Search

If the American presidency is a catalyst for and exemplar of the power of rhetoric, so too is the presidential museum. Indeed, the confluence of material, textual, and visual rhetoric in these constructed places of memory continues to make these sites compelling and influential. Much like its counterparts across the country, The Jimmy Carter Presidential Museum seeks to captivate visitors with an array of immersive exhibits that appeal to the visitor’s full sensorium. In this essay, I extend the concept of political scopophilia to better account for rhetoric’s impact on the visitor’s full sensorium in presidential museums. Through activating and enhancing the visitor’s scopophiliac impulses, the Carter Museum creates an illusion of intimacy in its attempt to refocus American collective memory around Carter’s post-presidential successes.

The range of available tracking technologies that target parents and children has increased dramatically over the last decade, providing functionalities such as location and activity tracking. Situ...

© 2020 International Visual Sociology Association. Brake and Aitken present artistic work, photography and speculative poetics, which explore the emerging sensorium of the vertical city and its tentative subjects. With reference to the case study of Anaconda Cut, Salford UK, the article considers the development of the housing commodity through its participation in aesthetic capitalism and the role of atmospheres and design in the staging of vertical lifestyles. The research considers photographs and other marketing materials related to Anaconda Cut as they evidence the deployment of atmospheres and the production of affective sensory spaces, highlighting the way renting an apartment is framed within contemporary notions of positional and hedonistic consumption.

This article considers the ways in which sensory perception underlies the aesthetic appreciation of the Middle English Pearl. In particular it focuses on how sensory description and perception is u...

Proponents of present-day Science and Technology Studies (STS) tend to disregard classical phenomenological research by considering it incompatible with the performative turn in STS. The paper counters this tendency by exploring the case of so-called epistemic things and how this particular notion can be used to extend Heideggerian phenomenology. Heidegger is well-known for drawing a distinction between things that are ready-to-hand (i.e. handy) and things that are present-at-hand (i.e. unhandy). Although these two categories delineate many everyday objects, there are also instances where things cannot simply be considered as involving either handiness or unhandiness. One such example is that of drones used for detecting leakages in heat pipes. In being epistemic, these drones form part of a technical assemblage that can be used for uncovering and exploring suspected leakages – or knowledge objects – thus rendering the hidden visible.

In an attempt to escape the presentist and pro-innovation biases that sometimes taint (digital) journalism studies scholarship, this article proposes an oral history of newsroom computerization bef...

“Tate Sensorium” was a project by creative partnership Flying Object at Tate Britain in 2015 that explored experimentally the scope for enhancing the experience of visual art by the addition of sou...

In food science and technology, understanding off-flavors has a significance with both technical and commercial implications. In the food industry in the United States, it is a widely held truism t...

This introduction contextualizes this special issue of Women & Performance by examining surface as an object of inquiry across a variety of fields, including psychoanalysis, literary studies, sensa...

Rhetorical scholarship has recently made significant contributions to an emerging “meta-field” that we might loosely call “shit studies.” In this essay, we review scholarship pertaining to the study of “shit” in communication. Specifically, we review current trends in the theoretical orientation of shit studies by advancing the ideas of points de sensorium and/as the stank of rhetoric. Drawing on theories of the point de capiton (quilting point), we are able to note some commonalities in the study of shit in communication scholarship. The stank and the points de sensorium speak to a theorization of affect and bullshit-texts.

Newton’s suggestion in Query 31 of the Opticks (1718) that infinite space is the sensorium of God and that God “is more able by his Will to move the Bodies within his boundless uniform Sensorium, and thereby to form and reform the Parts of the Universe, than we are by our Will to move the Parts of our own Bodies” has recently been shown to be both philosophically coherent and compatible with contemporary religious views. This paper explores the further meaning of this and what it tells us about Newton’s theology, and his attempts to maintain immanentism while avoiding pantheism. It is suggested that Newton’s evident equivocation in discussing these matters stems in large part from the fact that there was no designation in his day for his position, but it can now be understood as panentheism.

