The Anthropology of the Senses and SensationsAuthor(s): Jack GoodyReviewed work(s):Source: La Ricerca Folklorica, No. 45, Antropologia delle sensazioni (Apr., 2002), pp. 17-28Published by: Grafo s.p.a.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1480153 .Accessed: 23/10/2012 07:26

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17

JACK GOODY The Anthropology of the Senses and Sensations

The senses have both a narrower and wider reference. In Europe the narrow meaning refers to the five senses distinguished by Aristotle (what for convenience I refer to as the basic senses). But there is a wider usage in which the senses would include, for example, a sense of humour, of justice, of duty, of colour, of rhythm. And there is a third and even broader usage in which the term sense (in the singular) covers the capacity to understand, to make sense, to have common- sense.

The basic senses are our windows on the world. Through the senses we acquire informa- tion as well as sensations, which are related to the senses in a more than etymological way. The stimulus for sensations or feelings may come from the outside or from the inside. Indeed the wider meaning of the word refers not only to the range of feelings, not simply to what we experi- ence through the senses but to the range of senti- ments surging within us, and whose presence is often included in the concept of 'mentalities' employed by psychologically-minded historians, for example, in discussing the distribution of the sentiment or feeling of love or, more directly relat- ed to the senses, of beauty.

I shall initially confine my discussion to the first of these, to the narrower meanings of the words. But it will not be altogether possible to keep to that resolution, since sense-impressions constitute the major way in which we interact with the world (in this sense they are mediators, involved in representation) and thoughts about their status in this capacity very much affect our understanding of it. Later on the discussion is extended to touch upon the question of senti- ments, feelings, mentalities.

All experience of the world outside is mediat- ed by the senses, including aesthetic experience in the arts and beyond. The senses are the means of communication, operating at both a

physiological and at a cultural level. Anthropolo- gists now deal largely with the latter and have paid little attention to the physiological senses. But at the beginning of this century, and earlier, many scholars as well as the general public considered that some general differences between the mentalities of the members of so- called advanced and primitive societies related to physical inheritance. The philosopher Levy-Bruhl wrote of 'primitive mentalities' which he saw as basically very different from ours regarding perceptions, at least cognitively. That problemat- ic continued to hold the stage at the physiological level as well, and investigations took place to determine how far basic sensory perceptions differed in the simpler societies. One of the first major expeditions of scientists to a 'simple' culture took place about one hundred years ago, in 1898, and was organised by the zoologist, A.C. Haddon, who recruited four doctors to assist him, W.H.R. Rivers, W. McDougall, C. Seligman and C.S. Myers. None of them, including Haddon, had much previous experience of anthropology, certainly not social anthropology; their interest lay in psychology of a physiological bent. Three of them became the effective founders of psycholo- gy in Britain; the fourth, Seligman, filled one of the first Chairs of Anthropology. When Rivers arrived in the islands of New Guinea, he established "a small psychological laboratory" in the disused missionary house on Murray Island where the team worked for four months. The topics investi- gated were mostly concerned with possible differ- ences in sensory capacities between western and simpler societies, that is, in

visual activity and sensibility to light difference; colour vision, including testing for colour blindness, colour nomenclature, the thresholds for different colours, after-images, contrast, and the colour vision of the peripheral retina; binocular vision; line

18 GOODY

dividing; visual illusions, some of which were inves- tigated quantitatively; acuity and range of hearing; discrimination of tone-difference; rhythm, smell and taste; tactile acuity and localization; sensibility to pain; temperature spots; discrimination of weight and illusions of weight; reaction-time, including auditory and visual simple reaction-time and choice-time; estimation of intervals of time; memo- ry; mental fatigue and practice; muscular power and motor accuracy; drawing and writing; blood pressure changes under various conditions, etc. 1

The investigators found only small differences in the physiological variables, though clearly there were some at the cultural level, for example in colour terminology and in drawing and writing, subjects that have remained of continuing inter- est, though these latter differences have little to do physiologically with the senses or with sensa- tions. Rivers concluded that at this level there was little difference between societies with and without writing although between individuals there was. But that universalism is not the whole story. The classification of colour does differ among human societies in interesting ways, apparently developmentally, in a cultural histori- cal sequence (Berlin and Kay 1969). Those differ- ences may affect our understanding of colour, for example the English perception of orange may be influenced by the use of a fruit as a concrete referent. On the other hand there is no indication that the absence of a term implies an inability to discriminate. The case of writing is somewhat clearer, not regarding the senses so much as the sensations, that is, feelings and emotions and the problem of how these are elaborated in the writing is one I pursue later.

