442 The Journal of American History September 2008

Can These Dry Bones Live? An Anthropological Approach to the History of the Senses

David Howes

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. Corbin’s article in that issue, “Histoire et anthro-pologie 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 humani-ties 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 disci-plines 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 Douglas’s seminal work Purity and Danger in 1966. In that work Douglas asserted that the body and its parts “af-ford a source of symbols for other complex structures.” Important works by other anthro-pologists followed that examined the symbolic roles of bodily functions and forms across David Howes is professor of anthropology at Concordia University, Montreal, the director of the Concordia Sen-soria 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 Sociétés, 14 (no. 2, 1990), 13–24. 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), 5–7. American histo-rians 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 Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago, 2005); Roger Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technol-ogy, Transformation (Baltimore, 2006); and Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill, 2006).

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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 an-thropology of the body. In 1993 the Canadian cultural historian Constance Classen pub-lished 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 blos-somed 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 an-thropology 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, re-lying in large part on techniques of “participant observation” for their material. That ap-proach requires a profound physical as well as intellectual integration into the culture un-der 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 one’s 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-

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 dis-tinct 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 Sensi-ble Objects: Colonialism, Museums, and Material Culture, ed. Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth Phillips (Oxford, 2006), 35–60.

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), 30–43; and Paul Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology (Philadelphia, 1989), 15–22, 32–34. 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), 392–404, 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 imagin-While the sources of history are typically visual, that fact did not preclude Renaissance historians from imagin-

ing themselves in aural contact with the past and giving voice to historical characters or using the vocative case to ad-dress 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), 159–93; and Jo Tollebeek, “Seeing the Past with the Mind’s Eye: The Consecration of the Romantic Historian,” Clio, 29 (Winter 2000), 167–91. 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.

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torians not only had no physical interaction with the peoples they studied, but focused on presenting a bird’s-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 histori-cal studies. The anthropological turn made everyday practices and popular beliefs fit top-ics for serious historical inquiry. These topics included:

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.

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 them-selves 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 hier-archy 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 anthro-pologists 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 so-cial ideals and systems of the cultures they studied. The sensory traits of culture were of-ten disdained as mere packaging—more 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 Ob-ject (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 (Cam-bridge, 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 Nélia Dias, La mesure des sens: Les anthropologues et le corps humain au XIXe siècle (The measure of the sen-ses: 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), 3–6.

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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 culture—as well as one alien to the “oral-aural” cultures of-ten 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 society’s sensory model or way of understanding the world through the senses. There have always been exceptional anthro-pologists whose work was rich in sensory material. Distinguished examples include Mar-garet Mead, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Victor Turner, and Edmund Carpenter.10 Yet the devel-opment of an anthropology of the senses demanded that specific sensory data be situated in a cultural paradigm of perception—not simply the “world view” of traditional anthro-pology, but a multisensory cosmology, a “world harmony” and “world scent.”

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 one’s own sensory model, to the extent possible, and to attend to the sensory dy-namics of the culture under study. When one considers that higher education caters vir-tually 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 olfac-tory 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 ocularcen-trism.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, 17–28. 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 Cul-tural 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 Carpenter’s 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 (To-ronto, 2002).

11 James W. Cook, “Seeing the Visual in U.S. History,” Journal of American History, 95 (Sept. 2008), 432–41, esp. 432–33.

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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 one-self to other sensory modalities requires swimming against the current of academic cul-ture. 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 im-posed on other cultures or, in historical research, on past cultures.

Historians must rely heavily on written accounts as they cannot engage in the time-honored anthropological practice of participant observation (except after the fact by ex-periencing 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 expres-sion. 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 customar-ily 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 mod-ern 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 misinterpre-tations.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 His-tory:

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. Simi-larly 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. Petrick’s 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 increas-Attempts at reproducing the life world (and the sensory world) of the past have become increas-ingly popular. See Hoffer, Sensory Worlds in Early America, 8–13; and Robert Jütte, A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace (Oxford, 2005), 1–6. 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, 281–303.

13 Ian Ritchie, “The Nose Knows: Bodily Knowing in Isaiah 11:3,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 87 (March 2000), 59–73; Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagi-nation (Berkeley, 2006); Richard Cullen Rath, “Hearing American History,” Journal of American History, 95 (Sept. 2008), 417–31, esp. 417; Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, 2003).