Isaac Newton, like many of his contemporaries, appears to have distinguished between the practice of divinity, founded on divine revelation, and philosophical considerations of God derived from the study of nature. This article evaluates these distinct modes of divine discourse through a close reading of the chymical content of Newton’s optical writings and his correspondence with Thomas Burnet regarding Genesis. Newton’s chymical exploration of divine activity in the natural world in Query 31 to the Opticks (1704) seems independent from Scripture in its physico-theological demonstration of God from natural phenomena and its divine metaphysical reliance on a priori concepts of God to establish principles of nature. Nonetheless, the sensorium analogy by which he explored divine agency in nature drew directly from the biblical doctrine of the imago Dei. Moreover, Newton used his chymical understanding of nature to access the natural-philosophical realities behind the accommodated words of the Mosaic...

This essay presents a transdisciplinary project whose objective is to create a sensorised insole built with latex (Hevea brasiliensis) to measure physiological variations of the human body, as well as to graphically represent affective reciprocal exchanges of the human behaviour with the environment. The purpose is to improve our enactive system through the use of various physiological sensors (e.g. pressure, galvanic skin response and temperature sensors), which can be processed and visualised by revealing the affective exchanges of the body while walking in the city, pinned on a map as data visualisation. Inspired by the enaction theories, the output of sensors and devices application that models the perception as a laboratory phenomenon, as proposed by Dr Ted Krueger, the investigation directed by Dr Domingues is conceived for the expanded sensorium and for the reengineering of life. The artwork is inserted in the domain of aesthetic investigation of art as experiences related to topics on art ...

This essay argues that Keats understood poetic performance as a conspiring, a powerfully somatic, often eroticized communion of poet and reader he figured as a process of mutual breathing. Owing to his personal history and medical expertise, Keats’s attitude toward respiration was deeply ambivalent: if a precipitant of death, breathing – the rhythmic conspiring through which poetic forms materialized in the bodies of readers during utterance – could be curative, even afford the poet a secular, aesthetic version of immortality. His embodied, breath-centered concept of reading and writing depended on a psychosomatic model of cognition that grounded intellectual activity in the life of the sensorium.

A documentary film producer situates key scenes for her work-in-progress film on youth, culture, and farming near the United States–Mexico border, Remembering How to Eat, in terms of theories of memory, place, and ecology; border studies; cinematic spectatorship; and sensory ethnography. The paper argues that documentaries about food and farming can help render a sense of place-based memory and identity, particularly on the border, which is typically characterized by mobility and transience. Such films can help cultivate a sense of food sovereignty in communities by rendering a multisensory engagement with the culinary and agricultural past. Such engagement includes not solely plants and farming processes but stories, recipes, and folktales. The paper lays the groundwork for a documentary cinematic aesthetic that gleans from these cultural materials a borderland sensorium that treats food and plants as active agents that compel us to act in certain ways. This approach can not only help transmit th...

May Morris (1862–1938), renowned craftswoman and daughter of William Morris, had an unconventional Victorian childhood in a home where all the members of the family were engaged in various forms of aesthetic labor, either as amateurs or professionals, and shared an aesthetic philosophy that blended the artisanal and the experimental from which would develop the Arts and Crafts movement. This article will examine the fragmentary recollections of her childhood recorded by May Morris in the introductions she wrote for the twenty-four-volume edition of The Collected Works of William Morris as a rich resource for Victorian sensory history because of the emphasis she places on the development of the child's sensorium, especially in relation to touch as the vital sense that linked family intimacy with creative activity. Employing the term “tactile aesthetics,” I show how, in the Morris household, the pleasurable sensual apprehension of the objects or materials worked by the hands of the craftsperson was ...

The primary purpose of this paper is to provide an interpretation of a claim made by Isaac Newton in the Queries appended to his Opticks. Specifically, my goal is to provide an analysis of Newton's...

This article proposes the term “perceptual abstraction” to describe the methods of artists who take bodily contingency as their medium. It focuses on the low-frequency drone work of an anonymous figure called Eleh. Like others in the Minimalist tradition, Eleh follows a processual ethic that begins from a minimum of structural elements and asks how they might reshape one another over time. What sets Eleh apart, however, is its singular focus on frequencies within, and sometimes beyond, the lowest reaches of human hearing. These tones play strangely on the sensorium because they can evade cochlear audition even while haunting other registers. This is bass as an agent of bodily mystification, and in Eleh's hands it becomes a sonic strategy for modulating felt space and fleshy thought. If Eleh diverges from most Minimalists in these ways, then liner notes and cover art point to another, more like-minded body of work. Might Op(tical) Art—with its interest in “charging fields” and rhythmically unraveli...

