bitter or mad) or by ear (snoring, bleak). The shade of the word can be both physical and moral (a scathing speech, for instance).

In the diachrony of the Spanish language, "rough" (much more frequent than “aspro”) has been considered a cultism, which would explain its wide use in a figurative sense, although the Etymological dictionary critical Castilian and Hispanic questions this hypothesis since the term is verified in popular works of the entire Middle Ages. This dictionary also holds that, attributed to the sense of taste, "rough" is associated with sour and several derived words maintain that denotation, like "I'll try.", a”, which refers to the apple tree and apple with grainy flesh and sweet and sour flavor that is used to make cider.

Taking into account all the possibilities noted above, with the corroboration of the entry in the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, it is possible to affirm that the adjective "rough" refers semantically to the field of the body, of the senses and emotions. Said significant totality and some literal values, metaphorical and implicit of the adjective, have been verified by Rodríguez and Miranda in the analysis of some accounts of The Miracles of Guadalupe (XV and XVI centuries) dealing with the release of Christian captives.

The general and total life situation of these prisoners is expressed in the miracles as a "sad captivity" and "so harsh captivity". (221 miracles, p. 482 y CXLVII, p. 521) from which only the Virgin Mary can deliver them with her sweetness, sensory image that synthesizes the idea of ​​divinity as the most pleasant thing a Christian can experience. The softness alluded to with the sweet Marian figure contrasts with the harshness of the captive's existence.

If for the touch the rough is the rough and the uneven, it is clear that it consigns what is unpleasant to touch, to have near or around. in a metaphorical sense, the captives are immersed in such an adverse situation –so harsh– that it causes them sadness and oppression. Roughness is a truly enveloping cloak: girds them, adjusts them, it squeezes them and causes discomfort and suffocation in the body that reverberates as pain in the soul.

The absence of regularity and smoothness is also used to describe a terrain, when it is rugged and uneven like the “very rough sierras” (miracle 1834, p. 642), they were out of the way, described in the Guadalupana work. In this sense, roughness is perceived with the whole body, that you must make the effort to move in an area lacking in uniformity, and by the sense of sight that perceives its edges. "Rough", as we saw, It can also be understood as 'curly' or 'curly', with which it also allows to describe a sea bristling with great waves: in this case, the roughness of the sea is verified by the sight and by the body of those who sail, that captures your movement. Although the term does not appear explicitly in miracle CLXXIIII (pp. 603-604), the idea of ​​harshness is implicit in the image of the storm when the captives arrived in Barcelona by boat and “an air arose very contrary to the one they brought […] and it pleased the heavenly Lady of hearing and made the contrary wind go down and return to the favorable one., with which they left".

to the ear, rough is that which is disagreeable or strident. El milagro CXXXI consigna los "grandes bramidos" (p. 483) of the lions that accompany the captive. Although these beasts have a positive evaluation as signs of the help of the Virgin, the text gives them a loud and intemperate cry because it is frightening for the Moors and makes them cowards.

In the miracle CXLVII, the Moor's daughter "gave bozes" (p. 522) to give notice of the escape of the captive. Contrary, the sounds of the christians are always measured and their evasion is never heard by the guards. The universe of harsh sounds exhibits, if we agree with Le Breton on voice bursts, the affective tonality of beings in their relationship with the environment as the deviation from perfect intonation displeases the ear because it indicates an altered image of the body schema. In the case of Muslims The Miracles of Guadalupe, the discordant and out of tune voices are a metaphorical expression that they have not found their way, Opposite situation to that of Christians who do achieve it through the iconic Christian path: the pilgrimage.

for taste, the rough is the dull and the hard. The Moors fed the prisoners, after work day, but the texts do not describe such support. Nevertheless, it is possible to suppose the harshness and scarcity of food in captivity from the image of the fugitive Christian of miracle CXLVII in a vineyard "picking figs from a fig tree to eat" (p. 523): the fig is sweet and soft and can be eaten only when it has escaped the roughness in the land of the Moors. It is thus that in these miracles the antithesis between roughness and sweetness poses an inverse temporal and spatial deixis since the rough is typical of the place and moment of the captivity suffered by Christians while the sweet alludes to a future place and time that awaits. to the devotees and to those who will arrive thanks to a displacement carried out with the help of the Virgin Mary.

The use of "rough" has a literal sense when it refers to the sensations provided by the senses., but its semantics is metaphorical when the sensory experience opens the way to the expression of feelings and emotions produced by situations, places and personal relationships, As in the examples mentioned above..

In both cases, the connotation of “rough” is never positive or favorable. As for the senses, what is touched, you like it, it smells, is heard or seen and perceived as harsh does not cause bodily pleasure, although the impression does not necessarily become a clear dislike or a total dislike. On the emotional level, roughness is more negative, because it produces rejection: its impact hurts the person in some way and confronts them with their reality. Take as an example of this nuance of harshness a fragment of the fertile land, novel by Paloma Díaz-Mas: "Since that day [his son died in feudal war] Doña Sibila hated that land and began to remember with longing the days she lived far from there., in Valencia, when their children were some to be born and others to raise; and it seemed to him that those fields of Valencia were kinder than the harsh lands of Bonastre and Guerau and the days were clearer and the air sweeter.. And it was nothing more than the memory of the happy days lost, when she had nothing but hopes about what her life should be. Because man usually expects better things than those that later happen to him. (p. 602). Kindness, clarity, sweetness, happiness and hope are all the good things in life, everything that she has lost in a rough environment that has only left her resentment and nostalgia.

Bibliography

• COROMINAS, Joan and Jose A.. PASCUAL, Etymological dictionary critical Castilian and Hispanic, Madrid, Gredos, 1984, “rough” entry, a”, pp. 381-392.
• DIÁZ TENA, Mary Eugenia (ed.), The Miracles of Our Lady of Guadalupe (XV century and beginnings of the XVI): edition and brief study of Manuscript C-1 of the Archive of the Monastery of Guadalupe, Merida, Extremadura Regional Publisher, 2017.
• DIAZ-MAS, Paloma, the fertile land, Barcelona, Anagram, 1999.
• ERNOUT, Alfred and Antoine MEILLET, Etymological Dictionary of the Latin Language. Word History, Paris, C-Library. Klincksieck, 1951, Prohibited rough, rough, rough, p. 91.
• GLARE, Peter Geoffrey William, Oxford Latin Dictionary, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968-1982, Prohibited asper ~ era ~ erum, a, pp. 182-183.
• BRETON, David, voice bursts. An anthropology of voices, Buenos Aires, Topía, 2021.
• BRETON, David, the taste of the world. An anthropology of the senses, Buenos Aires, New Vision, 2007.
• MIRANDA, Lydia Rachel and Gerard Fabian RODRIGUEZ, “Sensations and traditions in the discursive configuration of the miracles of liberation of Christian captives (The Miracles of Guadalupe, XV and XVI centuries)”, Mirabilia Journal, 35, 2 (2022), pp. 232-263.
• ROYAL SPANISH ACADEMY, Dictionary of the Spanish language, 23th ed., [version 23.6 online]. <https://dle.rae.es> [22 December 2022]. Prohibited: rough, a.
• RODRIGUEZ, Gerardo Fabian and Lidia Raquel MIRANDA, "The sensory importance of animals in the accounts of Christian captives released in The Miracles of Our Lady of Guadalupe (XV and XVI centuries)”, CEMyR notebooks, 31 (2023), in press.

Sensory community

Gerardo Rodriguez

National University of Mar del Plata

National Council of Scientific and Technical Research

National Academy of History

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Sensory communities refer to groups to which individuals, social subjects or actors belong and in which they participate sharing and involving the body and the spirit. They integrate a communion of beliefs, know, practices, concerns, obligations, pleasures, affections, sensations, values, emotions and senses, be it formally established groups, as traditionally marked by historical studies, or of ephemeral meetings, as recently emphasized by anthropologists and sociologists.

My proposal dialogues with the original thesis of Barbara Rosenwein, referred to the emotional community. For the American historian, These emotional communities form groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value - or distort - equal or related emotions.

This author assimilates these emotional communities with social communities, that include families, neighborhoods, guilds, monasteries, parish members, allowing you to study a large number of them and point out the complex ways in which they interrelate: a large circle containing smaller ones, none completely concentric, but rather unevenly distributed in a given space and among which individuals can have some mobility. He was also interested in the affective plots that are generated within them and in the relationship that exists between emotions and affections with material objects, insofar as the latter are capable of awakening or motivating the issues of the sensible world.