There are certainly some universal features apart from the physiological ones. Human soci- eties in general recognise the same senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, as we do. However, looking at the question more from the standpoint of social or cultural anthropology, there is little evidence that the recognition of senses as a category, in particular of a group of five senses, is a widespread conceptualisation outside Europe and Asia. Indeed the oral cultures of Africa, while the senses of sight and the others are clearly recognized, do not appear to group together of the senses of touch, sight, hearing,

etc. in any overall scheme, whether with five or any other number of components. Not only is there no grouping together but the LoDagaa of northern Ghana have no collective word for the senses. One can refer generally to bodily feelings in the phrase n id ba num, my body is not sweet (nu5). That adjective is also used to describe indi- vidual senses such as taste, a zier numo na, the soup is sweet ('tastes good'), the opposite of which would be tuo, bitter. Other senses recog- nized included touch (fiil), smell (nyO0), hearing, sight, but they are usually referred to by the verb (action) rather than by the abstract noun. More- over the verbs for hearing and smelling (as well as for drinking and smoking) appear to be the same, though the actions themselves are certainly distinguished when this is required.

Is the grouping together of the senses in a specific named category, with a fixed number of elements and a higher degree of abstraction, encouraged by literacy? Watt and I argued that writ- ing promotes the abstract as distinct from the concrete, contextualised use of language2. That is certainly the case with the use of nouns (Goody 1987). The numerical development is suggested by the dominating tendency of the Chinese to group attributes and persons of all kinds by numbers, for example, the Four Gentlemen of Flowers, the Gang of Four. For the basic senses there seems relative- ly little difference in literate cultures at this level; the number five is widespread, possibly for physiologi- cal reasons, possibly to do with the spread of writ- ten knowledge 3. Important differences in the conceptualisation of the senses do however lie at the cultural level and relate to three main areas, firstly the place of the senses in the total cultural universe, secondly the variable emphasis placed on the different senses, and thirdly the evaluation, indeed the very credibility, of sense impressions, of sensory data.

Regarding the relationship between the sens- es and the cultural universe, the formal side of such linkages is illustrated by the case of the Ayurvedic system in India, which is characteristi- cally a written form of medicine. The five senses, as we know them, are grouped together under the concept rasa. The senses are in turn linked formally, in a manner typical of early written cultures, with the five elements of the universe.

Rivers 1901-3: 1-12. 2 Goody and Watt 1963. 3 In early modern English the five are the

five senses wits but the concept also applies to mental faculties more widely, for example, 'witless' (John Kerrigan).

Ether Sound Air Sound and touch Fire Sound, touch and sight

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE SENSES AND SENSATIONS 19

Water Sound, touch, sight and taste Earth Sound, touch, sight, taste and smell

Such a systematisation was not primitive, as some structuralist writers have thought, but an example of complex, at least early complex, writ- ten graphic display4.

Regarding the second point, the relative importance of the senses, the Chinese have long dwelt on this topic in writing, recognizing the same five in a set as Europeans as early as the third century B.C.E., for example in the writing of Xunzi (Hsujn-tzu), of Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzi) and of late Zhou (Chou) dynasty thinkers 5. In his work 'Concerning Heaven', Hsun-tzu writes of the five senses each of which receive stimuli and cannot be interchanged; these are the five senses - the natural (T'ien) senses - which are controlled by the heart, their natural (T'ien) ruler6. The Japan- ese appear to have adopted the Chinese ideas, probably in the Nara or the early Heian (794- 1185) period since the writer's view of Confu- cianism was favoured at the court.

