Embodied Values

The inadequacy of contemporary models of human-environmental relationships suggests the need to reconfigure existing and historical models of the senses within new paradigms informed by the inter-dependent exchange between mental and physical ecology: that is, embodiment. This Sawyer Seminar series sought to challenge, and to re-think, presuppositions of Western twentieth-century engagement with the world such as anthropocentrism, mind-body dualism, and isolated subjectivity. The rationale for these comparative seminars was clear: to clarify the degree to which sensory engagement in the world is a necessary precondition for the ethical self, for the intellectual self and the fully realized human being, and to articulate ways in which bodily, sensory and extra-sensory perception are being or may be re-engaged with the environment – 'nature' as both immediate experience and independent reality. Cumulatively, the intention was to think what has been lost and what acquired in our historical sensory engagements; to meditate on the effects of sensory loss and deprivation, and on the conditions for enhancement.

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the seminars concentrated on each of the five traditional senses individually, plus one seminar on 'the senses in motion'. Each bi-monthly seminar involved a day-long meeting that was discursive, detailed and participatory in nature. Three or four visiting scholars/practitioners presented papers for discussion that described how their current research/practice illuminated or intersected with the given topic. Interdisciplinary, interrogative and exploratory in tone, each seminar included an opportunity for all the participants to explore the sense in question through a practical, or experiential, session, and each was concluded by an evening public lecture by a scholar of international standing.

The series was attended by a group of core local participants, who ensured continuity by attending all the seminars, and a changing group of invited scholars from institutions further afield. A conference, entitled 'Sensory Worlds: Environment, Value and the Multi-Sensory', brought the series to a close and provided a chance for many of the seminar participants to consider the inter-relation of the senses, and engage with a wider community in sharing and reflecting upon the discoveries made in each of the series' seminars. All disciplines, insofar as they are concerned with the relation of humans to each other and individually and collectively to the world they inhabit, face questions of the role and value of human sensory perception; the Embodied Values series provided an interdisciplinary forum for their shared exploration. Furthermore, it allowed us to consider the contribution that a sensorially aware Humanities can make to environmental thinking and action today.

The Embodied Values Team

Staff: Dr. Rachel Harkness, Mellon Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow and Social Anthropologist

Steering Committee:
• Professor Susan Manning (Director of IASH; Grierson Professor of English Literature, University of Edinburgh);
• Pauline Phemister (Deputy Director of IASH; Reader in Philosophy, University of Edinburgh);
• Emily S. Brady (Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh);
• Mark Dorrian (Professor of Architecture Research, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University);
• Colwyn Trevarthen (Professor (Emeritus) of Child Psychology and Psychobiology, University of Edinburgh)
• John Harries (IASH Fellow, Department of Anthropology, University of Edinburgh)