In the last ten years, the definition of sensory community was taking a theoretical path from the pioneering analyzes of Phillip Vannini, Dennis Waskul y Simon Gottschalk, later applied in his particular historical studies by Richard Newhauser when speaking of a peasant sensory community, Gerardo Rodríguez when proposing the existence of a Guadalupana sensory community and a Carolingian sensory community and Gabriel Castanho, who proposes to rebuild the sensitive community offered by the Carthusians in their texts. All these authors emphasize that both the writers and the general public of the different historical contexts, reacted to the same events and problems with similar sensory and emotional responses, since they were part of a shared community of objects, corporeality, senses, emotions and virtues.

Ana Lidia Domínguez Ruiz maintains that communities and senses have a double relationship. On the one hand, the senses contribute to the production of community and, for the other, culture conditions the ways of feeling within a group. It considers that these communities are recognized from: collective identities and sensibilities, the social institution of taste, cosmoperception, listening communities, the bodily practices and sensory knowledge and the sensitive elements of the ritual experience.

For me, I highlight the value of the senses in the configuration of sensory communities. The senses actively participate in shaping collective sensibilities, in the transmission of culture and in the processes of formal and informal transfer of knowledge. The members of these communities are identified by the fact of sharing a certain repertoire of knowledge and sensory and perceptual skills, acquired in context and through group interaction. In this frame, smell, play, like, sounding and looking together are forms of common excitement that contribute to creating a sense of belonging to a collective body.

We learn to feel, we learn from our bodily contacts, we learn to develop our senses based on our abilities, our needs, our trades and our culture. Within the wide range of possibilities offered by the approach to the "network of relationships" as Olga Sabido Ramos maintains, It is possible to ask some questions from the mind / body duo, that is replicated in the perception / sensation, as if the first was cognitive and the second physical, adding the consideration that all skills, even the most abstract, they start as bodily practices.

Bodily practices that are linked to relationships with objects, open field and considered fundamental to the understanding of sensory experience. From the simplest, like utensils used in everyday life, even the most sophisticated, that require a certain technological development, like a car, a mill, a combat weapon. These possibilities allow us to interact with other humans and non-humans and, for the same, feeling or framing experiences within the sensory community.

Bibliography

• BROWN, Gabriel, “Building a Sensitive Community: body, affection and emotion in the writings of Guigo I (Great Charter, 1109-1136)”, Past Open. Magazine of CEHis, 9 (2019), pp. 34-59.
• DOMÍNGUEZ RUIZ, Ana Lidia, "Sensory communities", Mexico, College of Ethnologists and Social Anthropologists, virtual courses taught in 2020 it has been 2021.
• NEWHAUSER, Richard, "Touch and plow: creating the peasant sensory community ", in RODRÍGUEZ, Gerardo and CORONADO SCHWINDT, Gisela (comps.), sensory approaches the medieval world, Mar del Plata, National University of Mar del Plata, 2017, pp.105-128.
• RODRIGUEZ, Gerardo, "To conquer, colonize, incorporate through the senses: Caribbean and South American experiences (late 15th century – early 17th century)”, in XXIII Colloquium on Canarian-American History (2018), Cabido de Gran Canaria and Casa de Colón, Gran canaria, 2020, pp. XXIII-96.
• RODRIGUEZ, Gerardo, "Bodies, objects, sensorialities: the record of Christian captivity in the hands of Muslims in the western Mediterranean (15th to 17th centuries)”, Digithum, 25 (2020), pp. 1-10.
• RODRIGUEZ, Gerardo, "The configuration of a Carolingian sensory community", in RODRÍGUEZ, Gerardo (you.), The Middle Ages through the senses, Mar del Plata, National University of Mar del Plata, 2021, pp. 23-57.
• ROSENWEIN, Barbara, “Worrying about Emotions in History”, The American Historical Review, 107, 3 (2002), pp. 821-845.
• ROSENWEIN, Barbara, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, NY, Ithaca, 2006.
• ROSENWEIN, Barbara, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600-1700, NY, Cambridge University Press, 2016.
• KNOWN RAMOS, Olga, "Senses, emotions and artifacts: relational approaches. Introduction", Digithum, 25 (2020), pp. 1-10.
• VANNINI, Phillip, WASKUL, Dennis and GOTTSCHALK, Simon, The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture: A Sociology of the Senses, London, Routledge, 2012.

Dulce

Federico J. Asiss Gonzalez

National University of San Juan

National Council of Scientific and Technical Research

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Sweetness in the medieval mind

Sweetness is a sensation that can occur in one or more senses. In a restricted mode, is linked to taste, in contact between the tongue and food or drink. In modern Spanish, sweetness is defined as a smooth palate sensation born from interaction with food, like sugar or honey. But in a broad sense, the notion exceeds the margins of a table. A few meanings later the Royal Spanish Academy recognizes that the adjective can be applied to a pleasant situation, gentle and to the docile and affable manners of a person. A) Yes, so sweet can be something concrete like fruits and people, or abstract and ephemeral like dreams and actions.

A) Yes, sweetness operates as a common denominator of diverse perceptions that end up referring to a subjective feeling of pleasure, well-being or attraction to the source of the stimulus. This situation accounts for an intersensoriality different from synesthesia that has to do with the intervention of two or more senses that complicate the resulting sensation.: you can taste the colors or watch the music; in the case of sweetness, the reverse occurs. Various stimuli captured by different sensory organs elicit sensations that consciousness designates with a wildcard term: “dulce”.

Nevertheless, this is not a denominational laziness typical of our time, rather, it refers to a tradition of classical roots that the Middle Ages bequeathed to the Romance languages. Already the Latin word "dulcis", direct ancestor of the traditional sweet, was able to operate in multisensoryity: migrated from the mouth to the eye and from the ear or nose to the touch, inhabiting the mind as a metaphor. The Romans were also capable of feeling sweetness in the entire extension of their body and consciousness..

The Aristotelian tradition (By anima; De sensu et sensato) had established a hierarchy of the senses that ranged from the most concrete and, thus, low, to the most ethereal: touch, like, smell, hearing and sight. The ladder that was the basis of Thomist theory in the Theological Sum (e. 1265-1274). For Thomas Aquinas (†1274) taste was one of the forms of touch, because it takes contact with the flavoring substance to taste it, and therefore the sweetness, in physical terms, it was one of the lowest sensations in contemplation of which the eye was capable: let's not forget that God was first of all light (“Lux Dei”).

By contrast, although very incarnated in the materiality of creation, throughout the Middle Ages sweet flavors were scarce, especially those of sugar cane, it has been, for that very reason, expensive. This was going back to sweetness, consumed as food and medicine, a luxury available to few. The sweet was a source of pleasure, health and social distinction, which was constituted in the sensory form of the pleasant since Roman times, but in the medieval world it transcended until it defined a softened divinity ("the sweetness of God").

Indeed, Although such an important source of pleasure always aroused the suspicions of the Church, not every kind of sweetness was morally dangerous. The Bible of Saint Jerome († 420) used the term to refer to God and, in medieval plenitude, Bernardo de Claraval (†1153) used it extensively in his writings. In one of his sermons, dedicated to the sacrament of the eucharist, defined Jesus as that sweet in his voice, in your face, in her name, in his works and sweeter still in his future divine vision in majesty.

Western mystique, just as classical literature had already done, discovered in sweetness an indispensable discursive resource to describe the experience of divine contemplation. For the Cistercian, the sweetness of the face of the Nazarene was in such a high degree that his beauty surpassed not only all the sons of man, but also to the thousands of angels. While its soft and sweet name poured out perfumed oil when pronouncing it - "oleum effusum nomen tuum".

Bernardo was not inventing any new use, but taking the Latin version of the Psalms, in which God is associated with sweetness. The Bible invites you to experience the sweetness of divinity, to taste it as it is enunciated in the psalm 33:9: "gstate and see that the Lord is sweet". "Suavis" can be translated as sweet: both terms are opposed to "amarus" (Samuel 19:35) and are perceived almost as indistinguishable synonyms by the Castilian romancers of the Bible. A) Yes, en los manuscritos E8/E6 el verse "a musical song that is sung with a sweet and agreeable tone" (This. 33: 32) it was translated as "song of singers who sing in sweet sound", being juxtaposed "suavi" and "dulci" in the Castilian "sweet".

The Bible, especially the Psalms and the Song of songs, when acquiring its Latin form they realized the semantic plurality of "dulcis". The same happened with his first versions in Castilian romance. Divinity, but also the fruits, Honey, voice and music, besides perfumes, they were sweet. He Old Testament is abundant in references to sweetness. For instance, Mana, later equated to the Eucharist, it was a sweet food similar to flakes, fritters and honey cakes.

For his part, Wisdom literature and chivalric books have recorded the multiple perceptions of sweetness. As attractive as a ripe fruit were the voices and harmoniously played instruments. The songs could be very seductive, as old Ulises experienced, but more dangerous were the words and the softened tongues. Its sweetness seduced the ears. As he Zifar Knight's Book (c. 1300) What, before him, the sapiential Gold morsels (m. s. XIII) they warned about the sweet words, because they could cover up lies and deceptions. Nevertheless, not every sweet word was necessarily bad: if they were true they would be very loved by God.

