Bücher der Reihe Sensory Formations

Smell is fundamental to experience but mired in paradox. Stigmatized as animalistic, it nonetheless feeds a vast fragrance and marketing industry. Considered ephemeral, scents have survived throughout the ages in a number of religious practices.

'Empire of the Senses' charts the new terrains opened up by the sensual revolution in scholarship, as it takes the reader into the sensory worlds of the medieval witch and the postmodern mall, a Japanese tea ceremony and a Boston shelter for the homeless.

Presents a series of readings which offer a range of alternatives to conventional psychological and social scientific approaches to the study of the ocular. This book highlights the multitude of ways in which vision is linked to the other senses by virtue of being embedded in complex cultural processes.