海外文化:文化塑造了我们的感官_BEC初级作文

海外文化:文化塑造了我们的感官

然而，人类确实就是这样。近年来，人类学家已经开始指出，感官知觉和文化有关。《深层感知：触摸的文化史》(The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch)的作者康斯坦斯·克拉森(Constance Classen)说，“感官知觉既是一种生理行为，也是一种文化。”有一个存在争议的说法因马歇尔·麦克卢汉(Marshall McLuhan)的坚持而出了名。他坚称，没有文字的社会是由口语和声音主导的，而有文字的社会会用视觉来体验词语，因此是由视觉统领的。如今的人类学家，基本不会简单地接受这个说法。但他们当中越来越多的人愿意提出，感官知觉和注意力的文化训练的关系，不亚于与生物学能力的联系。

Now they have some quantitative evidence to support the point. Recently, a team of anthropologists and psychologists at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University, both in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, set out to discover how language and culture affected sensory awareness. Under the leadership of Asifa Majid and Stephen C. Levinson, they made up a kit of systematic stimuli for the traditional five senses: for sight, color chips and geometric forms; for hearing, pitch, amplitude and rhythm variations; for smell, a set of scratch-and-sniff cards; and so forth. They took these kits to over 20 cultural groups around the world. Their results upend some of our basic assumptions.