Consequently, the sweetness was located between the truth, what was God, and the lie, able to acquire truthful outward forms without losing its bitter interior. There were no sweeter words to the ears of the flesh and those of the soul than those divinely ordained and, Nevertheless, the mark of sin rendered men incapable of differentiating them from others, just as sugary at the start, although later very bitter. The Punishments de Sancho IV (†1295) warned about the dangers of lies and deception that were poured into mellifluous containers.

There is an etymological link between "dulcis", "sweet" y(per)recommend". Persuade literally means to sweeten. With a metaphorical use, the sweet thing exceeded the nutritional references and was synonymous with "suave", used to refer to a pleasant sensation, without making a distinction of senses. Latin literature had already applied "dulcis" to refer to all sources of pleasure, and that of courtly love continued to use this metaphor to describe ladies, feasts and spaces. Nevertheless, Wisdom literature dealt with analyzing the dangers to salvation that harmful words masked with sweetness could bring.

In this sense, don Juan Manuel (†1348) is one of the medieval authors who links the effects that candy generates in the mouth with those that it can produce in the ear. It says in the prologue of the Book of the conde Lucanor (e. 1331-1335) that, just as doctors used sugar so that the medicine was absorbed by the liver, He used engaging and entertaining stories to convey a message that few would otherwise have taken.

Just as taste allowed medicine to enter the body camouflaged by a sweet taste, poison could do it too. He pharmakón Greek had the double meaning of remedy and poison. In the same way, syrupy words could carry unsuspecting messages of condemnation to the ears, as well as salvation. Ramón Llull (†1316) at Book of wonders (e. 1287-1289) tells us about a king who, fearing these risks of speech, looked for a means to avoid them. In his search he was given a book without words: he Pleasure book Vision. It was made up exclusively of images drawn by a clergyman from stories he learned from other codices and from his experience in the world.. But, this book is not only defined by the sense of sight in its name, but also by the use that the king makes of it: the real look does not slide through the letters, runs through a book "bell, and well painted and figured ”. AND, from that concentrated look, manages to access through the spiritual eyes - "uylls speritals" - to the contemplation of God.

The Bible I already saw beautiful and true words as honeycombs, sweet para el alma y medicine para el cuerpo — "a honeycomb compounded sweetness of the soul and health of the bones" (Proverbs 16:24). Sweetness that could actually be verified on the tongue, as it happened to Ezequiel, who at Jehovah's command ate a scroll with holy words, which they knew "sweet sicut mel" (This. 3:3). By contrast, deceptive sayings were capable of confusing in their exteriority: mixing good and bad, light and darkness, sweet and sour (Is. 5:20). But, even in evil there may be a devilish sweetness, since it does not lie in the thing, but in the pleasant perception of the subject. Therefore, for the wicked, evil words were enjoyed as a hidden and sweet pleasure retained on his palate that would later be punished by God by turning that food into snake venom in his entrails.

In sum, the sweet cuts through the entire medieval mentality as a sensory space for physical and spiritual enjoyment. His rare pleasure allowed the religious to sensorialize the divine presence, but also poets embody love, the attraction to beauty or pleasure in any of its forms. For its ease in winning human wills, so given to pleasure, was suspected by the Church and moralists, who warned powerful men about the risks of falling under bad advice presented in beautiful and sweet words. The sweetness, like beauty, they could not be rejected at all because they found their ultimate reason in God, but they could be dosed and regulated so that they were a remedy for souls and not a poison. In the measure was the key to its moral value for the Middle Ages.

Bibliography

• ENRIQUE-ARIAS, Andrés (you.), Medieval Bible. Online at http://www.bibliamedieval.es [19/07/2021]
• GOLDSTEIN, R. James, "Sweetness: Dante and the Cultural Phenomenology of Sweetness”, Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society, 132 (2014), pp. 113-143.
• RODRIGUEZ, Gerardo and CORONADO SCHWINDT, Gisela (dirs.), sensory approaches the medieval world, Mar del Plata, National University of Mar del Plata. Faculty of Humanities, 2017.
• RODRIGUEZ, Gerardo, PALAZZO, Éric and CORONADO SCHWINDT, Gisela (dirs.), medieval soundscapes, Mar del Plata, National University of Mar del Plata, 2019.

Intersensorialidad

Gerardo Rodriguez

National University of Mar del Plata

National Council of Scientific and Technical Research

National Academy of History

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The development of sensory studies promoted the analysis individually and collectively, of the senses, that established from descriptions of how such smell or taste felt at a certain moment in history to comparisons related to sensory hierarchies and their philosophical foundations, religious, theological. It is in this comparative context that the notion of intersensoriality gained strength to explain the necessary interrelation between the senses when transforming a body appreciation into a sensory assessment. This concept allowed paying attention to the multiple sensory dimensions that objects generate, constructions and landscapes in societies and individuals.

Mark Smith, promoter of the concept of intersensoriality, considers that in the history of humanity the senses have always been present, individually, collective way, in different ways, but they always offer a kind of concert, that we did not know how to listen to at all times. His holistic view in relation to the senses is historically contextualized in a way to avoid essentialist and a-historical interpretations.

In its long-lasting sensory history, it poses a break from Modernity, epoch in which the senses are hierarchized in a similar way to current times. Understanding this is essential to explain the presence or absence of the senses in documentation and historical analysis.. The senses, individually or integrated, should be present in all historical studies: military, of genre, race, diplomatic relations, of a cultural nature, among many others, as can be seen in the research collected by Olga Sabido Ramos who proposes to travel, feel the world, to realize its importance in historical and cultural settings. Affirms that sensory studies have a great future, both in relation to History as a discipline and in museological approaches or industries related to tourism.

His proposal is revitalizing and renewing, since it requires new looks and new methods to be able to account for information that has intersensory dimensions, very present in our experiences, but quite far from the investigations. Bet on a historiographic renovation that recovers the sensory imagination of historians.

Bibliography

• DELALANDE, François, “Sense and Intersensoriality”, Leonardo, 36, 4 (2003), pp. 313–316.
• DOMÍNGUEZ RUIZ, Ana Lidia and ZIRIÓN, Antonio (eds.), The sensory dimension of culture. Ten contributions to the study of the senses in Mexico, Mexico, Editions of the Lily, 2017.
• HOWES, David, “Scent, Sound and Synaesthesia: Intersensoriality and Material Culture Theory”, en TILLEY, Christopher, WEBB, Keane, KÜCHLER, Susanne, ROWLANDS, Michael and SPYER, Patricia (eds.), Handbook of Material Culture, London, Sage, 2006, pp. 161-172.
• HOWES, David, "The growing field of Sensory Studies", Bodies, Emotions and Society, 5 (2014), pp. 10-26.
• RODRIGUEZ, Gerardo and CORONADO SCHWINDT, Gisela, "Intersensory in the Walter”, Medieval Notebooks, 23 (2017), pp. 31-48.
• KNOWN RAMOS, Olga (coord.), The senses of the body: the sensory turn in social research and gender studies, Mexico, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Center for Gender Research and Studies, 2019.
• SMITH, Mark, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007.

Sensory mark

Gerardo Rodriguez

National University of Mar del Plata

National Council of Scientific and Technical Research

National Academy of History

Download the entry here Sensory mark

The valuation of the sensory experience of present and past subjects and their intermediation in the processes of constitution of the cultural parameters of societies, made it possible to consider sensory perceptions as valid means of knowledge for the Humanities and Social Sciences, which gave rise to the construction of sensory studies. This field has stimulated the development of an evolving multidisciplinary approach, which raises a cultural approach to the senses and a sensory approach to culture, as David Howes claims.

This approach allows a new reading of the available documentation., studying for each epoch the sensorial registers transmitted by the sources and the network of dynamic relationships in which they are inserted. Such a perspective is not simply an attempt to reconstruct the variety of sensory perceptions and how they transform from one period to another or from one culture to another., Rather, it seeks to establish the intimate connection between a sensory formation and the ways in which it contributes to interpreting and codifying reality.. That is to say, how perception affected and interceded in the behaviors of the subjects, in considerations of Constance Classen.

The sensory approach entails a series of obstacles, among which is the difficulty of examining documentation that has not been created with the intention of transmitting sensitive records.. That is why Gerardo Rodríguez and Gisela Coronado Schwindt propose the notion of sensory mark, be it visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory or tactile, to identify the perceptions of the senses that have a special significance for the cultural fabric of an era and that it is necessary to distinguish between the lines of what is written.

Texts can hold sensory records, conscious or unconscious, But it is the researcher who gives them an intellectual significance in the context of the analyzed context., and who turns them into sensory marks. This concept refers to the notion of soundmarks formulated by Raymond Murray Schafer, with which it recognizes those sounds that are important to a society, according to the symbolic and affective value they possess.

