Smells and Bells

As I said in my first post, this class has been an eye-opening to a degree for me as well as generally just happening at a very difficult period in many of our lives. I have actually had the chance to fully understand not only how all of the senses interact and mingle with each other, but also how they are involved with the dimension of religion. Even further than this, the class offered a chance to see this topic from a great deal of perspectives, from all of my classmates. I think in a time that is difficult as this, Smells and Bells gave us a chance to enjoy actual interaction with each other and the place that I feel this started was with the reading of Ackerman’s book. That was the point that unified us, we were all fed up with how she was portraying information to us, we may not have had our own fully formed ideas yet but we knew that her way was not the way. I felt the most unity in the class during the time when we absolutely roasted her book and all of the Western romanticized...

The relationship between the dimension of smell and religion is one that I especially have not given much thought to beyond some surface level analysis of uses of incense in certain traditions for example. I most certainly did not really think about what smells actually signified and did within religious activity. One of Green’s first few lines to chapter 4 of her book, The Righteous Aroma of Justice, “The rabbinic voices pick up the imagery of aroma…” (116) provides a very interesting insight or at least line of questioning in my mind for the role that smell plays in religion. The fact that aroma in, many but not all, religious traditions must index the sense of smell through text plays into how interconnected the sense is with most of the other scents. Imagery is what rabbinic literature must use to capture the essence of scent in their work and that reveals a lot about how people past and present conceptualize aromatic experience. Smell really seems to be one of the hardest sens...

As I have stated in previous blog posts, I have had a life relatively devoid of religion so a lot of my initial thoughts when it comes to the senses does not immediately see the deep connective tissue between the two categories, yet taste and its associated ritual activities is one of the easiest connections that I have made. I understand how deeply comforting and powerful the act of preparing and eating a meal can be, it made sense faster to me than any of the others. There is something very special about this sense, and Perez captures it in her book, Religion in the Kitchen, with describing how the family she was working with had found their last house completely unsatisfactory due to the awkward and small design of their kitchen. The cooking process as well as food was so intertwined with their faith that could not be the same without. Just this year I have really started to get into cooking, I had done a lot before for jobs but that kind of sucks the enjoyment right out of the act...

Unfortunately while I did not have access to Eck’s book on Darsan, I also have had experience in a number of classes learning about divine visualization and its potential for activating religious experiences. In a number of South Asian focused courses, such as Peoples and Cultures of the Himalaya I have had the chance to interact with both the Buddhist and Hindu practice of visualization and it has always captured my attention. Now in this course, it assumes a very different focus as rather than honing in on the regional and ethnic characteristics of the practice, I am taking a peek into the sensory dimension of the act which would seem the most obvious. This practice also interests me from a science vs. religion perspective, what is the appropriate way to categorize and understand a practice like this? We as people and culture, simultaneously put both a lot of stake and almost none into the act of seeing something in order to believe it. The act of seeing must first be believable to...

Rasmussen, as well as a few other of the authors we have read for this course, has piqued my interest as someone who is trained as an anthropologist, as that is my own background. Their methods and theory seem to elicit some of the most interesting insights from the places they study, and this is a bit more biased but I usually think they have some of the best takes. Rasmussen’s observations on the potency of culturally informed views of sound in religious experience seems to be no different to me. The way that she described the need for one to understand a religious experience such as the Azan when it is played through various sources around Jakarta rather than imagining it as the singular “chilling” voice that most westerners think it to be. As for my title of this post, I think the fury comes from my need to make an incredibly bad pun as well as my frustration that arises from individuals choosing to divorce the context from an important piece of sound. I am someone who enjoys mus...

I think that the notion of the sixth sense, something beyond human understanding, has been one of the most compelling and interesting topics we have covered inside of this course. I feel like the most lively discussion we had on campus had to do with the paranormal, and that is saying something as this course has crafted interesting exchanges but this went beyond. The Great Beyond is something that captures the attention of many people and always appears to create a dichotomy between the various number of things. Abrams points to the separation of the natural world as a rigid and understood entity with the “supernatural” or the unexplainable that moves above it as a major snag that Western thinkers have gotten stuck on. I think this is a very interesting place to think on how we might move forward in understanding the categories we call paranormal and supernatural because they are clearly so important to us.                     ...

Touch is an interesting sense as far as I am confirmed, it is weirdly connected to a lot of negative things for me and this was definitely reaffirmed by Classen. I have felt funny enough that this seems to be one of the most negatively connected senses to religion, lots of pain and punishment is a direct result of touch especially in Western traditions like Christianity. An entire chapter of her book, The Deepest Sense : A Cultural History of Touch, is called Painful Times and focuses on a lot of what I have associated with my sense of touch, the deeply negative and painful connotations of the sense and how it may relate to history and religion. Though on page 49, she offers a simple sentence that forces me to think just a bit harder on the connection, “The roles of touching treatment, in turn, were myriad.” This sentence made me reconsider some connotations due to indexing of the really healing properties of touch. Though it may not be inherently religious in its context, healing do...