How can film studies address the work of Dusan Makavejev beyond his films’ critique of ideology and the director's perceived disregard for narrative and visual conventions? This question addresses the prevailing approach to Makavejev that trumpets his earlier work for its stylistic and political daring while disregarding some of the director's later films. Taking up his films from the later 1980s, The Coca-Cola Kid (1985) and Manifesto (1988), this essay studies how approaches to Makavejev's work can be revised to address the director's concerns with fundamental aspects of the film medium and of the film viewing experience. By addressing the use and reception of color in these two films, this essay studies the sensual experience of watching The Coca-Cola Kid and Manifesto. By considering how the earlier film addresses the viewers’ sensorium and how the later was received, the essay offers methodological alternatives to viewing Makavejev's films solely as aesthetic vehicles of ideological critique.

Intelligent building should be occupant oriented. It means that the occupant's point of view regarding safety and comfort should be taken into account, at least at the designing phase. The occupant's point of view relates to his needs. The level of fulfilling those needs influences the occupant's satisfaction. The occupant's needs and satisfaction relate to a human being. One of the essential features of a human being is using his senses to perceiving the world and feeling satisfaction. It means that human senses are an important issue regarding intelligent building. Therefore, human senses should be taken into account, at least from the designing phase. An occupant of a building realizes different processes. Many of them are routine (repeated) processes. For instance, the nourishment process might be one of the routine processes at home. The research carried out, and presented in this article, showed that among many process mapping approaches for intelligent building none used the sensorium assessment. T...

In this essay, I contrast two moments of shock to open Christianity in the Philippines to a spatial analysis. I begin by framing the Spanish colonial period and the Christianisation of the Philippines as a spatial shock. The Philippines was spatially transformed through colonial projects such as urbanism, intensive agriculture and resource extraction that, taken together, can be understood in the first instance as processes of unmapping, where environments once alive and animated by meaningful relations between peoples and places were reconfigured as empty, and in the second instance as the instantiation of a new sensorium with profound consequences for how Filipinos would, thereafter, experience the world. I dwell initially on Spanish urban practices and the optical power of the planned town as the emplacement of a Christo-disciplinary sensorium that rendered local populations legible and visible to colonial power, generating new types, compositions and combinations of subjects and establishing new point...

In seeking to expend the sensorium of art history, it is interesting to note that an engagement with the sense of smell was prevalent in a number of artists' writings prior to the actual creation of olfactory artworks. Despite its presumed marginality, scent was a preoccupation for a number of artists, and was integrated into the major trajectories of modern art, even ones dominated by painting and sculpture. This article examines the writings and works of one prominent artist from the modern era, Paul Gauguin, to explore the precedents for contemporary olfactory aesthetics.

Art educators have previously noted that senses other than sight are frequently engaged by contemporary art (e.g., Springgay, 2004; Garoian & Gaudelius, 2008), craft (Congdon, 1991), material culture (Bolin & Blandy, 2003), and popular culture (Duncum, 2004). However, despite their efforts, on the whole, art education remains indebted to the legacy of modernistartcritiqueand practiceand so valorizes vision to the exclusion of other senses. Additionally, the recent visual culture movement tends to similarly sideline consideration of senses other than the optic (Duncum, 2004; Freedman, 2003;Tavin, 2002).'In this article, I employ the concept of the sensorium - the sum total of our ways of sensing and perceiving the world - in order to argue that art educators need to embrace senses beyond sight. Otherwise, conscious consideration of some of the diverse directions art education is now taking will be severely limited. I explore how contemporary approaches to the sensorium overturn long held assumptions about the senses, which opens up new possibilities - and challenges - for art education. I critique the assumptions on which ocularcentricism was foundational to modernist art and modernist art education, and I survey how contemporary art intentionally goes well beyond the visual to engage other senses. This problematizes the word visual in visual culture (Elkins, 2002; Mitchell, 1995), and I show how even digital screen images are best conceived as multisensory. I argue that it is necessary to acknowledge that even in afield whose focus is rightly on what is visual, consideration of sight alone is not enough. In considering how identity is formed through sensory experience, an eye does not make an I.The SensoriumContemporary psychological and philosophical accounts have defined the sensorium much more broadly than the senses. The sensorium has been conceived as the total character of the sensory environment which together includes sensation, perception, and the interaction of information about the world around us. It is the whole sensory apparatus of the body, "the subject's way of co-ordinating all of the body's perceptual and proprioceptive2 signals as well as the changing sensory envelope of the self" (Jones, 2006, p. 8). The sensorium refers to how the senses operate in consort to make up perceptual systems, how these systems operate in relation to the environment, and our own interpretive capacities (Gibson, 1966, 1986; Serres, 1985/2008).A Reconceptualized SensoriumThere have been three long-standing, popular assumptions about the senses, each of which are now considered problematic by psychologists and philosophers alike: (1) there are only five senses; (2) they are hierarchically ordered in terms of their importance to knowledge; and (3) they operate separately from one another. Below, I explore how reversing these assumptions creates new directions for art education in relating to both contemporary art and the popular images and artifacts that many art educators are now addressing.Many SensesFirst, there has long been less agreement about the number of senses than is generally supposed, or even what is to count as a sense. For example, Democritus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, thought of all the senses as variations on just one, the sense of touch (Connor, 2008). Aristotle was more generous, but he still counted only four senses, considering that taste was a "modification of touch" (cited in Conner, 2008, p. 2). Socrates was especially generous, advancing the idea of a potentially limitless number of senses. In addition to the usually defined senses, he is alleged to have said, "there are others besides, a great number which have names, an infinite number which have not" (cited in Connor, 2008, p. 2).Contemporary psychologists have sided with Socrates. They have differentiated many senses, including "heat, effort, lightness... weight and speed"(Gibson, 1966, p. …