But the question of sight has been particular- ly important for Chinese authors, no doubt because of the importance given to painting, an activity that was closely connected with the use of the brush for writing, for calligraphy7. The prolif- eration of Chinese characters, in the logographic system, means that special attention has to be paid to small differences in graphemes which have to be learnt by heart. Of course in preliterate societies, men and women have to be aware of different visual clues, for example, in hunting or in travelling from place to place. But when language becomes visible it does demand contin- uous, concentrated attention at decipherment. And in a wider sense, the development of visual representations, for example, in perspective, in landscapes, in anatomical drawings, in botanical illustration, does seem to have an affect of the way we perceive the world.

Such cultural influences are yet clearer for the

sense of taste. The elaboration of a complex or haute cuisine, the frequent use of spices, the emergence of a culture of wine with its profes- sional terminology, these factors lead to a greater emphasis being placed upon taste in many strat- ified post-Bronze Age societies and at the same time to a development of the ability to discrimi- nate between flavours. In this sense, taste is cultivated, like flowers.

Perhaps that is also true of the sense of smell, which is closely linked to taste and is often applied to cooking and to wine. There do seem to be some broad differences related to cultural elaboration of this kind of and it has been suggested to me that African societies do not for example greatly elaborate the discrimination of smell any more than they do of taste, of cuisine; certainly in both these cases the vocabulary seems somewhat limited in comparison to the major civilisations of Eurasia.

The Chinese case also raises the third point to which I referred, since significantly the elabo- rate cultivation of the senses goes hand in hand with their rejection, especially in Buddhism 8. Much neo-Confucian thought in both China, Japan and Korea deals with 'human desire' versus 'heavenly principle', the first obviously linked to the senses and to the earth, but which, as in most religions, we must eventually leave for another, more spiritual, destination. Sensuality is thus opposed to spirituality, giving rise to dualist, Manichaean, views of the world which rejected the flesh in favour of the spirit. Reliance on the senses also raises a related opposition, espe- cially in Japan, between the notion of 'duty' and the 'natural emotional instincts', though to get round this dichotomy, some Chinese turned to ritual, some to classical writing (for example, Dai Zhen), and others to notions of moral account- ing9. I have suggested that one finds the roots of this opposition in human society generally, but that it becomes more explicit, more 'intellectu- alised', when faced with the reflexivity of writing.

That dilemma relates very directly to the ques- tion of aesthetics and the appreciation of beauty. With each sense a discrimination may be made on a scale running between positive (good) and negative (bad) impressions, between the beauti- ful and the ugly when dealing with sight, but with similar evaluations (of a kind +/-) for the others. Beauty, delight, pleasure are all associated with the positive sensations. Tastes too range from good to bad, so too with smell (though in English

4 I am indebted to Asha Sarabhai for help. 5 See University of Chicago thesis on 'The Senses in Early China'. 6 The Works of Hsijn-tzu, trans. H.H. Dubs, London 1928, pp. 175-6; Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philoso- phy, vol. I., The Period of the Philoso- phers, trans. by D. Bodde, Princeton, 1952 p. 304. I am indebted to David McMullen for these references.

7 Clunas 1981. 8 T. Brook 1998. 9 I am much indebted to Dr J. McDer- mott for help with this section. See Chow Kaiwing 1994, and Dai Zhen, commenting on Mencius, Yale 199X and C. Brokaw, Moral Ledger Books, Prince- ton, 1990.

20 GOODY

separate words are also involved), a pleasant and an unpleasant (or disturbing) sound; with touch, which is marginal in this respect, the skin receives both painful and pleasant sensations, such as fire and heat. A variety of terms are used to describe points on this range of experiences but in most languages, as in English or LoDagaa, the terms good and bad could probably be applied across the whole range of senses. However the scale between good and bad relates in a more profound way to the evaluation of sense data, of sensation, of aesthetic experience and of emotion, on which we have touched.

