SALC 260751/SIGN 26075
A paduka inscription on a chatri monument in Rajasthan, India. Photo: T. Williams, 2020.
Step into the sensorium…
What is a ‘sense’? How do we attune, organize, coordinate, and interpret our senses and the information that we receive through them? Is a sense an objective, ‘natural’, unmediated perception of the world around us or can it be trained, developed, shaped, and refigured? Is sense merely perception or does it have an emotional dimension as well? This course invites students to dive into the multi-sensory world of South Asia—a region that includes the modern-day states of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka—by learning about how peoples of the region have both theorized and employed the senses to order their aesthetic, social, and religious worlds. You will notice that the title of the course refers to South Asian sensoriums in the plural—this is because there is no single or default way of organizing the senses and sensory experience in the myriad cultural, linguistic, and intellectual traditions of the region.
Attune your senses to a variety of objects and materials…
Painting of a buraq, ca. 1660–80. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Accn. 1992.17.
We will combine the examination of objects—including visual art, sculpture, sound recordings, literary works, architecture, and even fragrances—with close readings of scholarly and literary works from and about South Asia in order to better understand the following fields of human experience and creative endeavor: the visual, the aural, the textual (if that can indeed be considered a ‘sense’), the gustatory, the olfactory, and the tactile. (We will also briefly discuss proprioception.) Students will receive an introduction to major South Asian theories of sense, cognition, art, and aesthetics and apply these theories to works of fine art, music, and literature. They will also be introduced to concepts from contemporary anthropological, sociological, and critical writings that explore how sensory regimes structure the individual’s experience of everyday life. A recurring theme of the course will be whether and how our sensory experiences of aesthetic objects and everyday objects overlap and inform one another. As some scholars have recently suggested, there may be reason to consider the senses and aesthetics as a single object of enquiry.
Primary readings will be drawn from pre-colonial as well as post-colonial South Asia and include lyric poems, excerpts from the epics, and selections from scholarly treatises in the languages of Sanskrit, Prakrit, Persian, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and Bengali. All primary readings will be in translation. Secondary readings will be taken from the fields of anthropology, sociology, literary theory, art history, visual studies, sound studies, and religious studies.
Please note that you do not need to possess any prior knowledge of South Asian languages or cultures in order to take the course.
A meal near Kakkanad, Kerala.
Course Format
- The course will consist of two lecture sessions and one section meeting per week.
- Before each lecture session, you will need to read short texts taken from primary sources (for example, musical treatises, plays, poems, cookbooks, advertisements) and secondary sources (scholarly articles and book chapters). You will also need to view a mini-lecture on Canvas/Youtube (approximately 1 hour in length).
- Lecture sessions will be one hour and twenty minute in length and will involve demonstrations and presentations by musicians, ritual specialists, actors, performers, researchers, and faculty, as well as question and answer sessions with these guests.
- Section meetings will be fifty minutes long and will involve activities such as tasting spices, smelling fragrances, listening to music, watching clips of dramatic performances, and discussing these experiences as a group. (Students will decide section timings in consultation with the Teaching Assistant.)
Assessment
- Each week you will be asked to write a brief (350-word) response to the course readings and lectures; we will post our responses on Canvas the evening prior to the section meeting. Before coming to the section meeting, be sure to read your classmate’s responses so as to prepare for the discussion.
- Each student will be asked to introduce one of the course materials during the quarter. This means speaking for one to two minutes about an author or work that we will read; you need only present general background details to help your classmates contextualize that particular reading. We will schedule these presentations during the first week of the quarter so that you will have time to prepare.
- Midterm: There will be a midterm exam during the fifth week of classes. You will be asked to provide definitions for terms and concepts that we have learned, explain how certain theories of sense work, and analyze an image, poem, or song of your choice.
- Final exam: The final exam will have the same structure as the midterm exam but will cover the material of the entire quarter.
Rubric
- 30% Class participation (asking questions, sharing ideas, participating in activities)
- 30% Reading responses (making solid and detailed observations about the readings)
- 20% Midterm exam
- 20% Final exam
Course Materials
- All readings will be made available in digital form via Canvas.
- All audio and visual materials will be made available on Canvas.
- Mini-lectures will be available via Panopto (Canvas) and YouTube.
- Students registered in the course will be mailed a sensory exercise packet containing spices, food stuffs, and fragrances to be used during class activities and homework assignments. If you have any allergies to foods or fragrances, please inform the instructor and/or the teaching assistant.
Special note in light of Covid-19 and social distancing:
The shift to online classes and remote teaching at the University of Chicago should not greatly impact this course. All of the materials and resources for the course were designed to be used online at the individual student’s pace, so the only major change will be the movement of class discussions to the Zoom platform.