Can These Dry Bones Live?

An Anthropological Approach to the

History of the Senses

David Howes

David Howes is professor of anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal, the director of the Concordia Sensoria Research Team (http://alcor.concordia.ca/~senses/), and the general editor of the Sensory Formations series
from Berg Publishers of Oxford.
I wish to thank Ed Linenthal and Mark Smith for the invitation to contribute to this special section of the
JAH.
Readers may contact Howes at howesd@alcor.concordia.ca.
1
Alain Corbin, Histoire et anthropologie sensorielle (History and sensory anthropology), Anthropologie et
Socits, 14 (no. 2, 1990), 1324. For an English translation, see Alain Corbin, Charting the Cultural History of
the Senses, in Empire of the Senses, ed. David Howes (Oxford, 2004). See further Alain Corbin, The Foul and the
Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).
2
Michael Bull et al., Introducing Sensory Studies, Senses and Society, 1 (March 2006), 57. American historians will have noticed the senses being stirred up in recent works in their field, including Leigh Schmidt, Hearing
Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 2000); Peter Charles Hoffer, Sensory
Worlds in Early America (Baltimore, 2003); Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenbergs Modernism and the
Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago, 2005); Roger Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation (Baltimore, 2006); and Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses
(Chapel Hill, 2006).

442

The Journal of American History

September 2008

Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org by guest on March 29, 2011

Eighteen years ago the eminent French social historian Alain Corbin, author of The Foul
and the Fragrant (1986), generously agreed to contribute to a journal issue I was editing
on the anthropology of the senses. Corbins article in that issue, Histoire et anthropologie sensorielle (1990), discussed the role played by the organization of the sensory
regime in the formation of the social imagination.1 The moment is now ripe for me to
repay that favor by making my own anthropological contribution to the history of the
senses in this round table in the Journal of American History.
It is gratifying to see that what has been called the sensorial revolution in the humanities and social sciences has now come to the field of American history.2 In what follows,
I would like to offer an overview of how the senses are studied in anthropology and how
that anthropological approach might be relevant to the historical study of the social life
of the senses in America and elsewhere. This account will be interspersed with references
to the companion essays in this round table by my colleagues in American history, all of
which point to the fruitfulness of a sensorial approach to the interpretation of the past.
Those references also underscore the mutually enriching association between the disciplines of history and anthropology that has emerged from their overlapping focus on the
sensate.
Eighteen years ago the cultural study of sensory perception was in its infancy. The
anthropology of the body had been well established since Mary Douglass seminal work
Purity and Danger in 1966. In that work Douglas asserted that the body and its parts afford a source of symbols for other complex structures. Important works by other anthropologists followed that examined the symbolic roles of bodily functions and forms across

An Anthropological Approach to the History of Senses

443

3
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo (1966; London, 1978), 115.
Compare, for example, the essays on handedness in Rodney Needham, ed., Right and Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic
Classification (Chicago, 1973); with the attention to the varieties of tactile experience in holding a calabash as distinct from a glass or wearing local robes as opposed to Western clothing in Kathryn Linn Geurts and Elvis Gershon
Adikah, Enduring and Endearing Feelings and the Transformation of Material Culture in West Africa, in Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums, and Material Culture, ed. Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth Phillips
(Oxford, 2006), 3560.
4
Compare, for example, the discussions of food in Richard B. Lee, What Humans Do for a Living; or, How to
Make Out on Scarce Resources, in Man the Hunter, ed. Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore (Chicago, 1968), 3043;
and Paul Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology (Philadelphia, 1989), 1522, 3234.
The first centers on the nutritive properties of the mongongo nut; the second concerns the social messages conveyed
by different-tasting sauces. Gabriella M. Petrick and Gerard J. Fitzgerald, In Good Taste: Rethinking American
History with Our Palates, Journal of American History, 95 (Sept. 2008), 392404, esp. 396.
5
Constance Classen, Inca Cosmology and the Human Body (Salt Lake City, 1993).
6

While the sources of history are typically visual, that fact did not preclude Renaissance historians from imagining themselves in aural contact with the past and giving voice to historical characters or using the vocative case to address their audience, nor did it prevent romantic historians (such as Augustin Thierry and William H. Prescott) who
happened to be blind and could write only with the aid of a noctograph from being credited by their contemporaries
with superior insight into the invisible past. In both cases the sensory model of the larger society imprinted itself
on the historiography of the period. See D. R. Woolf, Speech, Text, and Time: The Sense of Hearing and the Sense
of the Past in Renaissance England, Albion, 18 (Summer 1986), 15993; and Jo Tollebeek, Seeing the Past with
the Minds Eye: The Consecration of the Romantic Historian, Clio, 29 (Winter 2000), 16791. The contemporary
equivalent would perhaps be multimedia history, as exemplified by the work of my colleagues in the Centre for Oral
History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University, Montreal, http://storytelling.concordia.ca.

Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org by guest on March 29, 2011

cultures. Most of this work, however, was curiously desensualized. The symbolic value of
the hands in a particular culture might be described but no mention made of the sense of
touch.3 The bodily function of eating might be examined at length without any reference
to the sense of taste. The curiousness of the latter elision, which also affected historical
writing, is noted by Gabriella M. Petrick and Gerard J. Fitzgerald in their contribution to
this section.4 It was not until the 1990s that an anthropology of the senses infused the anthropology of the body. In 1993 the Canadian cultural historian Constance Classen published Inca Cosmology and the Human Body, which examined Inca and European models
of the body and the senses at the time of the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century.5
Since the formative period of the early 1990s, the anthropology of the senses has blossomed into a major field with new works on the subject appearing every year.
Why did the social life of the senses develop more rapidly as a field for inquiry in anthropology than in sociology or history? One answer is that anthropologists, typically
coming from Western, urban backgrounds, had their senses awakened by the new sounds,
smells, and savors of the non-Western societies in which they usually undertook their
fieldwork. Sociologists, customarily working in a more familiar sensory landscape, did
not undergo a similar jolting of their senses. Historians, relying primarily on texts and
visual images for their source material, did not experience the direct physical impact of
novel sensations.6
A related answer is that anthropologists customarily work with small-scale groups, relying in large part on techniques of participant observation for their material. That approach requires a profound physical as well as intellectual integration into the culture under study. (It has jokingly been said that the ultimate aim of every anthropologist is to be
ritually adopted as a kinsperson by his or her informants.) Living and working alongside
ones informants directly inserts an anthropologist into the sensory and social dynamics
of the culture under study. Sociologists, by contrast, have typically focused on large-scale
social institutions and phenomena or relied on survey data and have lacked a prolonged,
intimate contact with a particular group of people and their way of life. Traditionally, his-

444

The Journal of American History

September 2008

torians not only had no physical interaction with the peoples they studied, but focused on
presenting a birds-eye view of social institutions and events. As a result, historians often
missed out on the intimate sensations of life on the ground.
As Alan Macfarlane noted in Anthropology and History (1988), the period between
1960 and 1980 witnessed an important shift in the purview of traditional historiography
as a result of the transplantation of anthropological techniques and interests into historical studies. The anthropological turn made everyday practices and popular beliefs fit topics for serious historical inquiry. These topics included:

The social historians of that time laid the groundwork for the later development of a
full-bodied history of the senses that would be similarly centered on the study of popular
culture (as opposed, for example, to a history of the senses based on philosophical and
medical texts, interesting as such intellectual histories might be to the contemporary
mind).7
One might nevertheless wonder why even anthropologists took so long to apply themselves to the study of what was literally under their noses from the start. Here we see how
ideological interests and concerns delayed the development of an anthropology of the
senses. The early anthropologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were
indeed interested in the sensory lives of the indigenous peoples they studied. However,
their interest customarily went hand in hand with a firm belief that indigenous peoples
primitive nature would be manifested by their heightened attention to the primitive
senses of smell, taste, and touch. Much of the sensory data anthropologists of that period
collected was explicitly or implicitly used to associate the lower races with the lower
senses and the higher races with the higher senses. Such integration of a social hierarchy with a sensory hierarchy appears in the work of a prominent nineteenth-century
natural historian, who characterized Africans as skin-men, Australians as tongue-men,
Native Americans as nose-men, Asians as ear-men, and Europeans as eye-men.8
Increasing criticism and disavowal of racial stereotypes from the 1920s on led anthropologists to turn away from the study of sensory practices and proclivities. At that time
many anthropologists also preferred to concentrate on abstracting and analyzing the social ideals and systems of the cultures they studied. The sensory traits of culture were often disdained as mere packagingmore suitable for a tourist brochure than a scholarly
7
Alan Macfarlane, Anthropology and History, in The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians, ed. John Cannon et
al. (Oxford, 1988). It took anthropologists longer to absorb the lessons of history into their research, but absorb
them they have, as evidenced by the work of Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983); and especially Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vols. I and
II (Chicago, 1991). Representative intellectual histories include Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought
(Berkeley, 1994); and Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (Ithaca, 2004).
8
See Nlia Dias, La mesure des sens: Les anthropologues et le corps humain au XIXe sicle (The measure of the senses: Anthropologists and the human body in the nineteenth century) (Paris, 2004). David Howes, Sensual Relations:
Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor, 2003), 36.

Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org by guest on March 29, 2011

conflict, ceremony, work discipline, time, space, myths, folklore, style and fashion,
oral and literate culture, birth, death, dreams, suicide, animals . . . [and particularly
witchcraft and magical beliefs]. The formal historical documents usually conceal
such topics, so that it was largely under the pressure of anthropology that a vigorous
development of the study of past mentality and emotional structures took place,
exemplified in the work of historians such as E. Hobsbawm, E. Le Roy Ladurie, E.
P. Thompson, and Keith Thomas.

An Anthropological Approach to the History of Senses

445

Observing, Understanding, Interpreting, and Comparing

Undertaking an anthropology of the senses consists of three parts: (1) observing the
sensory characteristics of a culture, (2) understanding those sensory characteristics in
their own cultural context, and (3) interpreting and analyzing the collected material in a
broader cultural, disciplinary, and perhaps cross-cultural perspective.
The first step when undertaking an anthropology or a history of the senses is to set
aside ones own sensory model, to the extent possible, and to attend to the sensory dynamics of the culture under study. When one considers that higher education caters virtually exclusively to the senses of sight and hearing and that academics work and think in
an audiovisual world, that is no mean feat. Universities offer courses or degrees in visual
anthropology, visual sociology, visual history, or simply visual studies, but none in olfactory culture or tactile studies. As James W. Cook points out in his article on visual history
in this round table, there are many contemporary critiques of such Western ocularcentrism.11 But, while it is true that we both love and hate our master sense, even criticism of
the hegemony of vision keeps our eyes fixed firmly on vision and away from the nonvisual
9
Howes, Sensual Relations, 1728. The turn to the narrative-linguistic is a dominating fact of twentieth-century
scholarship. On its expressions in the discipline of history, see Barry C. Knowlton, The Linguistic Turn and the
Discipline of History (Ph.D. diss., Boston College, 1998); Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, 1999); and Elizabeth Clark, History, Theory,
Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).
10
Edmund Carpenters work on sensory perception had a major influence on the thought of his then colleague
at the University of Toronto, Marshall McLuhan. See Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto, 2002).
11
James W. Cook, Seeing the Visual in U.S. History, Journal of American History, 95 (Sept. 2008), 43241,
esp. 43233.

Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org by guest on March 29, 2011

work. One might say that while historians have often struggled to bring the dry bones of
archival material to life, anthropologists have put effort into turning the all-too-sensuous
and fleshy nature of culture into the orderly bare bones of social fact.
The linguistic turn in the anthropology of the 1970s and 1980s made it fashionable
to treat cultures as texts that could be read by a knowledgeable anthropologist. That
turn further impeded the development of a sensory anthropology by promoting a purely
visual and literary model of cultureas well as one alien to the oral-aural cultures often studied by anthropologists. A similar paradigm shift swept over historiography in the
same period and likewise contributed to the sleep of the senses, which it has taken the last
two decades to begin to dispel.9
The return of anthropologists to their senses required three things. First, that the study
of the role of the senses across cultures be disassociated from traditional hierarchies that
linked the so-called lower senses to supposedly lower races. Second, that the central role
of the senses as mediators and shapers of social knowledge and values be recognized.
Third, that sensory practices and values be related to a societys sensory model or way of
understanding the world through the senses. There have always been exceptional anthropologists whose work was rich in sensory material. Distinguished examples include Margaret Mead, Claude Lvi-Strauss, Victor Turner, and Edmund Carpenter.10 Yet the development of an anthropology of the senses demanded that specific sensory data be situated
in a cultural paradigm of perceptionnot simply the world view of traditional anthropology, but a multisensory cosmology, a world harmony and world scent.

