Tatsuma Padoan

This project aims at investigating the role of bodily perception in social life, by looking at everyday verbal and nonverbal semiotic practices of communication. Following the etymology of aesthetics as “aesthesis” – originally defined by philosopher Alexander Baumgarten as “sensuous cognition” (Wiseman 2007) – we propose to analyze the aesthetics of communication in everyday practices, including but not limited to artistic expression, in order to find new ways to understand the social role of sensory and affective interaction in producing and interpreting meanings and identities at the individual and collective level. In contrast to common reductions of senses to the physiological and biological nature of the brain and the nervous system, and starting from a socio-cultural anthropological approach as a general framework, we want to bring into conversation scholars working on linguistic anthropology, inter-species ethnography, semiotics, anthropology of STS, film and screen media, as well as video-makers and artists to investigate the sensory dimension within and without verbal language, as well as across and beyond the human. Such a redefinition of aesthetic communication will help us to rethink the role of perception in “making the social”, and in composing and recomposing our diverse, and increasingly hybrid, common world.