Bibliography

• BULL, Michael, “Introducing Sensory Studies”, The Senses & Society, 1, 1 (2006), pp. 5–7.
• CLASSEN, Constance, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures, London, Routledge, 1993.
• HOWES, David: “The Cultural Life of the Senses”, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, 3 (2012), pp. 450-454.
• HOWES, David, “Anthropology of the Senses”, and WRIGHT, James (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Oxford, Elsevier, 2015, pp. 615-620.
• MURRAY SCHAFER, Raymond, The new soundscape. A Handbook for the Modern Music Teacher, Buenos Aires, Memories, 1969.
• RODRIGUEZ, Gerardo and CORONADO SCHWINDT, Gisela, "Intersensory in the Walter”, Medieval Notebooks, 23 (2017), pp. 31-48.
• RODRIGUEZ, Gerardo, SHOEMAKER, Mariana and LUCCI, Marcela (dirs.), feel America: European sensory records from the Atlantic and South America (XV and XVI centuries), Mar del Plata and Buenos Aires, National University of Mar del Plata and National Academy of History, 2018.

Sensory model

Gerardo Rodriguez

National University of Mar del Plata

National Council of Scientific and Technical Research

National Academy of History

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The pioneering work of Canadian cultural historian Constance Classen helped define what a sensory model is. She studied how the Incas, at the time of the Spanish conquest, they generated, through the use of metaphors and sensory practices, senses that referred to the world.

These pioneering investigations allowed him to sustain the hypothesis that, through the senses, either by means of one of them or by the conjunction of several, all societies have a sensory model that marks what is allowed to do from what is prohibited. Good and evil are distinguished by their associations with a fragrance, with a certain smell, with a certain patina of colors, some specific sounds, some melodies that can include voices or instruments; all clearly indicate the limits of our society.

This same author proposed, for the approach of western societies of modernity, pay attention to how gender-related issues determine social hierarchy, emotional and sensory: on the one hand, the masculine, associated with light, the hot, how warm, it vigorous, civilization, the european world, the view, the ear, which in turn refers to knowledge, writing practice, exploration (understood as the outside world, with the outside) and the bourgeois rational; for the other, as its opposite, feminine, that refers to the dark, to the cold, wet, the weak, the uncivilized, to non-europeans, touch, the sense of smell, taste and practical experiences involving these senses, how to embroider, to care (understood as the inner world, with the inside), with the sensuality and the working class.

Bibliography

• CLASSEN, Constance, “Colors, Fragrant Songs: Sensory Models of the Andes and the Amazon”, American Ethnologist, 17, 4 (1990), pp. 722-735.
• CLASSEN, Constance, Inca Cosmology and the Human Body, Utah, University of Utah Press, 1993.
• CLASSEN, Constance, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures, London, Routledge, 1993.
• CLASSEN, Constance, “Engendering Perception: Gender Ideologies and Sensory Hierarchies in Western History”, Body & Society, 3, 2 (1997), pp. 1-19.
• CLASSEN, Constance, The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination, London, Routledge, 1998.
• RODRIGUEZ, Gerardo and CORONADO SCHWINDT, Gisela (dirs.), sensory approaches the medieval world, Mar del Plata, National University of Mar del Plata, 2017.

Sensory landscape

Gerardo Rodriguez

National University of Mar del Plata

National Council of Scientific and Technical Research

National Academy of History

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Since the end of the 20th century, sensory experience has been at the center of the reflections of researchers in the broad field of social, who resorted to dialogue between epistemic disciplines in order to enrich the theoretical definitions, including the landscape, natural landscape, cultural landscape. In this context, landscapes are nothing but the images that arise from the sensory perceptions of the environment; memory is integrated into them, the memories and senses of those who perceive them. In that apprehension and interpretation, the human being recreates the territory in each of the representations, evocations and constructions, figurative or abstract, plastic, sonorous, urban planning, gastronomic and many more, that constitute new readings and meanings, as Amalia Lejavitzer and Mario Humberto Ruz consider.

The notion of sensory landscape developed recently, to give rise to the importance of the senses, individually, holistically or multisensory, when they affect the environment, either to transform it, interpret or value it.

Ongoing studies recover the intersensoriality of different landscapes, from a small space in a city, for instance, a square, a train station, a specific port facility to a large space, that can coincide with the city itself, the railway network or the port as a whole. These studies stress these areas as they try to reconstruct collective sensorialities from individual and subjective sensory expressions. It can also refer to a private or public sphere, to an event that, for the ordinary, is repeated or that is extraordinary and therefore ephemeral (the arrival of an authority or the celebrations for obtaining a sporting triumph). Or pay attention to sound changes, visuals, olfactory, gustatory, haptics generated by transformations that, like the industrial revolution, demonstrate the novelty of their presence with remarkable sensory strength.

Finally, sensory landscapes that transcend time and space, are related to the phenomena of patrimonialization and memorialization. In the first case, the product brands associated with a place could be the best known example today. In the second case, the sensory and emotional marks that are linked to a certain historical period and become memory, for instance, of suffering in the concentration camps of Nazism.

The museums, currently, constitute the meeting places between heritage, memory and senses. The concept of sensory landscape is present in multiple samples, as well as in the searches that its managers carry out for artifacts and sensory objects.

Bibliography

• CLASSEN, Constance, The Museum of the Senses: Experiencing Art and Collections, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
• EDWARDS, Elizabeth, GOSDEN, Chris y PHILLIPS, Ruth (eds.), Sensible Objects. Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, London, Routledge, 2006.
• LEJAVITZER, Amalia and RUZ, Mario (eds), sensescapes: a cultural heritage of the senses (Mexico-Uruguay), Montevideo and Mexico, Catholic University of Uruguay and National Autonomous University of Mexico, 2020.
• FLOUR, Véronique y PEAUD, Laura (dirs.), Sensory landscapes. Multidisciplinary approaches, Rennes, Rennes University Press, 2019.
• RODRIGUEZ, Gerardo and CORONADO SCHWINDT, Gisela (dirs.), sensescapes. Sounds and silences of the Middle Ages, Mar del Plata, National University of Mar del Plata, 2016.
• RODRIGUEZ, Gerardo, PALAZZO, Éric and CORONADO SCHWINDT, Gisela (dirs.), medieval soundscapes, Mar del Plata, National University of Mar del Plata, 2019.

Performance

Federico J. Asiss Gonzalez

National University of San Juan

National Council of Scientific and Technical Research

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The word performance, of English origin, has focused on Spanish usage perhaps due to the difficulty of finding an adequate semantic correspondence that, although inaccurate, be able to cover the same broad spectrum of meanings. He performative turn occurred in the second half of the 20th century led to the dispersion of the term in academic discourse in Spanish by echoing the studies that, in English and French, different disciplines carried out, redefining the concept performance tailored to the discipline and the problem of study (Burke, 2015).

As the decades pass, the performance won a letter of citizenship in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy. From 2017 is it possible to use this word, although the italics indicate its foreign origin, both to refer to the benefit or harm obtained after weighing the means used and to refer to an improvised artistic activity in public.

A limited semantic field is the one that the RAE has assigned to a word that in its language of origin manages to occupy theatrical stages, the podiums and seats of politics, without losing its ability to refer to the general execution of an action, great field conquered in english, especially if we consider that it is not properly English. Proceed, like so many others, of the Norman ships that in the 11th century crossed the rocky British coasts following William the Conqueror. We know with sufficient certainty that since the 13th century or, later than, the xiv, the word had already acclimatized to the new language, leaving behind its Norman form. In the invasive language, performance era perfumes; variant, at the same time, from old french perfect the parfunir, verb that referred to ending or consummating an action (Onion, 1966, p. 668).

In our days, the performance implies a particular way of behaving, that is to say, to assume or question socially codified behavior; an action that is always thought in relation to others. The performance It is a type of action only conceivable in a social environment, because their regulations dialogue or discuss with the conventions of the moment, They are the ones that give it a conventional or disruptive meaning., as well as whether or not they give it artistic value.

For this reason and in principle, We consider it necessary to highlight the semantic affiliation of this Anglicism, in all the nuances that the RAE obstructs, with the gesture. With this we do not intend to induce you to value both terms as synonyms.; Few words can be perfect synonyms for each other., but it does illuminate a common fund of meanings that refers to a corporality in movement, socially driven, domesticated.

Continuing with this line of reasoning, we will stop at a feature of the gesture: the character of potential action capable of being read, interpreted and socially signified. It is not an involuntary and incomprehensible spasm of the nervous system; It is an act that follows recognized and recognizable immemorial forms as they are culturally anchored., a social memory or convention of a specific time. The gesture in its performative value is a physical action that is integrated into body language.

