Visual Sense: A Cultural Reader

by Elizabeth Edwards, Kaushik Bhaumik (Editor)

Vision is more than looking or seeing. It is integral to all human action. Visual Sense presents a series of readings which offer a range of alternatives to conventional psychological and social scientific approaches to the study of the ocular. The book highlights the multitude of ways in which vision is linked to the other senses by virtue of being embedded in complex cultural processes.Visual Sense introduces students to the analysis of a wide range of ways of experiencing sight across time and across from Renaissance Italy, Aztec Mexico and early Christian Europe, to Tibet, West Africa, Aboriginal Australia and South America, amongst others. It is arranged around broad themes of visual experience, ranging from navigating the sacred and ordering knowledge about the world to thinking creatively, socially and beyond vision into cyberspace and daydream. This unique approach allows cross-cultural and thematic connections to be made. A Guide to Further Reading allows students to expand their learning independently, and section introductions place the readings in context.Visual Sense expands the field of visual studies and explores the place of vision in the sensory world.

496 pages, Hardcover

First published January 6, 2008

About the author

Elizabeth^^Edwards

A visual and historical anthropologist, Professor Edwards has worked extensively on the relationships between photography, anthropology and history, on the social practices of photography, on the materiality of photographs and on photography and historical imagination. She has previously held posts as Curator of Photographs at Pitt Rivers Museum and lecturer in visual anthropology at the University of Oxford, and at the University of the Arts London. In addition to major monographs, she has published over 80 essays in journals and exhibition catalogues over the years, is on the board of major journals in the field including Visual Studies and History of Photography. She serves on numerous academic committees and peer-review colleges, was Vice-President of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2009-12 and in spring 2012 held a Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Durham. With colleagues in the Netherlands and Norway, she undertook a major HERA/European-funded project on the role of the photographic legacy of the colonial past in contemporary Europe. She is currently working on late nineteenth and early twentieth century photographic societies and networks of photographic knowledge, on the market in ‘ethnographic’ photographs across scientific and popular domains in the nineteenth century, and the relationship between photography and historical method.