The Sixth Sense Reader

Description

What is the sixth sense? Is it physical, mental or spiritual? Do we all possess it or is it unique to exceptional individuals? Might there be a seventh sense and an eighth sense as well? What role does culture play in determining the range of our perceptual abilities? The search for a supplementary sense has taken many directions and yielded numerous possibilities for an "additional faculty" of perception - from magnetism and movement to dreaming and clairvoyance. Stimulating reflection and debate, The Sixth Sense Reader explores the cultural contexts which give rise to such reports of "psychic" and other powers that exceed the ordinary bounds of sense. In this groundbreaking volume, leading scholars in history, anthropology and biology take the reader on a tour of the far borderlands of consciousness. From the world beneath to the world beyond the five senses, every potential avenue of sensation is opened up for investigation.

David Howes is Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University and the general editor of the Sensory Formations series from Berg. He is the author of Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory, co-author (with Constance Classen and Anthony Synnott) of Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, and editor of Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, among other works.

"Five is a handy number, but the world's cultures have imagined more than just five senses connecting human beings to the ambient world-and to their own bodies. The Sixth Sense Reader circles this intriguing phenomenon from a number of disciplinary vantage points, across a range of cultures and within an historical horizon that stretches from Aristotle to cyberpresence. Precisely because its subject cannot be taken for granted, The Sixth Sense Reader offers a particularly lively and provocative introduction to the new field of sensual culture." - Bruce R. Smith, University of Southern California