Also, the gesture, while performance, porta in nuce, the idea of ​​completed action. To be possible to semanticize, the gesture as an ephemeral action demands its conclusion. Without her, cannot be valued as a unit of meaning. This has been the case for centuries. He gestures Latin derived from type , What does it mean to carry out orderly?, premeditated. This not only links to the gesture, for its body anchorage, in the vicinity of “behaving”; the verb then and its infinitive type they summon a rich semantic field linked to what is incorporated, what not only the body passes through, but it is the body. Not coincidentally, the gesture shares the same root with “digest.”, organically assimilate something. Then involves the action of carrying something and carrying it with you; but it is also related to the idea of ​​“containing” and, from there, of “produce” or “generate”, that is to say, “gestate”. Based on these semantic relationships, it is that type can encompass the idea of ​​“representation”, interweaving that is positioned between the act of carrying something else, contain it with the body and, at once, produce it with the body by representing it.

This semantic proximity is what we consider enables us to treat the performance in terms of gestures. A gesture that can be understood in time or beyond time. From a historical perspective, The study that Marcel Mauss dedicated to gesture and corporality in 1934. Taking the body as a human universal, was applied to observe the variations, ways to shape your movements, that each culture possessed. This seminal work was continued by Marcel Jousse, one of his disciples, who understood the anthropological gesture as an inseparable unit of living matter and expressive movement. No direct successors, The study of cultural conditioning on the body was stopped until the decade of 1970, when anthropologists and folklorists recovered the notion of performance that John Austin had used (performative utterances or performative statements). A milestone in this line is the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who not only wrote about the performative power of enunciation, but he coined the term habitus to refer to the learned behavioral conditioning with which we enter to play a non-predetermined role in a specific social field.

In the field of historiography, there are numerous studies that have been carried out from different levels on the performance; but we consider it valuable to rescue the work of Jean-Claude Schmitt due to the recovery he has made of the term gesture in performative studies.. Using the studies of Jacques Le Goff as a starting point, who had stated that medieval society constituted a civilization of the gesture (1964, p. 440), Schmitt adds that it had this characteristic both because gestures had an irreplaceable regulatory role in the definition of identity and social relations and because it was an object of study and reflection already in the Middle Ages itself..

It was a central object of reflection, because it was not understood as a mere matter of etiquette, sino that “these gestures make men what they are” (Schmitt, 1990, p. 14). And this idea can be understood as a constant, Because the humanities and social sciences analyze gestures for their ability to crystallize in each individual act conventional frameworks that explain a society.. The body is set in motion, that is to say, The gesture combines a practical action with a particular meaning that comes to express (Bourdin y Amorim, 2022, p. 13). From a historical perspective, A certain bodily movement becomes a gesture when it is linked to a meaning that is not arbitrary but is anchored in a previous practical function..

Nevertheless, From an artistic perspective, the expressive value of the gesture lies in its poetic capacity to break with the period framework and not because of its adaptation to it.. Georges Didi-Huberman has recovered in his research some conclusions that Charles Darwin collected in The expression of the emotions of men and animals (1872). According to them, Gestures must first be understood as a trace formed by a pre-volitional reaction of the nervous system to a stimulus.. Only the reaffirmation of the trace through habit allows us to reproduce the gesture voluntarily., displacing it to other areas outside its utilitarian function. By last, In its development, gestures acquire the antithetical capacity to express the opposite, highlighting its physiological uselessness to gain expressiveness. The gestures, like the Pathos formulas by Aby Warburg his reversibles. In its timelessness or untimeliness, just as in its uselessness the gesture would become fully expressive.

It is true that currently, Georges Didi-Huberman embodies an extreme position of gesture within art theory, that is connected with a Warburgian look. But it is this positioning that makes it interesting to reflect on the gestural or performative. Aby Warburg, between the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, he proposed to develop a non-historical theory of art, while non-progressive, of the Italian Renaissance. For him, Renaissance art made up a set of expressive forms, that is to say, pathetic forms Pathos formulas. This positioning towards art recovers corporality in artistic expression; so Didi-Huberman (2008ª, p. 14) considers that all aesthetics entail an “aesthetics”, that is to say, a sensoriality. But since there is no sensation possible without movement, present or past of the body, All aesthetics end up anchoring themselves in the expressiveness of a body that performatively stimulates the viewer's senses..

The body is a matter molded by gesture, It is a body in motion, in dance. The Didi-Hubermans, body movement must be understood as a dance that reveals, repeat and rethink some forms that are immemorial. The great difference that this approach to the gesture presents with respect to what we could call historical is the impossibility of defining a causal line., well the gesture, or at least part of it, is positioned outside of consciousness, beyond memory. It is anchored in an immemorial memory; worth the oxymoron that this phrase outlines insofar as it serves to materialize on the verbal level the tension of times that the gesture makes emerge symptomatically..

From Warburg's vision, it would not be appropriate to think of an idea, a concept or regulation that models the gesture, their corporeal forms in time and space. There is no priority or intention to refer to, everything happens superficially and symptomatically. The body is subjected to an emotion, to a pathetic force that does not stand back, that should not be exhumed, but nests in the same form of the gesture that outlines. There is no form and emotion, solo Pathos formulas. The body is always a montage of times (Didi-Huberman, 2002, p. 124). A present tense overlay, the historical plane in which it is anchored, and of an immemorial temporality, primitive. The Pathos formulas or “primitive affective form” is an old-fashioned gesture embedded in current gestures, but not as imitation or rebirth. Historical time is a spiral of times. Anachronism knots the time in which we live, made of reminiscent presents and pasts (Asiss-González, 2019). We talk here about survival, of a fossil the movement manifested as fossil in movement that, as a symptom, You should try to understand what that primitive formula is expressing in its update..

The Pathos formulas Its function is to fix emotions and movements and then lodge in a collective and unconscious memory., only accessible in the gesture of the body, able to articulate bodily animality, psyche and symbolism. Therefore, the gesture, your pathetic forms, they make us confront the non-historical, with the drive, the biological, the body; but also with the historical, with the symbol, with culture.

The gesture dialogues with a context and is expressed through a culture without ever achieving synthesis. It is a poetic act that breaks the historical plane of the apparent, showing his conventionality, and in its rupture the unconscious background in which it is sustained and anchored: the Dionysian after the Apollonian. The gesture always exceeds the culture, because it exceeds a single meaning. It is not a sign or idea, but flesh and anachronistic grimace (Didi-Huberman, 2008b, p. 284).

The gesture is the body's reaction to a specific situation of fear, desire, duel or despair; but that gesture has an antiquity that refers to the depth of time, to a borderless darkness (Didi-Huberman, 2005, p. 39). Didi-Huberman metaphorizes air and stone to express the two sides of the gesture: its evanescence and its permanence in a past always reactivated. In that encounter that is always a clash before a confluence, The body becomes a terrain in which the long duration of a memory inaccessible by another path is transmitted.. In summary, in Didi-Huberman's Warburgian approach, gestures are areas of reminiscence (2008b, p. 289).

In the theater, The Argentine playwright Pompeyo Audivert has expressed positions similar to those of Didi-Huberman on the arts that work with still images (paint, photography and sculpture) or that are based on the registration of moving bodies (cinema and video games). The ephemeral nature of the theater's bodily movement accentuates its performative character., just like with dance; They are artistic expressions designed to fade.

Prepare to listen, theater is capable of reflecting the historical and the essential, which qualifies as anti-historical; This art manages to mix opposites, confronting us with a poetic vision that considers a condition of possibility for the human being to constitute itself as such., have a history and a world: “The poetic founds the world, reveals history and establishes man in his essence." (He will listen, 2022, p. 1). The art, the arts, They are the link between man and his poetic being, your vastest self, your being other.

For his search for the dissolution of identity, stopping at the psychic plane of the subject to trace the roots of a gesture, of a behavior, turns out to be reductionist. The poetic force that summons the body in movement must overcome this barrier to immerse itself in the depth of the unconscious and the collective with its proliferation of senses..

The poetic breaks or should break the historical surface, the reflection of an era, that Audivert identifies with the historical plane of conventions. After this rupture of the mirror of the time and a displacement, the truth comes down to the cracks, to the flash in the crash in Walter Benjamin's terms. The arts have the ability to generate a space for decontextualization of the gestures of a society., put the real at risk to challenge its univocal character, enabling other real ones on the level of fiction. What the body has learned through repetition since early childhood, act in which games play a central role (Benjamin, 2015, pp. 30-31), What has been naturalized as possible actions must be questioned to see what it may contain and the diffuse limits of the identity that inhabits it..

It's about the body, in this case of the actor according to Audivert, where the reflection occurs, the embodiment of the era, and also the breakup, the tear. Theater, before realistic mirror, It must be the stone that breaks mimesis to make meaning emerge.. The theater places the spectator on the broken surface made of reflections and concealments. Show appearances, the conventions, and the formless thing that sustains them.