This article contributes to recent debates concerning automobility and ‘mobile, embodied practices’ (Cresswell & Merriman, 2011) by considering how various ‘driving events’ entail modes of perception that are of interest from an ontological perspective; that is, how drivers and passengers see the world through the windows of a moving car and how the driving ‘sensorium’ (Gilroy, 2001; Sheller, 2004) may be associated with emotional states (such as ‘escape’, ‘frustration’, ‘nostalgia’) that arguably characterize the everyday life of late modernity. In addition, the discussion speculates on what this altered perception means for how we see and conceptualize the contemporary urban landscape, concurring with Doel (1996) that such space has effectively become a ‘scrumpled geography’ that can no longer be accounted for in traditional cartographical terms. These reflections are explored through close readings of a selection of literary texts (principally, crime fiction novels) emanating from Greater Manc...

For Uitoto communities in the borderlands of the Colombian Amazon, ordinary sociality depends on the effective rendering of sweet social relations from a universe of bitterly antisocial possibilities. Human personhood and kinship must be continually materialized through the transformation of bitter substances and sensations into sweet ones, and the incorporation of sweetness as a sensible quality of moral personhood. In a context where the sensorium is frequently transposed into a moral register, taste qualities both index and transmit the moral qualities of persons, and the bittersweet potentialities of kinship relations are mediated through botanical instruments of moral transformation. This paper explores the qualities of dulzura (sweetness) and amargura (bitterness) as key terms of value in the moral economy of Uitoto horticulturalists—experts in the management of bitter manioc (manihot escualenta) and bitter feelings alike.

Noetic insight involves direct access to knowledge beyond that which is available through the five senses or through reason. It typically has to do with sensing the interconnectedness of all things, and is informed by a feeling that one knows but without knowing how. Psychedelic substances constitute one vehicle for the production of noetic experiences. Using a biopsychosocial approach, this article explores the shifting contexts for the enjoyment and analysis of noetic experience in twentieth-century American popular and scientific culture, beginning with the psychedelic revolution and culminating in the “quantum computer” turn of brain (and mind). It emerges that the ‘feeling of knowing’ may be a sensory ability after all, and a key to understanding many other forms of anomalous cognition.

Using Foucault's early radio address ‘Utopian Body’ as an initial starting point, this paper examines the role of sensorium in the production, circulation and legitimization of knowledge, especially as it pertains to an understanding of a transparent operation of senses. Using targeting as an example of the ways in which the senses combine with transitive grammar to reinforce specific notions of the subject and subjectivity, the article offers a variety of visual texts and grammatical examples (namely the middle voice) to consider the ways in which Foucault's writings in The Birth of the Clinic and ‘Utopian body’ both subvert common-sense understandings of transitivity, the subject, the body and the senses (again through targeting) and reinforce them. The article includes a brief foray into teletechnologies and urban attacks.

