Translating is today a complex, comprehensive process that mirrors social, cultural, and political shifts in its context. Building on this broad understanding of translation and on the "outward turn" in translation studies, which opens translation to other disciplines, this article introduces a type of translation rooted in the anthropology of the senses which will give way to a "tangible" translation. From these theoretical foundations, the article explains how objects that migrants carry from their places of origin to new countries convey emotions and traumas of these difficult experiences, not through words but through the senses. The focus is on the objects that migrants bring with them, where touch, smell, and texture express feelings and hardships more powerfully than words.
Field recording is the most common method used to capture the acoustic qualities of an environment with one or more microphones. It proved to be particularly useful in supporting qualitative researchers in engaging with the sonic situation they study, providing opportunities to playback and re-listen to the recording and also to share them with others. In this article, we introduce a framework to support the qualitative analysis of urban field recordings taking into account the personal experience of the recordist, the use of written notes taken during recording, the editing, playback and airing of the recordings. By testing the framework in the context of a study on the sonic environment of Montreal's entertainment district (Quartier des Spectacles), we discuss how it can be used with flexibility to address different research goals and to explore multiple approaches for the qualitative analysis of field recordings within social sciences.
Based on ethnographic research conducted in neurology clinics across three sites in Kenya and Canada, we examine cross-cultural differences in how people describe their everyday sensory experiences in relation to their health conditions. We focus on sensations of heat, cold, burning, and freezing experienced by patients living with neurological symptoms. We examine how these sensory experiences influence patients' communication of neurological conditions - such as tremors, paralysis, seizures, sensory sensitivities, and pain - to their neurologists. We analyze cultural and linguistic differences in patients' accounts of somatic experiences linked to brain injuries and in medical providers' responses. By paying close attention to clinical encounters and conversations between patients and clinicians, we observe socio-cultural variations that reflect local beliefs about the body, mind, and biomedicine in Canada and Kenya. Specific sensory experiences associated with neurological conditions are described, along with their context. Finally, we explore the historical and social forces shaping these perceptions of illness and disability in anthropological discussions of sensory ethnography and localized spaces of action, considering the differences and similarities between two former British colonies.
This article explores the Adriatic Sea as a historically specific sound world in the late medieval and early modern periods. Focusing on the eastern Adriatic littoral and archipelago, it asks how travelers and local observers described the sounds of the sea and what cultural meanings they attached to its many states. Drawing on pilgrimage and related travel narratives, complemented by local narrative sources, the article treats these texts as both records of experience and theologically mediated reconstructions of past journeys. Situated at the intersection of sensory history and auditory history, the study combines close reading of sensory language with attention to distal touch. It argues that the Adriatic functioned as an acoustic threshold into pilgrimage, a moral and theological environment in which travelers learned to hear danger, community, and environmental change. Storms turned ships into resonant chambers of fear, while dead calm produced a paradoxical state of audible stillness and immobilized travel. Over time, the sea's murmur became a sound that faded into the background yet could be reactivated in moments of nocturnal vigilance and monastic contemplation. The article thus adds a maritime dimension to recent work in sensory and auditory history.
This article delves into relationships between light and emotions, a concept shaped by modern scientific understanding but which has historical receptions in literature. Drawing on a detailed analysis of lighting as a literary device in three works of French literature (1820-1864), it addresses how forms of literary lighting articulate emotions, arguing that this articulation happens through (1) sensual transfer and (2) a play on perceptions of time. These considerations support the use of the term lumitope, which the author proposes as terms for discussing the interplay between light and place, and which could be applied to other disciplines. Taking the ideas about literary time-space from Bakhtin, examples show how lumitopes announce a transfer from sight to other senses and shift portrayals of time from the structured and horological toward the sensory and perceptual. Drawing attention to the effects of this literary device on evoking emotion, the article argues that the advent of modern lighting technologies influenced the conventional ways light was used in literature. We see how literature transcribes sensual experiences provoked by a light source in ways that change over time and can be modeled by new lighting technologies.
In late-medieval Florence, the confraternity of the Compagnia della Madonna di Orsanmichele met every weeknight in the oratory of Orsanmichele to sing devotional songs directly in front of a painting of the Virgin and Child that was believed to be capable of performing miracles. This oratory was once a grain market, which over the course of the fourteenth century was transformed into a grain repository and a lavishly-decorated and important devotional location, filled with sculptures, frescos and stained-glass windows, thus becoming a veritable feast for the senses. Focusing specifically on the windows, this article will examine the relationship between the visual environment and the devotional rituals practiced by the Compagnia. I will argue that the visual imagery of the windows resonated with the themes, emotions and desires expressed in the laude, and in so doing, encouraged devotees to reflect on their individual morality in such a way that might persuade the Virgin to protect the well-being of the city, and specifically their access to nourishment. I will also show how the windows draw attention to the power of repeated vocalizations and prayer, thus making the windows literally about the kinds of acts being performed by confraternity members.
This essay examines Jeremy Shaw's Phase Shifting Index, a seven-channel video and sound installation that stages immersive encounters with expanded body-mind states of transcendence. Drawing on theories of embodied cognition and neuroaesthetics, it argues that Shaw's work does not merely represent altered states but actively performs them through multisensory orchestration. By combining hypnotic audiovisual effects, disjunctive temporality, and choreographed corporeal intensity, the installation invites viewers into an experiential interplay of affect and analysis. Situating Phase Shifting Index within late-capitalist attention economies and immersive media aesthetics, the essay explores how Shaw leverages perceptual overload to foreground the pre-cognitive conditions of spectatorship-where automatic, bodily responses and attentional autonomy are always in tension. Ultimately, the work proposes a model of transcendence as a relational, embodied process of spectatorship rather than a mystical escape, illuminating the entangled nature of feeling, perception, and technology in our digital age.