In the gestures of Gernica Pablo Picasso expresses the pain of the historical event he portrays, but its artistic interpellation is achieved thanks to a timeless gesture, to disfigured hands and faces, twisted. The non-historical in the gesture could be seen as an equivalent of the archetypes in literature. That is to say that in the body and in the word it is possible to study both planes., the historical, that of the conventions or uses that are made of the possibilities of the corporal or the verbal; but also realize the poetic in them, stress them to the point of breaking to make the timeless emerge, the permanent, the open and paradoxical meaning in constant redefinition.

Bibliography:

• ASISS-GONZÁLEZ, Federico, “History and anachronism. “The anachronistic representation of the past”, Agón: Journal of Theoretical and Practical Philosophy, 1, 2 (2019), pp. 81-94. Pompey AUDIVERT, Pompey, “The stone in the mirror”, 2022, pp. 1-2. https://www.teatroelcuervo.com.ar/material-para-alumnos
• BENJAMIN, Walter, Toys, Madrid, Casimiro books, 2015.
• BOURDIN, Gabriel Luis and SOARES DE AMORIM, Siloam, “The anthropological gesture today”, Mundaú Magazine, 11 (2022), pp. 12-18.
• BURKE, Peter, “Performing History: The Importance of Occasions”, Rethinking History, 9, 1 (2005), pp. 35-52.
• Didi-Huberman, Georges, The surviving image. History of art and the age of ghosts according to Aby Warburg, Paris, Midnight,
• Didi-Huberman, Georges, Gestures of air and stone. Corps, parole, souffle, image, Paris, Midnight, 2005.
• Didi-Huberman, Georges, The dancer of solitudes, Trad. Dolores Aguilera, Valencia, Pre-texts, 2008a.
• Didi-Huberman, Georges, “The ghost gesture”, Act: Magazine of contemporary artistic thought, 4 (2008b), pp. 280-291.
• JOUSSE, Marcel, The anthropology of gesture [2th ed.], Paris, Gallimard, 2008.
• LE GOFF, Jacques, The civilization of the medieval West, Paris, Arthaud, 1965.
• MAUSS, Marcel, “Techniques and body movements”, in Sociology and Anthropology, Madrid, Tecnos Editorial, 1971, pp. 337-356.
• ONION, Charles T. (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1966, p. 668.
• SCHMITT, Jean Claude, The reason for gestures in the medieval West, Paris, Galimard, 1990.

Sensorium

Maria Jose Ortuzar Escudero

University of Chile

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The notion of sensorium formulated in the 1960s in order to understand how developments in the natural sciences contribute to a profound transformation of sensory perception, the emergence of new means of communication and economic forms. In particular, Marshall McLuhan, Edmund Carpenter y Walter Ong (Howes, 1991: 8) develop the idea that different cultures operate with different relationships (ratio) about the different senses. In his studies on “literacy”, Walter Ong (1991 [1967]: 28) thus highlights the social function of vision as opposed to that of hearing: the growing occupation with textual media led to auditory and oral cultures gradually becoming visual cultures. To understand the changing importance of certain senses within a culture, Ong formulates the concept of sensorium, which describes the entire sensory apparatus as an operational complex. Consequently, differences between cultures can be thought of as differences in sensorium, whose organization is partly determined by culture, while at the same time building it.

The term sensorium it is already used programmatically in the pioneering studies on the anthropology of the senses (ver, for instance, Howes, 1991). It is also adopted, in historical studies, counting those that deal with the Middle Ages (ver, among several others, Rodríguez, Palazzo y Coronado Schwindt, 2019). Richard Newhauser (2014: 1) begins his introduction to the volume A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages, emphasizing that:

An essential step in the writing of a comprehensive cultural history involves the reconstruction of the sensorium of the period, of the “sensory model” of the conscious and unconscious associations that function in society to create meaning in the complex network of continuous and interconnected sensory perceptions of an individual.

The notion of sensorium, formulated in its beginnings to account for the hierarchical arrangement in the use of the senses (exteriors), is not used unambiguously when applied to medieval sources: can refer to the classification of the senses, to rules that set the use of these —or, more precisely, of the sensory organs—and/or to the ways in which experience is constructed and the people who relate to certain objects. Regarding the classification of sensory perception, Richard Newhauser (2015: 1563-1569) points out that medieval thinkers used three major taxonomies: external or physical senses, the spirituals, and the interns.

External senses correspond to touch, taste, the sense of smell, hearing and vision; this order corresponds in many writings to the importance given to each of them, what is commonly known as the “hierarchy of the senses”. The members that relate to these senses are eyes, ears, nose, tongue and/or mouth and/or palate, skin and/or hands and/or feet. Speech is added to the list of senses in many writings as one more sense of the mouth (Woolgar, 2006: 84-104). In philosophical treatises, Two types of explanations of sensory perception are found: an active, based primarily on the writings of Augustine of Hippo, and a passive, which ultimately lies in the Aristotelian writings (At the forefront 2011; 2014).

The spiritual senses correspond to what can be understood as the senses of the “inner man”. This conception appears with Origen, who considers that there are five classes of perceptions of the divine, corresponding to the five bodily senses (Rahner, 1975: 113). Its purpose is to account for the biblical texts that allude to sensory perception and explain how the knowledge of incorporeal things reaches the body. (Scheerer, 1995: 837; Rudy, 2002; MARSTAL, 2012; Martin de Blassi, 2018). This transfer of the domain of the corporeal to a higher plane, it is also evidenced in several passages of Augustine of Hippo (Ortuzar, 2020). Such reflections must have a wide and continuous echo in writings of a monastic and theological nature. (see the essays contained in Gavrilyuk and Coakley, 2012), as well as in those of mystical type (Newhauser, 2015: 1567-1568).

Unlike the spiritual senses, the interior ones can be understood as bodily faculties that process the information delivered by the five exterior senses. The origin of this doctrine is found in the treatise By anima by Aristotle, where a distinction is made between an instance called "common sense", which unites the different impressions of the senses and distinguishes movement, form, number, magnitude and rest, and the faculties of imagination and memory. Treatises written under Galenic influence in Late Antiquity link such faculties with the ventricles of the brain.. These ideas are adopted and transformed into the writings of Nestorian Christians and Persian physicians.. Translations of Greek and Arabic texts, prepared in southern Italy during the second half of the 11th century, transmit these ideas to the Latin West. The translations of Avicenna in Toledo during the second half of the 12th century spread the idea of ​​not three, but of five internal senses located in these ventricles: common sense, the imagination, the imaginative power (in animals) the cogitative (in humans), estimative power and memory (see Ortuzar, 2018; 2020). These ideas are adapted and transformed by various authors until the sixteenth century (for an exhaustive list of authors and of the different faculties considered and their location, ver Manzoni, 1998: 124-125). further, it is found that some authors of the twelfth century, based also in part on lists of faculties contained in works such as the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, treat some of these faculties as the first steps not to the knowledge of the world, but for the knowledge of God; where a supra-rational cognitive instance intervenes (Németh, 2013: 33, 35, 69; Ortuzar, 2020: 13-14; see Newhauser's interpretation, 2015: 1568-1569). The latter shows that the category "inner senses" is not always differentiated from the experience of the "inner man".

At least analytically it is possible to distinguish these taxonomies from typical norms regarding the use of the sense organs.. Carla Casagrande (2005) has shown the role that the five senses play in sinning and also in atoning for these sins. Particular mention deserves the speech, to which correspond “the sins of the tongue” (Casagrande y Vecchio, 1987). In monastic and canon regular writings, the explanation of how the senses operate derives in the proper and sinful acting of the members of the senses (Ortuzar, 2019).

As for sensory experience, Éric Palazzo (2014) has underlined the importance of the liturgy in shaping the senses given the importance in the medieval period of the Church and its rites. In a similar line, Hans H. L. Jørgensen (2015) posits the existence of a hagiosensorium to designate a medieval paradigm of perception, according to which the sacramental world of Christians models the interaction of the senses—and, consequently, theirs with objects—and enables a manifestation of the immaterial in the physical. These approaches also indicate a certain indeterminacy and fluidity in the conception of external and spiritual senses.. Besides, research in other areas of the medieval world, as in the practice of medicine, point out the importance of all the senses and, for the diagnostic, of touch that measures the pulse and of vision that judges the color of urine (Wallis, 2014).

