ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This essay attempts to describe and explain disgust in relation to the sense of taste. Since the senses play a special role in how a person feels the emotion of disgust, it is legitimate to consider the senses when approaching the problem of disgust. Intuitively, sensation seems to be an area that should be approached neurophysiologically, but there is a social dimension to the problem of sensation that a neurophysiological approach cannot grasp. Gustatory experience takes place within a sociocultural framework, so judgments of aversive flavors are not made by taste buds, but depend on the sociocultural framework providing the standard evaluating what is disgusting (the sociality of gustatory experience). Gustatory experience is also related to social categories that produce distinctions, so the consumption of food operates as a principle of discriminative social group construction. Food taboos, i.e., the prohibition of gustatory experience of something, are also organized within a sociocultural framework. The person who eats the forbidden food may feel disgusted with himself, and moral condemnation, reprimand, and punishment are possible for others who eat the forbidden food. Some people practice abhorrent eating as a strategy of disgust to undermine the sacred. Finally, the article invokes Nietzsche's historical sense to ask the possessor of which sense is more noble.

키워드