What is the sixth sense? Is it physical, mental or spiritual? Do we all possess it or is it unique to exceptional individuals? Might there be a seventh sense and an eighth sense as well? What role does culture play in determining the range of our perceptual abilities?

The search for a supplementary sense has taken many directions and yielded numerous possibilities for an "additional faculty" of perception - from magnetism and movement to dreaming and clairvoyance. Stimulating reflection and debate, The Sixth Sense Reader explores the cultural contexts which give rise to such reports of "psychic" and other powers that exceed the ordinary bounds of sense.

In this groundbreaking volume, leading scholars in history, anthropology and biology take the reader on a tour of the far borderlands of consciousness. From the world beneath to the world beyond the five senses, every potential avenue of sensation is opened up for investigation.

About the author

David Howes is Professor of Anthropology at Concordia University and the general editor of the Sensory Formations series from Berg. He is the author of Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory, co-author (with Constance Classen and Anthony Synnott) of Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell, and editor of Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, among other works.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Revolving Sensorium

PART I: BEARINGS
1 The Search for a Sixth Sense: The Cases for Vestibular, Muscle, and Temperature Senses
Nicholas J. Wade
2 Sense of Direction
W. H. Hudson
3 Bushman Presentiments
Wilhelm H. I. Bleek and Lucy C. Lloyd
4 Anatomy of Mysticism
Jess Byron Hollenback

PART II: HISTORICAL INVESTIGATIONS
5 The Five Senses in Classical Science and Ethics
Louise Vinge
6 The Mesmerism Investigation and the Crisis of Sensationist Science
Jessica Riskin
7 Swedenborg's Celestial Sensorium: Angelic Authenticity, Religious Authority, and the American New Church Movement
Leigh Eric Schmidt
8 The Erotics of Telepathy: The British SPR's
Experiments in Intimacy
Pamela Thurschwell
9 Intuition and Reason in the New Age: A Cultural Study of Medical Clairvoyance
Ruth Barcan
10 Refusing to Give Up the Ghost: Some Thoughts on the Afterlife from Spirit Photography to Phantom Films
Pamela Thurschwell

PART III: UNCANNY SENSATIONS
11 The Sense of Being Stared At
Rupert Sheldrake
12 Tactility and Distraction
Michael Taussig

PART IV: CROSS-CULTURAL INVESTIGATIONS
13 Sense-Experience and Mystical Experience
Mircea Eliade
14 Peyote and the Mystic Vision
Barbara G. Myerhoff
15 The Embodiment of Symbols and the Acculturation of the Anthropologist
Carol Laderman
16 Sensing Divinity, Death, and Resurrection: Theorizing Experience through Miracles
Bilinda Straight
17 Zulu Dreamscapes: Senses, Media, and Authentication in Contemporary Neo-Shamanism
David Chidester

ABCDERIUM of Extra/Sensory Powers

Notes on Contributors
Copyright Acknowledgments
Index