446

The Journal of American History

September 2008

Whatever the scope of the subject matter a sociocultural dimension is essential in a

sensory history. A history of perfume, for example, does not constitute a history of
the senses unless it relates perfume practices to social trends and ideologies. Similarly the investigation of the sensory worlds of past eras should not merely describe
the range of sounds and smells that existed in a particular time, as evocative as
12
Of particular note is Gabriella M. Petricks practice of cooking up the past; see Petrick and Fitzgerald, In
Good Taste, 393. Attempts

at reproducing the life world (and the sensory world) of the past have become increasingly popular. See Hoffer, Sensory Worlds in Early America, 813; and Robert Jtte, A History of the Senses: From
Antiquity to Cyberspace (Oxford, 2005), 16. On the links between this development and the sensorial revolution in
the academy and in the larger society of late capitalism, see David Howes, Hyperaesthesia; or, The Sensual Logic
of Late Capitalism, in Empire of the Senses, ed. Howes, 281303.
13
Ian Ritchie, The Nose Knows: Bodily Knowing in Isaiah 11:3, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament,
87 (March 2000), 5973; Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley, 2006); Richard Cullen Rath, Hearing American History, Journal of American History, 95 (Sept.
2008), 41731, esp. 417; Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, 2003).

Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org by guest on March 29, 2011

world. (A wry analogy would be if the field of gender studies were both to promote and to
criticize the social dominance of men but rarely to examine the experiences and history of
women.) Turning away from this fascination with visual imagery in order to attune oneself to other sensory modalities requires swimming against the current of academic culture. It should be noted, however, that the anthropology of the senses does not preclude
the study of visual culture. It does argue that nonvisual phenomena should not be left out
of the picture and that contemporary Western visual models should not be arbitrarily imposed on other cultures or, in historical research, on past cultures.
Historians must rely heavily on written accounts as they cannot engage in the timehonored anthropological practice of participant observation (except after the fact by experiencing modern survivals or re-creations of the subject of their study).12 Much happens
in any society that is not talked about or written down, either because it is supressed or
taken for granted or because language is not considered the proper medium for its expression. A historian might get insight into the unvoiced and unwritten by examining such
material as artifacts, images, inventories (which might be informative about, for example,
perfume use or culinary ingredients), and outsiders accounts (such as travel writings,
which often note practices left undescribed in local accounts).
The importance of going to original sources for information when possible need hardly
be pointed out to a readership of historians. Later rewritings and translations customarily reinterpret material according to the sensory and social biases of the time. The Bible
presents many examples. The passage in Isaiah 11, for example, that originally stated that
the Messiah would judge people by smell is stripped of any olfactory reference in modern translations to cater to an odor-denying contemporary public. In his essay Hearing
American History for this round table (which builds on his barrier-breaking book on
how colonial America sounded), Richard Cullen Rath recorded intriguing examples of
how early modern accounts of thunder were rewritten to refer instead to lightning. When
dealing with a subject matter so often culturally repositioned as sensory phenomena, it
is evident that reliance on secondary or translated material may well lead to misinterpretations.13
The most acute attention to the sensory characteristics of a particular culture, present
or past, can only provide us with a basis for further investigation. As Constance Classen
noted in her review of the history of the senses in the Encyclopedia of European Social History:

An Anthropological Approach to the History of Senses

447

that might be, but should uncover the meanings those sounds and smells had for
people.14

14
Constance Classen, The Senses, in Encyclopedia of European Social History, ed. P. N. Stearns, vol. IV (New
York, 2001), 35657.
15
On the locus of thinking, see Kenneth Kensinger, How Real People Ought to Live: The Cashinahua of Eastern Peru (Prospect Heights, 1995), 280. On solar symbolism, see Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the
Senses in History and across Cultures (London, 1993), 12231.
16
Constance Classen, Touch in the Museum, in The Book of Touch, ed. Constance Classen (Oxford, 2006),
27586; Mark M. Smith, Getting in Touch with Slavery and Freedom, Journal of American History, 95 (Sept.
2008), 38191, esp. 384; Cook, Seeing the Visual in U.S. History, 43738.

Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org by guest on March 29, 2011

The problem with remaining at the level of description is that such an approach fails
to control for the writers own sensory biases. An outside investigator, for example, might
overemphasize certain sensory characteristics (this occurs most notably with the visual
dimensions of culture). Indeed, it may not be possible for an outsider to pick up on all
the sensory phenomena considered important by a culture, either because of her or his
inability to perceive the fine distinctions of sensations deemed meaningful or because of
not readily apparent sensory associations or emphases. One of the lessons anthropologists
often learn firsthand is that the most commonplace assumptions of Western culture (say,
for example, that thinking takes place in the brain) are otherwise construed by other peoples. Whereas westerners, for example, traditionally associate the sun with light and sight,
the Tzotzil of Mexico give priority to its production of heat and tactile effects; the smellminded Ongee, who live in the Andaman Islands off the coast of India, assign an odor
to the sun. In certain cultures the sensory importance of lightning, discussed by Richard
Rath in his essay here, does not lie so much in either the flash or the crash as it does in the
tactile connection lightning seems to establish between heaven and earththe transformative touch of a gods finger.15
The direct references to sensory experience that the members of a culture make may
likewise not always mean what they seem to mean. For example, the term seeing might
express a complex of sensory experiences and not simply a visual act. Accounts of visitors
seeing a seventeenth-century museum, for example, did not necessarily mean that seeing was all they did. At the time handling was often thought integral to a proper viewing, as seventeenth-century Europeans regarded sight as an unreliable sense that needed
to be supplemented by the firm probings of touch. Belief in the insufficiency of sight as a
vehicle of information can also be found in more modern times. Mark M. Smith, for example, noted a suspicion of visual appearances among nineteenth-century slave buyers in
his essay on touch and slavery, while James W. Cook explored how the visual trickery of
circus impressarios made nineteenth-century spectators similarly distrust their eyes.16
One cannot rely solely on ones own attentiveness to source material to provide a culturally informed description of the sensory world others experienced. Thus the next step
in the pursuit of the cultural study of the senses is to situate ones material in cultural
context. This is a stage sometimes skipped by researchers, particularly those working outside of anthropology, who prefer to go straight from the stage of description to the stage
of interpretation. The pitfall here is that the interpretation may well have much more to
do with the contemporary interests and emphases of the researchers own circle or culture than with the experiences and values of the peoples under study. For example, the
highly sexualized nature of contemporary Western culture has led many scholars to interpret almost any form of sensuality, but especially practices of touch, as essentially erotic
in nature. The value of such interpretations, however, may lie more in what they tell us

448

The Journal of American History

September 2008

17
See David Howes, Freuds Nose, in Nose Book: Representations of the Nose in Literature and the Arts, ed. Victoria de Rijke, Lene Ostermark-Johansen, and Helen Thomas (London, 2000), 26581; and Howes, Sensual Relations, 2023.
18
On the methodology of sensory anthropology, see Part VIII: Sensorial Fieldwork, in Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader, ed. Antonius Robben and Jeffrey Sluka (Oxford, 2007); and David Howes and
Constance Classen, Sounding Sensory Profiles, in The Varieties of Sensory Experience, ed. David Howes (Toronto,
1991), 25788. On anthropologists increasing use of video recordings in their research and inclusion of dvds with
their monographs, see Sarah Pink, The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses (London, 2006); and Tomie
Hahn, Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance (Middletown, 2007).
19

Rath, Hearing American History, 422. I call this the phenomenological fallacy. It is also present in anthroplogy, as exemplified by Thomas J. Csordas, Somatic Modes of Attention, Cultural Anthropology, 8 (May 1993),
13556.
20
See David Howes, Scent, Sound, and Synesthesia: Intersensoriality and Material Culture Theory, in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley et al. (London, 2006), 16172. Smith, Getting in Touch with
Slavery and Freedom, 382. It might be objected that the fivefold structure of this round table does not leave any
space for the discussion of the sixth sense, whether it be defined scientifically (as proprioception) or Spiritualistically (as seeing dead peoplein the words of the Cole Sear character in the film The Sixth Sense). See Nicholas Wade, The Search for a Sixth Sense, in The Sixth Sense Reader, ed. David Howes (Oxford, forthcoming); and

Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org by guest on March 29, 2011

post-Freudians about our own obsessions than in what they reveal about cultures of other
places and times.17
In attempting to situate material in cultural context, the anthropologist seems to have
the advantage over the historian. The anthropologist can simply ask the people being
studied what a practice or statement means; the historian cannot. The advantage is limited, however, for to their chagrin anthropologists often find that informants have little
to tell. Time and again, attempts to probe the significance of a particular act are met with
incomprehension or a simple this is the way we have always done it. Certain sensory domains, such as smell, may be little elaborated in language yet highly elaborated in ritual.
Anthropologists have hence learned to use a variety of sources, from informants statements to stories and myths to ritual and customary practices, to make sense of the cultural
landscape in which particular acts and statements are formulated.18
Here I have a bone to pick with Richard Rath, who asserted that shifts in the cultural
importance of different senses are purely due to the role of attention, which acts as a filter
on sensory data, letting some through to consciousness but not others.19 While I agree
that we all prioritize certain sensory impressions and reduce others to mere background
noise, I would argue that we also actively create sensory environments that provide us
with more of the particular sensations our culture deems meaningful and less of all the
others. Thus the rise in the importance of visuality in modernity was due not simply to
a greater consciousness of visual phenomena, but to a whole complex of scientific, technological, social, and economic processes that opened more and more of the world up to
our eyes. The invention of optical instruments allowed visual access both to the distant
face of the moon and the microscopic world of a nearby pond, the development of surgical practices made it possible to peer inside the previously hidden recesses of the human
body, and the proliferation of exhibitions and shows transformed the world into a visual
spectacle. Sensory worlds are shaped by their inhabitants and not simply experienced in
different ways over time as patterns of attention shift.
Any study of culture necessarily introduces a rupture in the interwoven patterns of cultural life by singling out certain topics for examination and leaving out others. Exploring
the cultural role of one sense while leaving out the others similarly ruptures the complex
web of relationships among the senses. I have elsewhere referred to this web of sensory
relations as intersensoriality and advocated exploration of the interplay of the senses (a
point that Mark M. Smith aptly developed in his contribution).20 Studies focusing on

An Anthropological Approach to the History of Senses

449

Pamela Thurschwell, Refusing to Give Up the Ghost, ibid. The agenda of this round table might also be extended
toward the analysis of the insensible. See Joy Parr, A Working Knowledge of the Insensible? Radiation Protection
in Nuclear Generating Stations, 19621992, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48 (Oct. 2006), 82051.
My point is that the definition of the bounds of sense in any given period are always a matter of convention and
therefore potentially subject to contestation.
21
See note 6 above.
22
On George Orwells statement, see Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: The
Cultural History of Smell (London, 1994), 166. Smith, How Race Is Made. See further Mark M. Smith, Sensory History (Oxford, 2007). Connie Y. Chiang, The Nose Knows: The Sense of Smell in American History, Journal of
American History, 95 (Sept. 2008), 40516, esp. 413; Lisa Law, Home Cooking: Filipino Women and Geographies
of the Senses in Hong Kong, in Empire of the Senses, ed. Howes, 22441; Robert Desjarlais, Movement, Stillness:
On the Sensory World of a Shelter for the Homeless Mentally Ill, ibid., 36979. Constance Classen, The Color of
Angels: Cosmology, Gender, and the Aesthetic Imagination (London, 1998).

Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org by guest on March 29, 2011

