“PAKAPA-KAPA”

AS AN APPROACH IN
PHILIPPINE PSYCHOLOGY
Author: Amaryllis Torres
 AMARYLLIS
TORRES
Amaryllis Torres is a Professor
Emeritus in the College of Social
Work and Community Development,
University of the Philippines
Diliman.
 Key
Points
Touch is an affective force or manifestation that is performed and expressed
through love, desire, communication, imagined belongingness, inclusivity,
devotion, and specific cultural practice.

 Torres explains that pagkapa, the Tagalog word for touching is an ethno
methodological approach in the study of behavior, culture, and society,
through the very specific and culture-bound meaning and usage of touch
(pamamaraan) in the Filipino/Tagalog consciousness and reality.

 Pagkapa ng isda, pagkapa ng daan, pagkapa sa dilim.

 O HA P T IC S A N D E R O T IC S
VIDE
AUTHOR: LAURA U. MARKS
LAURA U. MARKS

Laura U. Marks is a Professor in the School

for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser
University in Canada.

She has curated programs of film, video, and

new media for venues around the world.
Key Points

 Haptic perception is usually defined as the combination of tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive
functions, the way we experience touch both on the surface of and inside our bodies.

 In haptic visuality, the eyes themselves functions like organs of touch.

 Touch is a sense located on the surface of the body: thinking of cinema as haptic is only a step
towards considering the ways in which cinema appeals to the body as a whole.
 THE TACTILE EYE:
TOUCH AND THE
CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE
AUTHOR: JENNIFER M. BARKER
JENNIFER M. BARKER

Jennifer M. Barker teaches in the Moving Image

Studies area and serves as Director of Graduate
Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta,
Georgia.

Her work also appears in Cinema Journal, Discourse,

Film-Philosophy, New Review of Film & Television
Studies, Paragraph Screen, and in anthologies on the
iPhone, art and the senses, acting in moving image
culture, performance theory and feminist
experimental film.
Key Points

 Tactility is used by the author to elucidate on cinematic intimacy, the sensual dimension of
two-dimensional images, and perhaps as a critical tool that enlivens the viewer’s
experience in interpreting or reviewing film.

 The author has focused much attention to philosophical writings about touch, intimacy,
embodiment, and phenomenology.

 This essay is also very useful in helping you hone your ability to see, view, imagine, and
write critically on the topic of touch or as a beginning or intermediate art/film critic.
THE DUBIOS INHERITANCE OF
TOUCH: ART HISTORY AND AUTHOR: FIONA CANDLIN

MUSEUM ACCESS
 FIONA
CANDLIN
Fiona Candlin is Program Director
for the MA Museum Cultures, teaches
on BA and MA History of Art, and
supervises doctoral students working
on museums and display at the
Birkbeck University of London.
 Key Points

 In this essay the author examines how museums in our contemporary

world and practice offer touch as an entry point to understand the visual,
sonic, or displayed work or artifact.

 The author owes touch as a possible primary access to a full museum

experience not only because of the changing times of museum that allow
interactivity and inclusion of persons with disabilities or visual
impairments but also through previous writings of Western theorists.
 LISTENING TO
CAPOEIRA:
PHENOMENOLOGY,
EMBODIMENT, AND THE
MATERIALITY OF MUSIC
AUTHOR: GREG DOWNEY
GREG DOWNEY
Greg Downey is an anthropologist who
teaches and conducts research at Macquarie
University in Australia

He has contributed to Macquarie

University’s strength in researching and
teaching human diversity, evolution,
psychological variation, and human rights.
 Key Points
 The essay by Greg Downey explores the notion of touch within a lived, embodied, and performative
experience through music, dance, sports, or a combination of the three.

 The author’s narrative, on the other hand, involves an expression and explanation of internal
processes that he experienced as he observing and researching a cultural form, perhaps a sport or a
dance in the Brazilian word as capoiera.

 Touch as a form of sensing, does not just happen on the skin or the traditional notion of perception
through the surface of a sensitive body, but also as an immediate and contingent response deep
beneath the surface of the skin, or even inside the mind, or through other senses that are activated in
moments of witnessing, feeling, seeing, reading, watching, tasting, walking, around, manipulating,
performing, reacting to art.