Smells and Bells

David Abram writes about medicine and magic, an unlikely combination to the Western eye, but one that is highly valued in many other cultures around the world. As it happens, I started reading this book last week while in the ER with my girlfriend, who had just broken her foot. So that happened to her last Tuesday night, and on Thursday morning, I started feeling kinda crappy. By Friday night I had a fever which lasted through the weekend. Overall, this was in no way a pleasant experience for either of us. It was painful for her to walk and she was greatly restricted to what she could do, and I was stuck in bed, the usual effects of a fever. But as miserable as we both were, it was a surprisingly enjoyable weekend to be together. We took care of each other constantly, watch movies, listened to music, and just rested. Who knows, it's possible that my getting sick was some mystical connection to her, and that it was in some way, a way for us to further spend time together and to ...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Kurutob_eating_with_hands.jpg The presentation from the touch group today made me think about an element of my study abroad that I really enjoyed. In both Tanzania and India, a lot of the food that we ate we ate without utensils, just using our fingers. In Tanzania it was rice, ugali, beans, cooked cabbage, and some other food. And in India it was many of the traditional, well-known Indian dishes like dal, curry and masala. We ate these by just grabbing the food we wanted with our fingers, mixing it around if desired, and picking it up and eating it. Many Indian dishes are served with a tortilla that can be used to pick up food. It was a practice that took some time to get used to, but once I did I found that I really enjoyed it. For one, it was a good way to tell if the food was too hot to eat. But it also meant that we really were connecting with our food on a bit of a deeper level than the disconnect of using a fork or spoon....

This may be a bit of an unconventional blog post, but I wanted to share some thoughts I had after Elizabeth came to our class on Monday. First, I want to say that much of what Elizabeth shared with us, I agree with or relate to in some way. Meditation, communicating to the body and listening and learning from it, these are all things that I've been actively practicing for years and that I feel are very important for healing and health, both mentally and physically. I know that times when I've meditated and connected with my body has helped me relax, center myself, and understand what I need in the moment. All that being said, I found the class to be difficult, and this is something that I've experienced before. It started with the guided meditation, which is something that has always bothered me. As I said, I do think that meditation is important and can be beneficial. However, I've always struggled with guided meditations. I find that the experience of someone tell...

One theme that we've been talking about recently is the distortion and amplification of sound, first in relation to Quranic recitation, and as of yesterday, drag performance. With Quranic recitation and the call to prayer, the sound is amplified through the use of microphones and speakers, and distorted through the amplification, but also distorted as the sound mixes with the sounds of daily life: cars, horns, music, voices and more. In the workshop by House of Larva, we listened to the audio of some of their performance, as well as a guided meditation, in which the vocals that had been recorded were often greatly distorted, either by the person speaking, or through later audio editing on the computer. Something that I've been thinking about in regards to this is how this modification of voice could lead to a loss of understanding and accessibility to the listener. This comes from my personal experience of being hard of hearing. As a result of my hearing loss, sound over...

In the chapter Celebrating Religion and Nation , Rasmussen writes about the Sayembara Azan: The Call to Prayer Contest. This is a four day contest in which men perform the Azan in public in front of a panel of judges who are evaluating them based on six criterium. Like Rasmussen says, I agree that it was strange to learn that this sacred practice, the Azan, was performed in such a way that it seemed to take away from its significance, sacrilegious as Rasmussen says. Rasmussen brings up four points about this practice and the last one was the most interesting to me. She said that by having this contest in the public, it separated it from its religious significance. By doing that, the practice was made more available for both people like her (a woman, non-muslim, researcher), and more importantly, for native Indonesians who might not be active participants in the religion. These public events are a way to draw them into the community. I think this is an interesting point especially i...

Today wasn't my first time "doing" miracle berries. While abroad last year, studying food security, we spent a class discussing sugar, obesity and the relationship between the two. As part of the class we had miracle berries and tried apples, lemons and limes, just like today. We were talking about how the miracle berry and its chemical components could be used in food and how that would be beneficial. By incorporating the berry into other foods that we eat, we could make them taste sweeter, and more enjoyable, without actually adding sugar or other sweeteners which can be harmful to our health. The way we used the miracle berry then was in a social/health context, so I tried thinking about how that could overlap with our religious context that we discussed today. We discussed how by using the miracle berry we were changing the food to taste differently and better (sweeter). That relates to how we understand God as being good. It then becomes a question of "is Go...

http://m5.paperblog.com/i/71/714671/interesting-psak-no-candy-man-no-throwing-can-L-4eXirb.jpeg Growing up Jewish, I remember my seventh grade year as being scattered with the Bar and Bat Mitzvahs of many of my classmates, both from Hebrew School and from my regular school class. I'm sure many others also remember getting dressed up on Saturday morning, going to synagogue, listening to a friend chant in Hebrew for a couple hours, and then later that day going to a big party at a local country club or somewhere. One of the many traditions that take place throughout the day is the throwing of the candy. This takes place after the Bar/Bat Mitzvah has just finished reading their Torah and Havtorah sections. The audience takes out the individually wrapped circular gummy candies and (hopefully) gently lobs them over the crowd and at the 13 year old at the front. Once the bombardment ends, the younger children dash to the front and collect as much candy as they can to quietly munc...

Last night, through the Outdoors Club, I led a night hike through the Wheaton Woods. This trip has been my speciality over the years, I'll lead a couple over the semester. Each night is different: temperature, weather, clouds, moon, and wind and more all have an impact on the experience. Photo by Egor Kamelev from Pexels https://www.pexels.com/photo/roadway-filled-by-snow-surrounded-by-pine-trees-landscape-photography-754151/ One thing that I love about night hikes is that our sense of sight is so greatly diminished, to the point where we almost don't rely on it at all. As we walk through the woods we almost rely on our feet, more than our eyes, to "see" the path we walk on. Our other senses are forced to pick up the slack. The same way as people who are blind say that their other senses are amplified, here we can induce the same effect temporarily. Last night, the wind was particularly interesting to experience. When we first entered the woods, it felt as tho...

I have a pin on my backpack that's a picture of a tree with arms around it, and beneath it is the word 'hugger.' Tree hugger. I've always been a tree hugger, there's hardly anything I love more than going into the woods (preferably barefoot and preferably when it's warm out) and just walking among the trees, feeling the bark, watching how the sun shines through the leaves and hearing the wind through the branches. I'm just now realizing how woods walks really make use of all your senses. Tu BiSh'vat, the Jewish Festival of the Trees just took place, and recently, my mom sent me this article basically about the science of tree hugging. What is says, is that a recent scientific study has proven that tree hugging, and just being in the vicinity of trees, is good for you. Everything vibrates right? On an atomic level, everything is vibrating at its own frequency, and the "vibrational properties," as the authors describe it, that trees give off...

Since reading the chapter on smell at the beginning of the week, I've kept thinking back to one of Ackerman's points: we don't have a language for smell. Not nearly as much as we do for our other senses. If I were to ask you to describe your bedroom for example, you would probably start by describing the layout of it, where your bed is, your desk, any posters on the wall. If I asked you about your favorite song and to describe how it sounds, you might start singing or humming it so that I can experience the sound for myself. So if I were to ask you to describe the smell of your parent's house, how would you describe it? For myself, home doesn't have a specific smell, home smells like home. And yet, I go to someone else's home and it has a very distinctive smell. There was a recent study done by the University of British Columbia  in which woman were given clothes to smell that either hadn't been worn, been worn by a stranger, or were worn by their romant...