This paper dwells in a comparative reading of select fictional works by two women writers of Indian origin that foreground the question of Indian food and its racist connotations in a diaspora. While doing so, it explores how retaining cultural identity through food habits unfolds racism under the multicultural policies adopted by the host states through the fictional works by USA-based Chitra Divakaruni and Australia-based writer Roanna Gonsalves. It further argues that the Indian diaspora's cultural preservation through culinary practices to cling to their cultural identity has resulted in underlying racism based on the smell of Indian curry. Indian curry has been exoticized and marketed as an appealing magical element and despised for its smell. Through reading The Mistress of Spices and select stories from Sunita Desouza Goes to Sydney, this paper will explore the inherent xenophobia through the narratives within a multicultural space. The fictional works are studied through the lens of W.E.B. Du Bois' idea of "double consciousness" and Lisa Lau's conceptualization of "re-Orientalism" to interrogate the racial anxiety that the Indian diaspora encounters within the discourses of Indian curry culture. It unfolds racist elements underneath exoticised versions of culinary fiction to inform insidious workings of race.
The presence of light - an opening out from us; its absence - an opening out into us. Light, although fetishized as an iconography of revelation, is an element of visual obscurity considering the absorbed praying eye. In the quiet solitude of my prayers within the modest mosque of my hometown, I experienced God not in an illumination, but in an inward descent. And now standing inside the contemporary mosques of Bangladesh, I challenge the platitude that light is the spiritual route to God. Focusing on the microscopic nature of the praying man as the structural basis of mosques, I aim to draw a subliminal line between the fetishizing and forsaking of light in mosques; deploring architecture's deliberation for creating visual effects, and affirming that any worldly terrain is not a gateway significant enough to comprehend the Godlike. Rather, the sublime gateway unfolds inward, into the absorbed mind, where God resides in a silent, formless presence.
Multimodal generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) intervenes in the technologically, historically, and culturally produced sensorium. With large-scale models centering on vast non-sensual datasets of image-text pairs and, to a lesser extent, audio-text pairing, the sensory hierarchies of digitized media are intensified and reconfigured. As a sense image-making practice, the sense modes coalesce and separate in new ways in non-sensuous neural networked processing, which is entrenched in culturally and socially entrenched and layered practices of digitization. In its current form, multimodal GenAI sidelines creative metaphorical meaning-making's role in communicating sense perception and creating significant worlds. The predominant practice of identifying sense-images and text in datasets introduces what can be understood as a "dumb synaesthesia" that cements relationships between text and sense images, limiting our ability to trace or decide how they generate pictures and sound, regardless of our technical skill. Curbing the role of self-reflective thought in the production of sensory images alters the relationship of individuals and collectives to images, with cultural and political implications.
This article analyzes the sounds of Chinese Dreamcore to explore how the Anthropocene's temporal crisis is perceived and resisted. Through an original sound collage piece, Echoes of the Millennium, it undertakes an experimental sound ethnography, constructing knowledge via participatory listening. The research finds that sound in Chinese Dreamcore constitutes a perceptual practice of "hauntological time," activating millennial memory-experiences structurally forgotten during China's rapid modernization. This fosters a temporal perceptual structure characterized by both "retroactive nostalgia" and "anticipatory homesickness," capable of responding to the Anthropocene's temporal crisis through environmental soundscapes and cross-scalar temporal experiences. However, such subcultural practices also face challenges of commercial co-optation and limited political efficacy. Therefore, this article advocates for moving beyond mere emotional indulgence and nostalgic consumption to develop a more reflective, participatory, and critical practice of "multi-scalar embodied listening," thereby recalibrating the dysfunctional temporal compass amidst Anthropocenic acceleration and crisis.
Norwegian horticulturists working between 1945 and 2021 have handled toxic compounds as part of their everyday practice. In oral history interviews, 44 horticulturists, women and men aged 25 to 95, talked about their experiences with pesticides. They shared memories and accounts of using pesticides, but also thoughts about how their praxis with, and perception of, pesticides have changed over time. Their histories come out of the cultural and ecological symbioses of the craft and science of horticulture. Horticulturists are part of material processes. This article demonstrates that experiences with pesticides are sensorily embodied. Growers have used their senses to avoid the toxicity of pesticide compounds and senses often prove the "toxicity" of the pesticides. The interview material shows how the personal and cultural context of the given period plays an essential part of individuals' perception of pesticides. The article argues that it is important to observe how sensory experiences inform other forms of knowledge. Documenting sensory experiences is part of understanding the cultural history of pesticides.
This article introduces the anthropocentric sensorium, diffracting Ranci & egrave;re's partage du sensible with contemporary feminist posthumanism-particularly that of Karen Barad and Vicky Kirby. The anthropocentric sensorium allows for a more-than-human understanding of the politics of aesthetics, ordinarily characterized as strictly human(ist). The anthropocentric sensorium offers a framework for understanding the ways in which nonhuman utterances are excluded from political domains, as well as how subjects themselves are formed through normative sensations. As materially-discursively performative, it points to a contingent set of worldly practices that make some sensations possible over others. Those sensations that are made legible or permissible tend to reinforce a sense of human separation and exceptionalism, while sensations that challenge this are often rendered insensible or illegible. In contrast to common-sense notions of the human subject-body as that which senses, this article flips causality on its head, to ask: how do aesthetics make us human? The article concludes with an exploration of more-than-human sensoria, via the implications in Karen Barad's sensuous proposition that matter makes itself felt. Susan Schuppli's artistic research into the Deepwater Horizon oil spill further helps to elaborate the juridical and political implications of aesthetic dissensus within an anthropocentric sensory distribution.