For aesthetics carries with it the notion of anti- aestheticism, of the rejection of an interest in what other societies, other peoples, or other times consider to be important categories of experience. This is not simply a matter of differ- ence in taste, for example in painting or in flow- ers. There is also a definite rejection of these activities which may take several forms.

When I was working on the culture of flowers, I was struck by the great variations in their use and appreciation, differences that were partly related to aesthetic choices. Flowers are often seen as having a particular appeal to the senses of sight and smell, and it was commonly stated in the literature that the love of flowers was univer- sal, related to the physical attractions of bees to colourful and scented flowers (and hence to their propagation). One was led to assume that these universal features were represented in the aesthetic preferences of humans for physiologi- cal reasons.

But humans turn out to be more complicated. In certain circumstances they subvert supposed- ly biological universals. What struck me in looking at sub-Saharan Africa was the fact that flowers were very little used in rituals or for decoration; they had never been domesticated (as in Eurasia) and even wild species held little attraction, at least as plucked flowers. I interpreted this neglect, even rejection, as resulting from the overwhelming preference for edible crops and to the knowledge that flowers were harbingers of fruit or berries and should not therefore be gath- ered for other purposes which elsewhere would be deemed aesthetic.

The cultivation of flowers and gardens, and with it perhaps the cultivation of a sense of their beauty, seems first to have been elaborated at courts and among aristocracies, at centres of written culture. That is not so very different from

the cultivation of taste, for haute (grande) cuisine and for the appreciation of rare wines, or indeed from much artistic and craft activity which often originated as luxury activities. It was in this way that the formal theatre developed, a fact that constituted one of the objections to the stage in the eighteenth century and earlier. The same was true of secular collections of art; they were seen as products of the luxury, of 'leisure time', of catering for the elite, as class-based, until they were neutralised by being placed in public muse- ums. So it was not only a question of Africa being without flowers but even in Eurasia, where the luxury cultures in China, India and the Near East had encouraged their domestication and cultiva- tion, there too one found situations and periods in which their use was greatly diminished if not altogether rejected and forbidden.

Take for instance at the example of Jewish and Islamic cemeteries. No flowers are ever grown or offered in these places. One major reason is that any such offering could be viewed as an attempt to influence the dead into looking after the living, whereas in these strongly monotheistic religions only God holds the reins of power.

Such hesitation, and even ambivalence, regarding the use of what in other situations might be a desirable offering, appealing to the various senses, is true of flowers but it is espe- cially true of the representations of flowers. Like other figurative representations these disap- peared from early Christian culture as they did from Jewish and Muslim ones. The reasons was partly religious (in representing nature, one was attempting to recreate what only the Creator could create) and partly secular (which related closely to problems regarding luxury but also to the validity of sense impressions in general, at least of their representations). For Plato, an image was a lie, never the thing itself. So too were objects, since reality lay beyond appearance in the idea of a flower or table. One could not trust the data of one's senses which depended upon representation and could not recognize the real, the pure, thing. And if the representation was also a luxury, the problem was further aggravat- ed. In other words the perception of sense data was strongly influenced not only by individual differences, by specific cultures (and their hierar- chies) but was also qualified by a more general factor marking some human cultures at some periods, a certain distrust of that data, especial-

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE SENSES AND SENSATIONS 21

ly when associated with 'luxury' and with beauty, and an ambivalence about attempts to re-present it in what others think about as desirable ways.

Some early Christian fathers like Clement rejected the giving of flowers at funerals preferring instead to give to the poor. That had also been a theme of the Roman moralists, later taken up by Christians. They expressed concern about the use of luxuries in their own culture, in particular those luxuries like perfumes and silks, the very objects of aesthetic preferences in terms of smell and touch, that were imported at great expense from abroad to gratify the senses. The true Roman ideally required none of this; like the early Germans, he needed only a crown of grass, not of precious metal. Such questioning was widespread in the classical world and the Near East in both secular and religious contexts. But it also occurred in other major civilisations. The Chinese philosopher Mencius worried about the legitimacy of such expenditure, such efforts for purely aesthetic ends, when the poor were starving.

