Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses is a highly original and comprehensive overview of the anthropology and sociology of the body and the senses. Discussing each sense in turn - seeing, hearing, touch, smell, and taste - Le Breton has written a truly monumental work, vast in scope and deeply engaging in style. Among other pioneering moves, he gives equal attention to light and darkness, sound and silence, and his disputation of taste explores aspects of disgust and revulsion. Part phenomenological, part historical, this is above all a cultural account of perception, which returns the body and the senses to the center of social life. Le Breton is the leading authority on the anthropology of the body and the senses in French academia. With a repute comparable to the late Pierre Bourdieu, his 30+ books have been translated into numerous languages. This is the first of his works to be made available in English. This sensuously nuanced translation of La Saveur du monde is accompanied by a spicy preface from series editor David Howes, who introduces Le Breton's work to an English-speaking audience and highlights its implications for the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and the cross-disciplinary field of sensory studies.

Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses is a highly original and comprehensive overview of the anthropology and sociology of the body and the senses. Discussing each sense in turn - seeing, hearing, touch, smell, and taste - Le Breton has written a truly monumental work, vast in scope and deeply engaging in style. Among other pioneering moves, he gives equal attention to light and darkness, sound and silence, and his disputation of taste explores aspects of disgust and revulsion. Part phenomenological, part historical, this is above all a cultural account of perception, which returns the body and the senses to the center of social life. Le Breton is the leading authority on the anthropology of the body and the senses in French academia. With a repute comparable to the late Pierre Bourdieu, his 30+ books have been translated into numerous languages. This is the first of his works to be made available in English. This sensuously nuanced translation of La Saveur du monde is accompanied by a spicy preface from series editor David Howes, who introduces Le Breton's work to an English-speaking audience and highlights its implications for the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and the cross-disciplinary field of sensory studies.

This third volume (after Vehicles and Architecture) in the series entitled Art Brut: The Collection, accompanying the Biennales de l'Art Brut, includes only works from the Lausanne museum, some of which have rarely been exhibited. The book contains a large number of drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures, reflecting the manifold representations of the human body in Art Brut, while paying close attention to the intimate relationship the artists have established with their creations. These works represent a sort of hand-to-hand combat; they are 'battles' in which no quarter is asked or given between the creator and his own image and unique personal history. For some the body is the refuge of a complex intimacy, for others it is a prison from which to escape, and for still others a storehouse of energy that needs to be set free and transformed. Rarely exhibited or published, Jean Dubuffet's prisoners' tattoos reveal how creations lying on the margins of art's traditional subject matter held a magnetic attraction for the founder of the concept of Art Brut, the core of the Lausanne museum's collection. The great 'classics' of Art Brut, such as Aloise Corbaz, rub shoulders with more recent discoveries, such as Eric Derkenne's body-faces, or the all-powerful 'nuclear trans-sexuality' of Giovanni Galli. The doubling of the self and a play of mirrors highlight the instinctive search for identity typical of Josef Hofer and Robert Gie. Whether dismembered and fragmented in Giovanni Bosco's work, or tightly gathered in cosmic unity in Guo Fengyi's creations, the body gives form to a perpetual flux which art can exploit to express existential experience.