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

The problem with remaining at the level of description is that such an approach fails to control for the writer’s 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 peo-ples. 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 smell-minded 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 earth—the transfor-mative touch of a god’s 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 see-ing was all they did. At the time handling was often thought integral to a proper “view-ing,” 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 ex-ample, 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 one’s own attentiveness to source material to provide a cul-turally 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 one’s material in cultural context. This is a stage sometimes skipped by researchers, particularly those working out-side 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 researcher’s own circle or cul-ture 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 inter-pret 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

14 Constance Classen, “The Senses,” in Encyclopedia of European Social History, ed. P. N. Stearns, vol. IV (New York, 2001), 356–57.

15 On the locus of thinking, see Kenneth Kensinger, How Real People Ought to Live: The Cashinahua of East-ern Peru (Prospect Heights, 1995), 280. On solar symbolism, see Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures (London, 1993), 122–31.

16 Constance Classen, “Touch in the Museum,” in The Book of Touch, ed. Constance Classen (Oxford, 2006), 275–86; Mark M. Smith, “Getting in Touch with Slavery and Freedom,” Journal of American History, 95 (Sept. 2008), 381–91, esp. 384; Cook, “Seeing the Visual in U.S. History,” 437–38.

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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 lim-ited, 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 do-mains, 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’ state-ments 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, tech-nological, 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 surgi-cal 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 cul-tural 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

17 See David Howes, “Freud’s Nose,” in Nose Book: Representations of the Nose in Literature and the Arts, ed. Vic-toria de Rijke, Lene Ostermark-Johansen, and Helen Thomas (London, 2000), 265–81; and Howes, Sensual Rela-tions, 202–3.

18 On the methodology of sensory anthropology, see “Part VIII: Sensorial Fieldwork,” in Ethnographic Field-work: 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), 257–88. 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 anthro-Rath, “Hearing American History,” 422. I call this the phenomenological fallacy. It is also present in anthro-plogy, as exemplified by Thomas J. Csordas, “Somatic Modes of Attention,” Cultural Anthropology, 8 (May 1993), 135–56.

20 See David Howes, “Scent, Sound, and Synesthesia: Intersensoriality and Material Culture Theory,” in Hand-book of Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley et al. (London, 2006), 161–72. 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 “Spiritual-istically” (as “seeing dead people”—in the words of the Cole Sear character in the film The Sixth Sense). See Nicho-las Wade, “The Search for a Sixth Sense,” in The Sixth Sense Reader, ed. David Howes (Oxford, forthcoming); and

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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 discov-ery that data on other sensory phenomena are limited. But when related sensory mate-rial 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 one’s 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 “native’s point of view” as an emic perspective. The outsider’s 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 value-laden 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 formula-tion of such a model by an anthropologist or historian could provide a highly useful de-vice 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 Smith’s work on the sen-sory 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. Chiang’s 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 Law’s study of the olfactory and gustatory imprint of Filipino workers in Hong Kong and Robert Desjarlais’s investigation of the sensory world of the homeless in Boston. Sen-sory researchers interested in gender may fruitfully turn to Classen’s pioneering work on the gender coding of the senses in Western history, The Color of Angels (1998).22

When anthropologists talk about a society’s “sensory model,” they are referring to its dominant sensory modes and values, not to a model that is equally shared by everyone in

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, 1962–1992,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48 (Oct. 2006), 820–51. 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 Orwell’s 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 His-tory (Oxford, 2007). Connie Y. Chiang, “The Nose Knows: The Sense of Smell in American History,” Journal of American History, 95 (Sept. 2008), 405–16, esp. 413; Lisa Law, “Home Cooking: Filipino Women and Geographies of the Senses in Hong Kong,” in Empire of the Senses, ed. Howes, 224–41; Robert Desjarlais, “Movement, Stillness: On the Sensory World of a Shelter for the Homeless Mentally Ill,” ibid., 369–79. Constance Classen, The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender, and the Aesthetic Imagination (London, 1998).

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that society. To speak of “Western visualism,” for example, is not to say that every individ-ual 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 mod-els may be challenged from within by alternative ways of perceiving the world. Classen wrote:

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

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 one’s material is drawn.

Anthropologists, who traditionally study societies and cultural practices foreign to them, usually approach their subject matter as etic observers—attentive to the “native’s 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 inattentive-ness 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 exhor-tation 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 in-terested in the cultural life of the senses. As well as providing background and compara-tive 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 percep-

23 Classen, “Senses,” 356.24 Chiang, “Nose Knows,” 416.

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451An Anthropological Approach to the History of Senses

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 histori-ans, 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

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

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