I suggest that this critical attitude towards luxury emerges as an intrinsic part of its appear- ance (and therefore of much related aesthetic and sense experience), especially where repre- sentations are concerned. In other words certain associated experiences, in particular in post- Bronze Age cultures where rich and poor exist side by side but with highly differentiated styles of life, promote their own critique. This reaction is found especially in the writings of philosophers like Mencius, of moralists like Pliny, of satirists like Juvenal, and it constitutes a critique of civili- sation itself. But it does not stop with the written word nor in the minds of specialists.

I have argued that there is an inevitable prob- lem (a contradiction) not only with luxury but with representation itself since this fundamental human activity intrinsic to language (which is mediated by the sense of hearing) may raise doubts about the validity of the process of re- presenting the world, 'reality' and ideas. That problem is intrinsic to Plato's exclusion of poets from his Republic - painters too, because they represented what to him was already a represen- tation of the world of reality embodied in ideas. What they created was never the thing itself, but since it made claims in that direction, it was therefore a lie.

A similar notion arises with sculpture and theatre. One of the most profound facts about the culture of Medieval Europe is the way that conti-

nent virtually rejected these two great achieve- ments of its own classical aesthetic heritage. Sculpture, one of the major glories of Greek civil- isation that provides the centre piece of the Louvre and many other great museums, practi- cally disappeared for centuries in its three dimen- sional form, until the early years of the Italian Renaissance.

So too did the formal theatre, another major glory of Greece and Rome; even at the popular level dramatic performance was often under pres- sure from the church even after the rise of reli- gious plays. That disappearance was not only due to the fall of the Roman Empire nor yet the decline in the economy, though these factors played their part. It was ideological (and ideologically econom- ic). Theatres were actually destroyed as well as allowed to fall into disrepair.

These rejections applied to representations, to the arts, which, to their detractors, did not present reality as much as misrepresent it. What appealed to the senses of some was rejected by others, and at some periods by all. Similar objec- tions are made against 'real' objects such as flowers, which once again had a great appeal to the senses for some but were mistrusted by others because of their association with luxury, or because the senses to which they appealed were suspect on wider metaphysical grounds, as re- presenting and therefore as possibly mispre- senting the world outside.

In a religious context this distrust of the sens- es was found in Buddhism, in early Christianity, and elsewhere; Puritanism indeed may perhaps result from a universal tendency in luxury cultures towards puritanism in a wider sense. We are accustomed to the idea that different societies have different concepts of beauty, for example, of women. That is an instrinsic part of the contem- porary commitment to cultural relativism. But in fact the difference between cultures and periods extends much further and is structured by wide comparative factors, such as the domestication of flowers in post-Bronze Age societies. Flowers provide a good example. In actuality, we do not find a universal sensation of beauty towards flow- ers; as sense data they are experienced differ- ently. But the differences in perception go deep- er. Doubts may also be felt about the validity of sensory perception as such, giving rise to a lack of trust in the senses, a deliberate setting aside of pleasure, of beauty, which can be seen as leading mankind astray from the proper path. The

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senses are distrusted as means of attaining the truth, at least the ultimate truth. And those doubts are connected on the one hand with a dualistic, manichean, Cathar, view of the world, which is unworthy of our attention since reality, spiritual reality, lies beyond. The flesh is bad, the spirit good. Not all components of all societies display this tendency all the time; groups and cultures change their orientation over time. That view was one component of early Christianity as well as of later Puritanism. There is also an impor- tant component of Buddhism that distrusted the senses, while another component made great use of them.

Those were the religious approaches. But there was also the secular view of philosophers and moralists, expressed most clearly by Bishop Berkeley in the eighteenth century who distrusted sense data as a means of learning about the outside world and even threw doubt upon the existence of one's self as well as the Other. Such an approach questioned the very nature of expe- rience whereas the religious belief had rather to do with the content - that is, sense impressions were not ways to God but distractions; that was the view of the Cistercian, Bernard of Clairvaux which ran very much counter to that of Archbish- op Suger, the promoter of the Abbey Church of St Denis, with its abundance of stained glass whose beauty was held to be an opening to the super- natural.