The incidents in this short story are refracted through the shattered sensorium of a traumatized but ethically intact survivor of the Holocaust. His narrative kaleidoscopically reconfigures horror and everyday life, nightmare and history, the gates of a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland and a checkpoint at the border between Israel and Palestine during the First Intifada. His act of witness defends the specificity of the human being, the other, in the face of the reasons of state and the abstractions of ideology.

Histories of exotic animal collection and display in Britain during the long eighteenth century have not been conventionally concerned with the sensory or bodily experiences of menagerie spectators. Olfactory, haptic and aural impressions – as well as the affective responses of laughter, disgust, anger and sympathy, are conspicuously absent in attempts to historicise animal collections. This paper principally argues that these often historically intangible and transient sensory experiences with animals were culturally significant acts or readings that produced meaning. To understand how spectators utilised their senses as an interpretive tool in reading menageries the article draws upon eighteenth-century understandings of the senses and bodily comfort. The manipulation of exotic animal bodies in menageries during the long eighteenth century had significant implications for British spectators. It is argued that their specific notions of Britishness in relationship to these captive animals from foreign cli...

Christmas Islanders participate together in blood metaphors, drawn from the island's biotic life. These metaphors proceed along specific sensual lines such that, in and through participation in this shared sensual citizenship, the identity category ‘Christmas Islanders’ is yielded. Pan-islandic sensory citizenship is based on participation in a highly visual and rhythmic auditory Christmas Island sensorium and other specifically ethnic relationships to the Island proceed primarily along the sensory lines of taste. Participation in particular sensory registers of island life is key in locating Christmas Islanders precisely as such, and is equally important in creating and maintaining ‘senses’ of ethnic difference between them. At the same time as local people participate together in pan-islandic metaphors, some ethnic groups have made sensory connections with the island that are not made by others. These connections are instrumental in locating islanders of particular ethnic membership as ‘native’ (over lo...

(2009). Designing the Sensorium. The Senses and Society: Vol. 4, Re-Mediating Touch, pp. 247-252.

As a legacy of Kantian rationalism, smell occupies a minor place in most approaches to the sensorium. Yet nineteenth-century sanitary medicine understood odor to be a diagnostic tool for distinguishing health and disease. For English evangelical sanitarians, the trained nose made it possible to detect the unhealthy and sinful practices of individuals, families, cities and nations. Cultivating the sense of smell entailed the elaboration of a dietetics, at once a manner of feeding, a way of life and grounds for critical judgment. The concept dietetics supplements the use of the habitus in the sensory literature.

This essay traces an epistemic shift occurring jointly in the late eighteenth‐century sciences of sensation and in the literary aesthetics of early Romanticism. Taking as my point of departure Michel Foucault’s remark that the history of modernity begins with a conception of the human being as a mutable physiological entity, my essay examines some ways in which Wordsworth’s poetry registers this coeval emergence. I argue that the poet’s celebrated account of the “infant babe” in Book 2 of The Prelude reflects a newly understood conception of the sensorium as subject to historical change. Attending to the human‐scientific contexts of Wordsworth’s narrative, I make a further case for reading in this passage an historiographical investment in the senses and their periodization that connects such densely psychologized passages of the poem with its explicit critique of French sensationalist psychology in the same book. As I argue, Wordsworth’s seemingly hermetic reflection on the infant babe can be seen as a p...

Current archaeological concerns with viewing and all things visual are predicated upon a series of assumptions that have so far escaped serious consideration. This state of affairs resulted from the way in which our concerns with mapping and analysing patterns of seeing and looking in the past emerged before any broader critical consideration of the senses per se. To place an interpretative premium upon viewing space is to accept that vision as a perceptual category was meaningful to those under study, and that it, above all else, shaped and structured understanding to the point that it can profitably be represented and analysed in complete isolation from all other sensory stimuli. In this paper we argue that vision should be folded back into the mix of the sensorium and sketch two potential pathways for achieving this.

Twinning arrangements between members and non‐members of the European Union are one of the many Euro‐symbolic measures taken with the aim of making indigenous populations “feel like citizens of Europe at the local level”. This article addresses the ways in which trans‐local projects of indoctrination, such as twinning, force indigenous peoples to reposition themselves toward what is culturally defined as local history. Its focus is on the exchange of small‐scale civilities through which partners engage themselves in sensory and affective performances of their history, and are gradually led to the reorganization of their domestic sensorium or public memory.

