Thank you very much for quoting my article. When we write, we never know who
will read, so we always get surprised when we realize people do read what we
write. Indeed, I have been working on some ideas on synesthesia and culture,
and in the last meeting in Hamilton a definetely felt that some kind of
approach which takes into account the question of culture is needed.
How could somebody talk experiment grapheme-colour synesthesia in a
pre-literate society, for example? These and other questions have led me to
draft sometings on this topic on the last months.
The overstressing of vision, the "imperialism" of the eye, on our culture
could be suggested to be in a certain way "colonizing" the other senses, as
to the point of, for some people, emerge as an experience. But this are just
intuitions by now.
On the other hand, I like very much Van Campen's notion of synesthesia being
something "in between". This dialogues very well with the notion that
synesthesia is deeply related to contemporary technological culture, in
which all strictly disciplinary thinking seems to be unable to deal with a
lerger understanding of life and meaning.
all the best from Brazil,
s.
On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 10:24 AM, herve pierre lambert <hplambert@hotmail.com
> wrote:
>
>
> On the internet, there is an interesting article easy to encounter, written
> by Sergio Roclaw Basbaum, "Consciousness and Perception: The Point of
> Experience and the Meaning of the World We Inhabit". He claims that "
> consciousness is aculturally shaped phenomena, and that any conception that
> may emerge about it from a traditional Western scientific approach cannot go
> further than suggest a model of consciousness that, at best, can correspond
> to the experience of consciousness in the culture in which this very
> specific way of dealing with reality is embedded."
>
> The anthropological dimension of synesthesia - as a metaphor or as
> neurological phenomenon- is usually avoided or forgotten. Van Campen
> alluded to this reality in "Synthetic Indians" with a commentary on the book
> World of sense by Constance Classen. Basbaum developed this idea of a
> synesthesia phenomenon conditioned by culture in a philosophical reflexion
> using references to Classen and Flusser. The last year I had told that we
> needed informations on synesthesia in the different cultures of the
> multicultural Mediterranean world. The emergency of an anthropology focused
> in the sensory worlds of different cultures enabled to put into perspective
> the western association between seeing and meaning. Quotation from the same
> article by Basbaum:
>
> "Different cultures emphasis in other senses gives birth to cosmologies
> based, for example:
> - in thermal sensations, like the Tzotzil's of Chiapas, Mexico;
> - in olfactory sensations, like the Ongee's of Little Andaman Island, in
> Bengal Bay;
> - in a highly synesthetic cosmology, like the Desana's of Amazon, which
> make meaning of their world based on multisensory correspondences
> experimented under hallucinogenic plants trance; (Classen, 1993: Chapter 6)
> - in such an emphasis on aural experience, like the Kaluli people of
> Bosavi, as to "reckon time and space by reference to auditory cues and
> entertain a fundamentally acoustic view of the structure of their physical
> and social universe." (Howes, 2003:xvii)
> These radically different sensorial arrangements (and there are many
> more), the meanings they ascribe to the world and the ways of dealing with
> life that emerge from them, make reasonable for us to talk not anymore about
> a "point of view", typical of Western culture, but of a "point of
> experience", the kind of hierarchy of the sensorium that structures
> experiences and cosmologies in different cultures."
>
> Hervé-Pierre Lambert
>
>
> Mein GlückSeit ich des Suchens müde ward,Erlernte ich das Finden.Seit mir
> ein Wind hielt Widerpart,Segl' ich mit allen Winden.Ashita wa ashita no kazé
> ga fuku
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--
-- Prof. Dr. Sérgio Roclaw Basbaum
-- Coord. Tecnologia e Mídias Digitais
-- Pós-Graduação Tec.da Inteligência e Design Digital - TIDD (PUC-SP)
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