Sociology of Senses and Sociology of Auditory Culture

There has been a flurry of studies on senses, sound, hearing and listening, alongside of studies on body, inhumanities and social sciences since the early 1990s. These studies reconsider the modern visualist paradigm,hegemony of vision and modernity through excavating other senses ― hearing, touch, taste, smell ― in varioussocial, historical and cultural contexts, therefore they share aims, concepts and theoretical frameworks with postmodernism,post-structuralism, gender studies, queer studies, post-colonialism, spatial-turn. This paper outlines thesociological perspective on relationships between senses and society, sees viewpoints of recent studies on senses,especially sound studies in a sociological light, and sheds light on the problems relating to ‘alternative’ ways ofthinking and ‘reflexivity’ ― positioning and accounting for own positions and questions ― which is insisted as animportant point of sensuous scholarship and sound studies. Including this abstract, studies on senses are obsessedwith visualist concepts and metaphors, and ‘alternative’ ways of thinking and ‘reflexivity’ should confront thisthorny problem which might not be solved by constructivism, contextualism and thought of ‘in-betweenness’which apparently deny dualisms. This paper also points out that sound studies must take seriously Judith Butler’sassertion: ‘It would make no sense to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a genderedcategory’, in order to reconsider dualisms; nature and society, sound and auditory culture, body (matter) andsociety, and sound studies should reflect its naturalistic name