Sensing the Past II

Join us for this presentation series and panel discussion, moderated by David Howes with Tin Cugelj, Andrew Flack and Celia Vara  as part of the Uncommon Senses V Conference.

How can you participate? Join us in person or online by watching live on YouTube.

Have questions? Send them to info.4@concordia.ca

Tin Cugelj  (Independent scholar and IMS Study Group - Auditory History)

‘Death was chasing us’: The Sea as a Sensory Agent of Early Modern Community Formation

On 13 October 1494, Pietro Casola experienced a storm during a pilgrimage. Driven by the intensity of the multisensorial experience, he wrote: “The following night the sea was so agitated that every hope of life was abandoned by all; I repeat by all ... Death was chasing us” (Casola 1494: 323). With the overwhelming sensory stimulation of the ship caught in a sea storm in mind, I believe that Casola’s experience was not exaggerated for the narrative’s purpose. Yet was he alone in sensing it, or did he portray the communal experience? Was sensing the sea influential in sensing the communal “we”?
This paper aims to understand the sea’s sensory agency on the group dynamics of early modern ad- hoc maritime communities through critical textual and sensorial analyses of pilgrims’ lived experiences captured in travelogues. Additionally, it addresses the degree of the sea’s involvement in experiencing maritime travel, its multisensorial perception, and ponders the importance of the medium of travel in experiencing the early modern world, the subjectivity of lived experiences, and the geographical and social implications for sensory experiences. Lastly, it raises questions on how sensory experiences of historical crises might ease modern society’s collective sensory challenges.

Keywords: sensory agency, ad-hoc maritime communities, multisensorial perception, group dynamics, travelogues

Andy Flack  (History, University of Bristol, UK)

Lessons from the Devil (and his hoofmarks in the snow...): Storytelling, Senses, and the Supernatural

Early in the morning of a December day in 1855, villagers across Devon and northern Cornwall arose from their mid-winter’s slumber. It had snowed that night, draping a thick white sheet across the southern English landscape. Imprinted in the snow, they spied something strange, something terrifying. A single line of bipedal hoofmarks had been left in the snow, not just in one village, but stretching across nearly 100 miles. They ranged through forest, field, highway and byway, climbing up drainpipes and scrambling over rooftops. The only explanation, they all agreed, was that Old Nick himself had walked in England that deep, dark night.
It would be foolhardy to dismiss this fragment of nineteenth-century English folklore as nothing more than a fantasy borne of the deep rural darkness at winter’s snowy summit. In this paper I want to ask a deeper question: what might this story – about sensation, animal tracks and ‘extreme’ environmental conditions - tell us, as sensory historians, about the past? Where do the material and imaginary, the ‘scientific’ and the ‘supernatural’ come into contact in the stories people told – and passed down through generations - about the ways in which they sensed and made sense of the living worlds they inhabited? And do such blurred boundaries retain value in an era of seismic environmental transformation? The Devil (probably) didn’t walk in England that night. But the hoofmarks in the snow might just be worth a second curious glance.
Keywords: Supernatural; environment; nocturnal; science; folklore

Celia Vara  (English and Cultural Studies, McGill University, Canada)

Sensorial Methodologies Researching Performance Art in the 1970s

What is it to know something somatically, through movement, or other bodily sensations? I am interested about how Feminist politics have understood the body as the site where constriction is done and the possible liberation from restrictive control. Yet, How it would be to make an embodied emphasis on corporeality as a source of liberation? As a psychologist and aikido and yoga practitioner for more than 15 years, I have felt in my research on performance art how the bodywork processes lead to places and spaces of liberation, of possible emancipation even if it is momentary. In this paper, I explain how perceptual and embodied methods provide genuine tools to develop an interdisciplinary methodology based on kinesthesia and kinesthetic empathy to illuminate artists that generates knowledge in a corporeal manner. How do the artists Pola Weiss (Mexico, 1947-1990) and Ana Mendieta (Cuba, 1948- USA, 1985) become aware of their bodies through sensory bodily practices in relation to their environment in their video performances and films? Based on feminist theories about the body and agency (McNay 2000; Meynell 2009; Coole 2005; Krause 2011; Gilligan 2016) taking kinesthesia (Noland, 2009; Smith, 2023) as a method to empathize with the work, and from a situated knowledge, I approach this research with qualitative and corporal methodologies such as research-creation (Chapman & Sawchuk, 2012; Manning, 2016) and kinesthetic empathy (Reynolds and Reason 2012; Sklar 1994, 2008).
Keywords: kinesthesia, kinesthetic empathy, performance art, embodied methodologies