Listening-touch, affect and the crafting of medical bodies through percussion (original) (raw)
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Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2017
Examining the mechanisms of medical knowledge transfer, this article addresses the ways nonvisual senses are employed within medical training, asking about the role of sound, touch, and movement in transmitting knowledge of the body. Based on a 10-month ethnography in a medical massage training course for blind students, the article examines the ways sensory medical knowledge is transferred in this setting. I discuss the multisensory characteristics of medical knowledge transfer, and the dual process inherent in this sensory pedagogy, in which senses such as touch and hearing undergo medicalization and scientification, while medicine enters the realm of the sensorial. Contributing to emerging research of nonvisual senses in medical training, this case study allows rethinking larger processes of medical knowing, challenging the dominancy of vision as the means of scientific knowledge transmission, and exposing the multisensorial elements of medical perception, and learning in general.
Ways of Knowing the Body, Bodily Ways of Knowing
Music Theory Online
The central role of the body in producing music is hardly debatable. Likewise, the body has always played at least an implicit role in music theory, but has only been raised as a factor in music analysis relatively recently. In this essay I present a brief update of the body in music analysis via case studies, situated in the disciplines of music theory and music cognition, broadly construed. This current trajectory is part of a broader shift away from the musical score as the sole focus for analysis, which admittedly—though, in my view, delightfully—raises a host of challenging epistemological questions surrounding the interaction of performer (production) and listener (perception). While the concomitant research methodologies and technologies may be unfamiliar to scholars trained in humanities disciplines, I advocate for a full embrace of these approaches, either by individual researchers or in the form of cross-disciplinary collaboration.
The amplification of the Senses Body Prosthetics and the Logos of the Musical Instrument
This paper examines in primis the relationship between the human body and the musical instrument; the phenomenology of music making, thinking and praxis: what is the association between the five senses (conventionally identified as touch, hearing, sight, smell, and taste) and the production of sound? The bond between the human body and the musical instrument; the relationship of the sensorium with sound architectures in music composition; the hearing experience of sound and music… Touching the sound, hearing the score, smelling the notes, seeing the sounds, tasting the timbres: this paper suggests that recombinatory potentialities, permeable vessels of sensing, are part of sound perception and the act of performing, composing, and listening to music. Furthermore this paper proposes that learning the body before learning music, by making the human body musical, immersed in deep listening, is a fundamental aspect of understanding the kinetic, proprioceptive, and haptic feedback involved in the musical gesture. I investigate the musical score and its anatomy, drawing a direct connection between notation practices and the implied kinetic gesture: a soundography, mapping the topography of bodily gestures through musical notation; I observe and inquire how the ‘education’ of the body within the pact of the social milieu (restrictions, regulations, accepted practices, routines) produces a frail and vulnerable relationship between the body itself and the senses, drastically altering and depleting the perception of sound and the experience of music. By developing a pedagogy of the senses, enhancing transformative practices of the body’s sensuous experiences (with close similarities to the Japanese dance practice butō), putting the human body at the centre of the sonic experience, suggesting strategies of body learning, this paper trace possible pathways of further investigation, research and pedagogical outcomes.
Medical education of attention: A qualitative study of learning to listen to sound
Introduction: There has been little qualitative research examining how physical examination skills are learned, particularly the sensory and subjective aspects of learning. The authors set out to study how medical students are taught and learn the skills of listening to sound. Methods: As part of an ethnographic study in Melbourne, 15 semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with students and teachers as a way to reflect explicitly on their learning and teaching. Results: From these interviews, we found that learning the skills of listening to lung sounds was frequently difficult for students, with many experiencing awkwardness, uncertainty, pressure, and intimidation. However not everyone found this process difficult. Often those who had studied music reported finding it easier to be attentive to the frequency and rhythm of body sounds and find ways to describe them. Conclusions: By incorporating, distinctively in medical education, theoretical insights into “attentiveness” from anthropology and science and technology studies, the article suggests that musical education provides medical students with skills in sensory awareness. Training the senses is a critical aspect of diagnosis that needs to be better addressed in medical education. Practical approaches for improving students’ education of attention are proposed.
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xCoAx 2021 9th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X, 2021
Building body knowledge is a multi-disciplinary, interpersonal endeavor that implicates medical imaging capabilities, scientific institutions, and datafication of personhood in popular culture. Drawing on existing scholarship in critical digital health studies, we contribute an articulation of how self-tracking leads to a paradox of control: the motivation to extend body knowledge is complicated by the experience of available consumer tools. Self-tracking as a mechanism of biopower underpins this paradox of control and contextualizes the subversive or resistant aims of the proposed resolutions. Prior work has suggested paths of subversion and resistance through available consumer technologies, as well as a critique of how these technologies are designed. Our work focuses on relating biotechnologically mediated art to the use of self-tracking tools more generally. This article is intended for both artists working with biological data or matter, and consumers of self-tracking technology who are interested in adapting these tools as creative means for building body knowledge. We turn to contemporary artworks constructed using biological material or bodily observation to find resolutions to the paradox of control, which include (1) renegotiating the relationship to institutions, (2) mobilizing available tools for unconventional narratives, and (3) embracing biological material.
This is about the body, the mind, the academy, the clinic, time, and pain
Doctoral dissertation, 2022
Link: https://visforvali.github.io/bmactp/index.html This dissertation explores how meanings are made around a queer Eelam Tamil fibromyalgic woman scholar's bodymind in biomedical and academic settings to excavate broader cultural relationships between chronic pain, ocularcentrism and the Euro-Western sensory hierarchy, the myth of objectivity, and submerged decolonial ways of knowing. This research interrogates how we think and talk about pain, how we engage each other about each other's pain, and how language, gesture, academic conventions, biomedicalization, and technological interventions into the body converge to standardize expressions and representations of pain that align with whiteliness and bourgeois civility. Using autoethnography, meta-ethnography, and disability studies approaches, I examine my analysis of my own pain — at critical moments of diagnosis, rejection, interruption, and rupture — as both a patient who is denied expertise and a scholar who is presumed to be an expert, to deindividuate the singular experience of chronic pain and recover what is desirable and resistive about the ontology of chronic pain and fatigue.
Re-enchanting the body: overcoming the melancholy of anatomy
Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 2018
I argue here that Weberian disenchantment is manifest in the triumph of instrumental reason and the expansion of analytic enquiry, which now dominates not simply those sciences upon which medicine depends, but medical practice itself. I suggest ways that analytic enquiry, also referred to here as anatomical reasoning, are part of a particular ideology-a way of seeing, speaking about, and inhabiting the world-that often fails to serve the health of patients because it is incapable of "seeing" them in the moral sense described by Iris Murdoch and others. I use the work of James Elkins and Wendell Berry to call for the recovery of a way of seeing the human body as both other and more than an object of scientific enquiry and social control.