Personhood, Senses and Artefacts: Tactile and Visual Experience in Perceiving the Immaterial Materially

This paper is dedicated to the nexus between personhood, sensory perception, and artefacts, all of them go around the body as a locus of experience integrated in the material world. Individuals and their own bodies are central in this perspective, but in the past the concept of individuality may have been based on relational identities rather than self-consciousness identities like today. This means that people had to negotiate their own personal identity in larger communities (family, group, clan, city, and so on) characterised by specific social practices they helped to formulate and maintain (Fowler 2004: 2-3; Fowler 2010: 352-385).