This book puts a finger on the nerve of culture by delving into the social life of touch, our most elusive yet most vital sense. From the tortures of the Inquisition to the corporeal comforts of modernity, and from the tactile therapies of Asian medicine to the virtual tactility of cyberspace, The Book of Touch offers excursions into a sensory territory both foreign and familiar. How are masculine and feminine identities shaped by touch? What are the tactile experiences of the blind, or the autistic? How is touch developed differently across cultures? What are the boundaries of pain and pleasure? Is there a politics of touch? Bringing together classic writings and new work, this is an essential guide for anyone interested in the body, the senses and the experiential world.
Author(s): Constance Classen
Series: Sensory Formations
Publisher: Berg / Routledge
Year: 2005
Language: English
City: Oxford
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Fingerprints: Writing About Touch
Part I: Contact
Contact
Handshakes
1 Tactile Communication
The Social Kiss
2 Skinscapes: Embodiment, Culture and Environment
Touch in the Classroom
3 Handling Children: To Touch or Not to Touch?
The Quiet Flow of Touch
4 The American Touch: Tactile Imagery in American Religion and Politics
Part II: Pleasure
Pleasure
I Want to Hold Your Hand
5 The Pleasures of Touch
Thermal Delight
6 Homely Pleasures: The Pursuit of Comfort in the Eighteenth Century
Scratching Where It Itches
7 Bourgeois Love: Mabel Loomis Todd
The Caress
8 Desiring Touch in Sartre and Beauvoir
The Touch of God
Part III: Pain
Pain
Speaking of Pain
9 The Language of Pain in India
Headaches
10 The Tortures of the Inquisition and the Invention of Modern Guilt
Stoicism
11 Primate Experiments: Harry Harlow and the Technology of Love
The Pangs of Rejection
12 Sex, Pain and the Marquis de Sade
Part IV: Male Bonding
Male Bonding
"Threads of Manly Friendship"
13 The Men's House: Touching and Wrestling among Mehinaku Men
Handymen
14 The Imperial Touch: Schooling Male Bodies in Colonial India, Part I
15 The Imperial Touch: Schooling Male Bodies in Colonial India, Part II
School of Hard Knocks
16 Sexuality and the Drill: The Body Reconstructed in the Military Academy
Warrior Love
17 The Dying Kiss: Intimacy and Gender in the Trenches of the First World War
A Hard Man is Good to Find
Part V: Women's Touch
Women's Touch
Women's Work
18 Saarak's Crisis: Childbirth and Weaning in an Inuit Community
Binding Women in China
19 Nu Shu: Female Writing in China
20 Feminine Tactics: Crafting an Alternative Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Throwing Like a Girl
21 Seamstress and Marketwoman: Working Women in Early Twentieth-century Paris
22 The Mosaic Makers
Warrior Women
Part VI: Control
Control
When Can a Man Touch a Woman?
23 On Medieval Manners
Don't Touch the Art!
24 Touch in the Museum
Hands Off!
Spouse Beating
25 Bourgeois Perception: The Gaze and the Contaminating Touch
Untouchable
26 In a Victorian Prison: Privations of the Flesh
Security Crises
Part VII: Uncommon Touch
Uncommon Touch
Fire in the Mind
27 Phantom Touch in "The Case of George Dedlow"
Still Life
28 Autism and "The Squeeze Machine"
Pure Touch
29 Rainfall and the Blind Body
Balancing Acts
30 Tactilism
What's Going On In There?
31 Visceral Perception
Nightmare Touch
Part VIII: Tactile Therapies
Tactile Therapies
Dr Touch
32 Magical Healing: The King's Touch
Sweat Baths
33 Ayurvedic Medicine and the History of Massage
34 Breathing Spaces: Qigong and Healing
The Healing Paw
35 A Touch of Danger: The Bedside Manners of the Eighteenth-century Physician
Domesticating Madwomen
36 The Golden Age of Electrotherapy
The Immune System
Part IX: Touch and Technology
Touch and Technology
The Mechanized Body
37 Polishing Your Heart: Artisans and Machines in Japan
38 Modernist Fictions of Speed
Nerve Endings
39 Grasping the Image: How Photographs are Handled
40 "Make it Snuggle in the Palm:" The Commodification of Touch
The Body Retouched
41 Digital Touch
Weaving a New World
42 Spacemaking: Experiences of a Virtual Body
Virtual Touch
Copyright Acknowledgments
Index
Series Page
