Kinesthetic Sense and Dynamically Embodied Action

The familiar Western taxonomy of the five senses, in which vision is accorded pride of place as "the noblest of the senses," has a venerable history going back to Plato and Aristotle. As several scholars have noted (e.g. Classen 1993, 1997, Herzfeld 2001, Howes 1991, Ingold 2000, Seremetakis 1994, Stoller 1989) vision is closely followed by hearing, both of which are deemed superior to the lower, more animalistic "contact" senses of touch, taste and smell. This hierarchy was readily mapped onto 19th century evolutionism in both popular and scholarly thinking in the West as the racist tendencies of an earlier anthropology associated the "lower" senses with the "lower" races (Herzfeld 2001). While sight, and to a lesser extent hearing, were deemed the prominent senses of "civilized" westerners, smell, taste, and touch were assumed to predominate among "primitive" races. For example, the early 19th century, pre-Darwinian natural historian and embryologist Lorenz Oken mapped this sensory hierarchy onto the conventional racist ordering of human groups in a 'taxonomy by fives' as follows (Gould 1985: 204-5):