The study of the senses in the Middle Ages has been, therefore, discovering typical ways of understanding and categorizing them. But, in addition, has been showing that these same categories have fuzzy limits on various occasions and are not always valid. This points to, although there are characteristics that are repeated during the long period that we commonly call the Middle Ages, the concept of “sensorium medieval” is very broad. This obscures the fact that, for instance, different groups within a larger community or different communities at a given time operate with different arrangements with respect to the senses—and, as we have seen, even with different categories regarding them. An uncritical use of this concept can also perpetuate the idea that "medieval" man had only one operational apparatus and therefore assumes a homogeneous idea of ​​culture and the medieval period.. On the other hand, the senses are used differently according to the activity being performed: In medicine, the sensory requirements are different from those required for the production of ceramics or for cooking. (ver Jenner, 2000: 138). The idea of ​​a single and continuous hierarchy of the senses, so, can hide the variety of sensory experience (Jenner, 2000: 143; 2011: 345). Instead, a critical use of the concept can illuminate the differences regarding the use of the senses and their categorization within a group, between groups, at different times, and thus account for the possible continuities, transformations and the limits between different communities with respect to the construction of sensory experience.

Bibliography

• BIG HOUSE, Carla, “System of Senses and Classification of Sins (XII centuries- XIII)”, Micrologus, 10 (2002), pp. 33-53.
• BIG HOUSE, Carla y VECCHIO, Silvana, The Sins of the Language. Discipline and Ethics of the Word in Medieval Culture, Roma, Institute of the Italian encyclopedia, 1987.
• Gavrilyuk, Paul L.. y Coakley, Sarah (eds.), The Spiritual Senses. Perceiving God in Western Christianity, Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2012.
• Howes, David, "Introduction", and Howes, David (ed.), The Varieties of Sensory Experience. A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1991.
• Jenner, Mark S. R., “Civilization and Deodorization? Smell in Early Modern English Culture”, in: BURKE, Peter, Harrison, Brian, Slack, Paul (eds.), Civil Histories. Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 127-144.
• Jenner, Mark S. R., “Follow Your Nose? Smell, Smelling, and Their Histories”, The American Historical Review, 116, 2 (2011), pp. 335-351.
• Jørgensen, Hans H. L., “Into the Saturated Sensorium: Introducing the Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages”, and Jørgensen, Hans H. L., Laugerud, Henning, Skinnebach, Laura K. (eds.), The Saturated Sensorium. Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages, Denmark, Aarhus University Press, 2015, pp. 9-23.
• Jørgensen, Hans H. L., “Sensorium. A Model for Medieval Perception”, and Jørgensen, Hans H. L., Laugerud, Henning, Skinnebach, Laura K. (eds.), The Saturated Sensorium. Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages, Denmark, Aarhus University Press, 2015, pp. 24-71.
• Pointed, Pekka, “Sense Perception, Theories of”, and Lagerlund, Henrik (ed.), Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy, vol. 2, Dordrecht i.a., Springer, 2011, pp. 1182-85.
• Pointed, Pekka, “The Senses in Philosophy and Science”, and Newhauser, Richard G. (ed.), A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages, London i.a., Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 111–32.
• Manzoni, Tullio, “The Cerebral Ventricles, The Animal Spirits and the Dawn of Brain Localization of Function”, Italian Archives of Biology, 136, 2 (1998), pp. 103-152.
• Martin-De Blassi, Fernando, Saint Augustine and the spiritual senses: the case of inner vision, Theology and Life, 59, 1 (2018), pp. 9-32.
• MARSTAL, Mark J., “Origen of Alexandria”, en GAVRILYUK, Paul L.. y COAKLEY, Sarah (eds.), The Spiritual Senses. Perceiving God in Western Christianity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 20-35.
• Németh, Csaba, Contemplation and the Cognition of God. Victorine Theological Anthropology and Its Decline (unpublished doctoral thesis). Central European, Budapest, Hungary, 2013. Recovered from: http://www.etd.ceu.hu/2014/mphnec01.pdf. consulted: 20.09.2017.
• Newhauser, Richard G., “Introduction. The Sensual Middle Ages”, and Newhauser, Richard G. (ed.), A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages, London i.a., Bloomsbury, 2014, 1-22.
• Newhauser, Richard G., “The Senses, the Medieval Sensorium, and Sensing (in) the Middle Ages”, and Classes, Albrecht (ed.), Handbook of Medieval Culture, vol. 3, Berlin, de Gruyter, pp. 1559-1775.
• Ong, Walter J., “The Shifting Sensorium”, in The Varieties of Sensory Experience. A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, Toronto i.a., University of Toronto Press, pp. 25-30. (First published in 1967).
• Ortuzar Escudero, Maria Jose, “The Role of the ‘spiritus animalis’ in Accounts of Perception. Medical and Philosophical Remarks from Three 13th-century Encyclopaedias”, Vincent of Beauvais Newsletter, 42 (2018), pp. 4-16.
• Ortuzar Escudero, Maria Jose, "Acting and the five senses in writings of the twelfth century", Past Open, 9 (2019), pp. 14-33.
• Ortuzar Escudero, Maria Jose,“Ordering the Soul. Senses and Psychology in 13th Century Encyclopedias”, Again, 3 (2020), Recovered from: http://journals.openedition.org/rursuspicae/1531. consulted: 02.02.2021
• Ortuzar Escudero, Maria Jose, “Sensory metaphors and the knowledge of God in some texts of Saint Augustine”, Chilean Journal of Medieval Studies, 18 (2020), pp. 29-38.
• Palazzo, Éric, The Christian invention of the five senses in liturgy and art in the Middle Ages, Paris, Editions du Cerf, 2014.
• Rahner, Karl, “The ‘spiritual senses’ according to Origen”, and Rahner, Karl (ed.), writings on theology, 12: Theology from the Experience of the Spirit, Zürich, Einsiedeln and Cologne, Benzinger, pp. 111-136. / originally appeared as: “The Beginning of a Doctrine of the Five Spiritual Senses in Origen”, Journal of Ascetics and Mystics, 13 (1932), pp. 113-145.
• RODRIGUEZ, Gerardo, PALAZZO, Éric and CORONADO SCHWINDT, Gisela (eds.), medieval soundscapes, Mar del Plata, National University of Mar del Plata, 2019.
• Rudy, Gordon, Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages, New York, Routledge, 2002.
• Scheerer, Eckart, "There", and Knight, Joachim, founder, Karlfried y Gabriel, Gottfried (eds.), Historical Dictionary of Philosophy, vol. 9, Basel, Swabian, 1995, 824-870.
• WALLIS, Faith, “Medicine and the Senses. Feeling the Pulse, Smelling the Plague, and Listening for the Cure”, and NEWHAUSER, Richard G. (ed.), A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages, London i.a., Bloomsbury, 2014, 133-152.
• WOOLGAR, Chris M., The Senses in Late Medieval England, New Haven y London, Yale University Press, 2006.

Sensorium sacred / sensorium devotional

Lydia Raquel Miranda

National Council of Scientific and Technical Research

National University of La Pampa

Download the entry here Sensory sacrum / sensorium devocional

David Howes in his recent book Sensorium (2024) remember that during Modernity the homonymous notion mainly referred to the inscription of sensation in the brain, meaning that was expanded by including the scope that surrounds all perception, perhaps indeterminate and/or plural sphere involving places, beings, objects and even knowledge without which sensitive activity would not be possible. The Canadian anthropologist also recognizes the limitation that the meaning of the concept suffers from the nineteenth-century psychophysical imprint and the subsequent influence of contemporary neuroscience.. “The reduction of perception to ‘patterns of brain activity’ […] has resulted in the retraction of ‘sensory processing’ from the interface between sense organ and world” (Howes, 2024, p. 9): this tendency to ignore the natural sense, social and integral sensorium In the last fifty years, it has led the Human and Social Sciences to become interested in and investigate the multiple ways in which sensory perception and its manifestations have been experienced and constructed in different historical periods and in different cultures.. To a large degree, findings in various disciplines are truly surprising, according to Howes, because they confront many of the assumptions that have operated as accurate evidence regarding the configuration of the sensorium.

It is worth recovering Walter Ong's definitions here (1991) about him sensorium because they stand out, precisely, the holistic meaning that all communication has, its central object of study. The man communicates with the entirety of his body, says Ong, in such a way that in every significant construction the corporality, sensoryity and the use of language make up a kind of complex operational apparatus that functions in a certain environment and in relation to certain objects.. This interaction becomes more noticeable with the development of mass media., in the 20th century, that imply a specialization of certain technologies conceived as an extension of the human senses. Each of these technologies have been dominant media throughout history—vocality and gestures in nonliterate societies., the written and the printed in the letters, telecommunications in the last century and electronic and digital media in the present—, not only because of its widespread use but, fundamentally, because its influence has determined the organization of mentalities and societies.

Therefore, As Richard Newhauser argues (2014), In any thorough study of the communities of the past, a reconstruction of the sensorium that defines them, that is, the sensitive model that, whether consciously or unconsciously, proceeds as a variegated fabric of sensory perceptions and continuous and interconnected emotional experiences between the different individuals that compose them and, that way, determines them.