This paper is an attempt to describe the nature of a new calculative background that is currently coming into existence, a background that will both guide and constitute what counts as ‘thinking’. It begins by providing a capsule history of how this background has become a more and more pervasive quality of Euro-American cultures as a result of the rise of ‘qualculation’. It then moves on to consider how this qualculative background is producing new apprehensions of space and time before ending by considering how new kinds of sensorium may now be becoming possible. In this final section, I illustrate my argument by considering the changing presence of the hand, co-ordinate systems and language, thereby attempting to conjure up the lineaments of a new kind of movement-space.

It is, perhaps, a cliche to say that we live in unsettled and troubling times. While the statement is true, it is not the first time that the world has confronted threatening conditions, nor will it be the last. What interests me as senior editor of Studies is how we as citizens and scholars confront our current national, global, and cultural difficulties. Due to its multi-disciplinary nature, art education is well placed to contribute in an informed and creative fashion. A scrutiny of the scholarship published in Studies over the years reveals multiple theoretical approaches and disparate subject-matters that are assimilated, re-worked, and articulated within our field. One of the consequences of this multiplicity of scholarshipis that the essence and scope of art education is always in question. The tensions and disagreements that emerge have been and continue to be a source of stimulating and constructive investigation.The articles in this issue reflect the diverse nature of today's inquiry in art education. They suggest new ways of understanding both the content of art education and how it should be practiced. As these articles make clear, art educators continue to deal with the residues of 1 9th-century colonialism and the challenges of globalization and environmental degradation. We are also alert to opportunities to expand our analyses into new domains, whether through film or other forms of media that take us beyond the visual. While there is no single unifying theme to the articles published here, they all contain important visions of how art education could and should respond responsibly to the present.Paul Du n eu m argues that the contemporary focus on visual culture in art education is inherently problematic given the multi-sensory nature of our artistic and lived experiences. By talking about the ways in which "art and popular culture appeal to the whole sensorium" he challenges us to take seriously the limitations of our traditional focus on the visual. Negotiating and making meaning in our world is more than a purely visual process. Du ncum's focus on the sensorium, or the total array of our sensory faculties, highlights the intricacy of our sensual experiences, and the diverse means through which we sense, perceive, and interpret the world. Using current examples from art and popular culture, he argues for the importance of adopting an approach to art education that includes and takes account of the fu Il spectrum of sensory experience. Without this more inclusive attention to all the senses, Duncum suggests, we will not be able to understand the complex nature of contemporary art.Addressing issues emerging from g loba Iization, Yujie Julia Li analyzes and re-interprets the installation work of the Chinese American artist, Wenda Gu. Li looks closely at Gu's forest of stone steles and united nations project as examples of art situated within a changing and transnational world, art that reflects a global sensibility and awareness. Her discussion centers around five conceptual attributes: thematic, dialogic, Janusian, discrete, and relational. These attributes provide a structure for coming to terms with the complexity of Gu's work. Li argues that a contemporary art education must embody these attributes in order to encourage students to be "globally conscious citizens. …

Group therapy provides the ideal arena for helping individuals cultivate the observing ego--that part of the sensorium that has the power of witnessing oneself in the world. The essence of our method is to employ the group as a temporary observing ego, out of which members may develop their own observing egos. A five-step process is presented to (1) help the members see how they are affecting others when they do not see this themselves, (2) help the members see how they produce this effect, (3) help the members see the self-injurious nature of their behavior, (4) resolve resistance to seeing any of this, and (5) help the members arrive at new modes of behavior.

This paper questions preconceptions that situate the |xam in a Stone Age past where they can be objectified by a timeless gaze. From such appropriations and (miss)-representation, the |xam emerge either as shamans or victims or as the quintessential proto-scientists. We explore instead the expressive culture of the |xam and describe its significance as “applied history” for people’s lives in the present. Our investigation follows two routes; firstly, via notions of vibration, sound and rock engravings as they remain available for intermedial comparison in the archaeological and ethnographic records. Secondly, we consider the complex ontological instabilities and continuities in an oral tradition by focusing on !khwa—rain potency. From this we demonstrate how cultural literacy, with no direct written form, is translated from an extinct |xam language and culture and finds meaningful leverage among present-day descendants of the |xam who are genetically extant but now speak another language, Afrikaans.

The human sensorium is usually understood to be limited to five senses. How then do we understand the experiences of fear, loss, prediction, passing time and nostalgia that are included among the t...