a particular sensory domain may nonetheless be undertaken for valid reasons, such as a
wish to bring out previously underexamined sensory dimensions of a culture or a discovery that data on other sensory phenomena are limited. But when related sensory material can be added to such a study, even briefly, it enriches the work by placing its data in
context and alerting readers to the sensory world that lies outside the framework of the
project at hand.21
The last stage in the cultural study of the senses that I will discuss here is interpretation.
One might wonder why this often hazardous stage is necessary. Is it not enough to situate
ones material in an adequate cultural context, explaining its significance for the people
under study? An interpretive commentary is not, in fact, absolutely necessary, but it may
be very useful. Anthropologists refer to the natives point of view as an emic perspective.
The outsiders view is called the etic perspective. Interpreting the sensory and social values
of a culture from an etic perspective allows one to present models and analyses that are
not explicit within the culture itself. For example, the notion of a society having a valueladen model of sensory perception might never occur to its members (who tend to live
their culture rather than theorize it). Yet, if well supported by cultural data, the formulation of such a model by an anthropologist or historian could provide a highly useful device for understanding and situating the sensory dynamics of that society.
Another area in the cultural study of the senses that often requires the interpretive skills
of the researcher for its elucidation is the relationship of sensory values to social constructs
of gender, class, and ethnicity. This relationship may be explicitly stated by a society but
is just as likely to be implicit and conveyed through practices and beliefs. George Orwell
once wrote that the real secret of class distinctions in the West could be summed up in
four frightful words . . . The lower classes smell. The uncovering of such sensory secrets
lies at the heart of a socially conscious history of the senses. Mark Smiths work on the sensory coding of race, in this round table and in his book, How Race Is Made (2006), offers a
fine example of such a history. Another example of a socially and politically aware history
of the senses can be found in Connie Y. Chiangs article here, which considers how local
responses to the odors or supposed odors of Chinese settlements in Monterey, California,
tapped into existing anti-Chinese sentiment. Anthropological work in this area includes
Lisa Laws study of the olfactory and gustatory imprint of Filipino workers in Hong Kong
and Robert Desjarlaiss investigation of the sensory world of the homeless in Boston. Sensory researchers interested in gender may fruitfully turn to Classens pioneering work on
the gender coding of the senses in Western history, The Color of Angels (1998).22
When anthropologists talk about a societys sensory model, they are referring to its
dominant sensory modes and values, not to a model that is equally shared by everyone in

The Journal of American History

450

September 2008

that society. To speak of Western visualism, for example, is not to say that every individual and group in the modern West is equally eye-minded, but rather that the propagation
of visual media and metaphors has a powerful and pervasive effect on society. Exploring
how sensory values uphold social ideologies helps alert us to the fact that sensory models may be challenged from within by alternative ways of perceiving the world. Classen
wrote:

In other words, while everyone in a society has to deal with the dominant sensory model,
like it or not, some may resist it and develop their own systems of sensory values. As
with any social study, the social study of the senses requires that one take into account
the status, way of life, and particular concerns of the group in society from which ones
material is drawn.
Anthropologists, who traditionally study societies and cultural practices foreign to
them, usually approach their subject matter as etic observersattentive to the natives
point of view but not typically subscribing to it themselves. Historians, who often study
past eras of their own societies, may sometimes approach their subject matter as emic
observers, with an assumed firsthand knowledge of the peoples they are studying. While
continuities of experience and social forms may make such an emic standpoint a source
of valuable insights, the assumption of an insider status may also result in an inattentiveness to real, if subtle, differences. Sensorially speaking, the past is a foreign country, and
it needs to be explored with senses wide open.
Finally, it is at the interpretative level that anthropologists or historians may make
cross-cultural and cross-temporal comparisons and draw out the relevance of their work
for their own discipline or society. Connie Y. Chiang, for example, followed her analysis
of ethnic and industrial olfactory values in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Monterey with
her reflections on the role of odorous industries in contemporary society and an exhortation to other historians to similarly follow the scent to a more complex and nuanced
understanding of the past.24

Conclusion
In this brief space I have explored how an anthropological approach to the senses may
assist historians in bringing the dry bones of the historical record to life. The historical
study of the senses, conversely, has much to offer anthropologists and other scholars interested in the cultural life of the senses. As well as providing background and comparative material, the history of the senses reminds us that sensory models are never static but
consist of continually shifting patterns and values. The history of the senses also enables
us to recognize the historical basis and contingent nature of our own models of percep23
24

Classen, Senses, 356.

Chiang, Nose Knows, 416.

Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org by guest on March 29, 2011

The sensory values propagated by the dominant social group are often internalized
to a greater or lesser extent by all groups within a society. For example, members
of the working classes will come to believe that, no matter how much they wash or
what perfumes they use, they are somehow not as clean or as fragrant as members
of the upper classes. Members of marginalized groups may challenge such sensory
values, however, and propose alternative schemes whereby clean-living workers
are contrasted with the filthy rich.23

An Anthropological Approach to the History of Senses

451

tion, which might otherwise run the risk of being reified (as the scientific perspective,
for example) or taken for granted. It was, indeed, in part the pioneering work of historians, such as Alain Corbin and previously Lucien Febvre, that gave the anthropology of
the senses its initial impetus, while contemporary work on the history of the senses, such
as we find in this round table, continues to stimulate and inform the development of the
field today.25

Downloaded from jah.oxfordjournals.org by guest on March 29, 2011

25
Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (Cambridge, Mass.,
1982).