The definition and scope in various fields and times have been well reviewed in this same work by Ortúzar Escudero (2021), which is why we will not dwell on them. Nevertheless, We have referred to Ong and Newhauser because their perspectives are unavoidable for this entry for two aspects.: the first because it relates the sensorium with the field of communication and/or mediation in social relationships, and the second for the importance assigned to the sensory model when historically analyzing the integration of human groups.. Indeed, the differentiation that Rodríguez and Miranda (2023) have established between sensorium sacral and sensorium devotional, as recognizable sensory schemes within the broad sensorium medieval, considers these two particularities.

The idea of sensorium sacred or hagiosensorium was raised by Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen (2015) to designate the medieval paradigm of perception according to which the primarily sacramental universe of Christians modeled the interaction of the senses and their interaction with other beings and objects and, So, made possible a manifestation of the spiritual in the physical. The Danish researcher recognizes in the Middle Ages a tendency to consider all the elements of the created world as potential carriers of the divine presence., propensity that allows him to elucidate the sensorium human of that period. It is so, according to the model of the hagiosensorium, The senses were structured and formed from the human impulse to recognize and understand the signs of God's trace in earthly life.. In this frame, The author conceives medieval man as a hermeneutic of reality who sought to unravel the spiritual meaning underlying the material objects of existence., whatever their area of ​​belonging, although especially in those associated with the liturgical space (sacred art, church paintings, coded expressions of devotion, among others), in which the symbolic interpretation was guided by the institutional framework. For this reason the sensorium delimited by Lohfert Jørgensen, more than sacral, it was sacralizing.

Although we agree that a sign is any device that is used in place of something else to be able to communicate something to someone (Eco, 1994), is warned, in the brief summary above, the ambiguity that has historically surrounded the interpretation of the term (Castañares Burcio, 2014). With the word 'sign' it is possible to encompass a huge number of very heterogeneous phenomena., widespread use that may explain the medieval propensity to identify the divine presence in all things noted by Lohfert Jørgensen. At once, the need for a common background structure, that makes them part of a system, manifests itself in the delimitation of significance to the scope of institutionalized religion that implies the hagiosensorium.

This divergence regarding the process of semiosis is at the basis of the distinction between sensorium sacral and sensorium devotional proposed by Rodríguez and Miranda (2023). The two conceptualizations refer to instances of religiosity in the Middle Ages., and in both the centrality of the senses stands out, intersensoriality, synesthesia and the significant impact of votive objects. Nevertheless, these sensoria Medieval ones are differentiated by the principle that gives them origin and by their possibilities of registration in the collective memory..

He sensorium sacrum has a hierarchical orientation from “top down”, because the Church, through ecclesiastical officials, and the legal and political authorities impose it on the social body through regulatory texts., ritual images, regulated practices and various controls. For his part, he sensorium devotional proceeds from “bottom up”, since it is the same devotee who carries out a religious practice, framed in a personal experience, that will enter orthodoxy through popularly disseminated texts, that will collect the experience through specific rhetorical and plastic images. That is, in an order of priority, first there is the sensorium devotional and then the sensorium sacred, that will consecrate it institutionally, either in its entirety or with modifications to adjust it to the requirements of the dogma, although without abandoning the distinctive connotations imposed by the religiosity that gave rise to it.. Logically, he sensorium devotional text of the Middle Ages can only be recognized through the interpretation of those texts, who patent it, but it is necessary to keep in mind that the textualization, mainly the written, It is part of the stage of sacralization and channeling of the collective memory imposed by the Church to the sensory scheme provided by the original pious experience.. In this sense, The task of historians and philologists is to identify, record and interpret the rhetorical and imagistic manifestations that refer to both sensoria, I mean, to the devotional aspects and the discursive strategies that the texts use in the process of disseminating and promoting them within the framework of institutionalization in Orthodoxy.

Bibliography

• CASTAÑARES BURCIO, Wenceslao, History of semiotic thought, 3 vols., Madrid, Trot, 2014.
• ECO, Umberto, Sign, Barcelona, Labor, 1994.
• HOWES, David, Sensorium. Contextualizing the Senses and Cognition in History and Across Cultures, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2024.
• LOHFERT JØRGENSEN, Hans Henrik, “Into the Saturated Sensorium. Introducing the Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages”, a Lohfert Jørgensen, Hans Henrik, Henning Laugerud and Laura Katrine Skinnebach (eds.), The Saturated Sensorium. Principles of Perception and Mediation in the Middle Ages, Aarhus, Aarhus University Press, 2015, pp. 9-23.
• NEWHAUSER, Richard, “Introduction. The Sensual Middle Ages”, and Newhauser, Richard (ed.), A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages, London, Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 1-22.
• ONG, Walter, “The Shifting Sensorium”, and Howes, David (ed.), The Varieties of Sensory Experience. A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1991, pp. 25-30.
• ORTÚZAR ESCUDERO, Maria Jose, “Sensorium”, in Rodriguez, Gerardo Fabian (you.), Sensorario: dictionary of sensory terms Mar del Plata, pendent, National University of Mar del Plata, 2021, https://giemmardelplata.org/historia-de-los-sentidos-proyectos-del-giem/sensonario/
• RODRIGUEZ, Gerardo Fabian and Lidia Raquel MIRANDA, “Ex-votos in Hispanic texts from the 13th to 16th centuries: stones and minerals as objects of a sensorium devotional”, Medievalismo, 33 (2023), pp. 225-260.

Synesthesia

Gerardo Rodriguez

National University of Mar del Plata

National Council of Scientific and Technical Research

National Academy of History

Download the entry here Synesthesia

Synesthesia, according to the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, comes from the greek syn (together) it has been aesthesis (sensation). There are several meanings of it: secondary or associated sensation that occurs in one part of the body as a result of a stimulus applied to another part of the body; subjective image or feeling, own of a sense, determined by another sensation that affects a different sense and a trope that consists of joining two images or sensations from different sensory domains. Laurence Sullivan defines it as the union of the senses.

It is a biological condition that can occur in an individual, that causes a secondary or associated sensation that occurs in one part of the body as a result of a stimulus applied to another. In this way, you are able to hear colors, see sounds, appreciate textures when tasting something. A synaesthetic perceives, spontaneously, Correspondence between shades of color, sound and flavor intensities.

By extension, in literature it is a rhetorical figure that consists of the attribution of a sensation to a meaning that does not correspond to it, such as a garish color, the sound of light or softness detected in the taste of a meal or in the association of elements from the physical senses with internal sensations, that provoke feelings.

The pain is very physical, Essential Referee Nigeriana Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, referring to the orphanhood caused by the death of his father, that hurts in the body: "An unbearable bitterness on the tongue, as if I had eaten something that I hate and I had not brushed my teeth; a horrible weight, enormous, on the chest; and inside the body, a sense of eternal dissolution. The heart (…) escapes me, has become a separate entity, beats too fast, at a rhythm other than mine (…) Meat, muscles, organs, everything is affected ".

Any artistic manifestation can bring to mind an experience, a feeling, a stimulus. In the case of music, the melody has the power to provoke sensitive reactions in the human being, capable of reviving images, places, situations, regards, persons. In the art of smells, a fragrance can make us remember a memory, A situation, a concrete fact. It has also been studied as a phenomenon related to changes in the state of consciousness..

Éric Palazzo studies the relationships between the five senses and the liturgy in the Middle Ages, since the medieval Christian conception of the world interpreted liturgical and devotional acts as a means to restore universal harmony, that was channeled into the rituals associated with the mass.

The sensory dimension of the medieval liturgy constitutes, according to him, one of the most important aspects of the definition of Christian anthropology. Images, objects (goblets, altars, patenas), clothing (chasubles, gloves, stoles) and in general all forms of artistic manifestation (fresh, sculpture, stained glass windows), are part of the ritual through which man is more intimately linked with God and with the cosmos.

Thus, medieval liturgical imagery does not have only an aesthetic function, symbolic and functional, but also a sensory sacramental sense that is linked to the synaesthetic perception of the rite.

Bibliography

• ADICHIE, Chimamanda Danger, About the duel, Barcelona, Random House, 2021.
• CYTOWIC, Richard, Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses, NY, Springer publishing house, 1989.
• PALAZZO, Éric, The Christian invention of the five senses in liturgy and art in the Middle Ages, Paris, Cerf Editions, 2014.
• PÉREZ FRUIT, illuminated, “Musical art and synesthesia. Synergy between scent, color and sound in classical music ", ABOVE WE ARE: Research magazine on musical and artistic creation of the Association of Composers and Interpreters Malagueños, 5 (2016), pp. 91-125.
• SULLIVAN, Laurence, Sound and Senses: Toward a Mermeneutics of Performance. History of Religions, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986.