The so-called “cultural turn” in foreign relations history has produced the revelation, among others, that participants in encounters between people and nations have not just brains but bodies. People do not only think about each other, even in order to dominate them; they meet each other hand to hand, face to face, body to body; they form impressions of others and have feelings about them. Their reactions are not always considered but may be instinctive and visceral. People feel about each other a mix of wonder at the seemingly different, and fear – of bodily penetration, pollution, or infection. The body is a membrane, as Laura Otis has argued, permitting osmosis that may be pleasurable or enlightening but also threatening. In their encounter with the new and strange, people feel – delight and alarm, hope and danger, arousal and disgust, exhilaration and terror.

It is through their senses that people apprehend each other and their environments. The senses are to some extent physiological phenomena. Yet it will not do to place the senses entirely in the realm of biology, for sensory perceptions are the products of history and culture. The body registers from its sensory encounters not fixed, universally held impressions, but interpretations of what it apprehends based on its experiences learned over time and according to place. The human “sensorium” has changed through time, as print largely replaced the oral transmission of information in modernizing societies and thus elevated sight over hearing and the other senses. What humans liked as sounds, smells, feeling, and tastes changed too, for reasons that were both sanitary and aesthetic. As Norbert Elias has argued, changes in manners during the European Enlightenment reflected new ways of contrasting the civilized with the primitive, with far-reaching consequences for the senses. What looks attractive, sounds pleasant, smells appealing, feels right, and tastes good varies according to cultural and individual predilection. “So,” concludes Robert Jütte, “there can be no such thing as a natural history of the senses, only a social history of human sense perception.”

To each sensory stimulus there is an emotional response, or several responses. Encounters with the unfamiliar often inspire the most powerful sensory and emotional reactions; the perceived strangeness of the Other is registered in the strength of the body's response to it. But there is nothing inherent in Otherness.