Rethinking Touch: Touch Deprived Culture (After)

  Touch may be the most overlooked sense of all. Due to its extremely complex system, I personally find it the most fascinating. David Linden points out that touch is so deeply woven into our sense of self that we do not even have a word for being touch-blind.  

   In addition to its importance as a communication tool, touch plays an integral role in human development. Physical contact is a great bonding mechanism for all our close animal relatives. Physical intimacy is highly therapeutic, and touch has been long used for healing purposes.

   In spite of its importance in all aspects, we have a poor awareness of our sense of touch. As David Keltner describes, we live in a touch-phobic environment, resulting in a touch-deprived culture. It is even more crucial to address this issue now, because of the pandemic , we're becoming even more alienated from touch, in every aspect, from our bodies to our environment.

   We lost touch with nature - so our bodies, steadily as civilization developed, from our quadrepedal ancestors to modern humans. We have switched from crowded, intimate tribal living to a modern nuclear family system that organizes intimacy and limits it to close family members.

   As an academic field that studies the roles of senses throughout history, sensory history sheds more light on sense hiyerarcy and why touch is placed as a "lower" sense. Western culture has evolved through oral, literature, and finally, visual culture. Seeing was associated with high class and intellect, while touching with labor. Furthermore, patriarchal culture compelled women to housework and to be more associated with touch, smell, and taste, while men were out exploring the world with their eyes and ears. This audiovisual culture has only intensified with modernity, creating a new form of human being, sedentary, disconnected, and zombielike consumer: "The Society of Spactacles."