In other words there have been two opposing views which have been stressed at different times and places but which may often exist contemporaneously and give rise to contradic- tions, sometimes even in the same person and producing ambivalence, not simply about the re- presentation of sense data but about the very validity of these data themselves. Mankind is at once highly dependent upon the senses for infor- mation about the outside world (and in a way about his internal states) but may also distrust what they tell him. Is that the truth or is it a lie? We are back at the Platonic problem regarding representations and the arts. For even the sens- es are re-presenting to us something they claim and we assume is out there. These rejectionist notions emerge from time to time as explicit ideologies. However there is always present in the human situation the possibility of doubt about the way the senses work, about the way they relay information to us and act as mediators with the world around us.

The problematic is somewhat different when we are dealing with images where one can compare the representation with the represent- ed, except in the Platonic schema where the image falsifies not the surface reality but the idea behind it. That is the same with sense data where the contrast between internal representation and external 'reality' can never in fact be made; one can never place them side by side to compare. Hence doubts about the validity of sense data seem less widespread than those about repre- sentation of the iconic kind.

in an earlier publication on Representations and Contradictions (1997) I argued that doubts not only about images but other forms of repre- sentation were found at least implicitly in oral cultures. These doubts were often brought to the surface by writing, encouraging reflexivity, as in Plato's case. Do we also find implicit doubts about the validity of sense data in oral cultures? That is a subject on which I am unclear, partly because of the difficulties mentioned above and partly because until one gets written categorisa- tions of basic senses, as in the Aristotelian case, the boundaries between the senses (as with the LoDagaa concepts of hearing/smelling) and between what we would regard as mystical, spir- itual, experiences beyond the purvue of the sens- es are much less clear-cut. The see-er is also a seer, discovering the future; the hearer is also a hearer of 'voices' or of the music of the spheres. Within the framework of these broader categories of perception through the senses, there is perhaps less cause to doubt; since there is no limitation to the physical, the empirical, doubt in a sense is built-in.

Let me turn to the linked concept of sensations which are clearly related not only etymologically with the senses but on the one hand to physical experience (feelings 1) and on the other to emotions, sentiments and passions (feelings 2). As physical experience, the sensation of heat is more specific, less abstract, than the sense of touch, so that sensations are not numerically cate- gorized in the same way as the (five) basic senses. Nor is it easy to find translations into non-European languages (especially non-written ones) for gener- al concepts like sensation, feeling, emotion, etc., even though some particular emotions are recog- nised, for example, love and hate. But the emotion- al sides of sensations (feelings 2) are clearly much more difficult to classify and specify than the sens- es; they refer not only to the media by which we

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE SENSES AND SENSATIONS 23

experience the outside world but also to the inward states to which those experiences, or internal reflection upon the experiences, give rise. In English there is a lexical typology of senses but is there one of sensations, emotions or passions, either explicit or implicit? I doubt if we are dealing with a set defined either by the actors or by the observers. In his extensive study of emotions Harr6 (1986) includes 'hope', which would not be part of many listings. The term 'emotion' first came into English at the end of the sixteenth century in the now obsolete sense of 'a political or social agitation'; only in the following century (1660) was it used figuratively for an agitation of the mind. Its psychological use for a mental feeling became current only in the nineteenth century, where 'emotion recollected in tranquility' is the equivalent of mental feeling, a state of consciousness as opposed to the cognitive.

Aristotle offers an informal listing, in which love and hate are central to the feelings that are accompanied by pleasure and pain. Cicero reduces them to four fundamental passions, distress and pleasure, fear and desire'o. Augus- tine saw all four as species of love. Aquinas reverted to the Aristotelian traditions and discerned eleven basic passions.

Emotions are clearly yet more influenced by specific cultural factors than the basic senses but despite these influences there is a core of commonality across cultures (a commonality that is transcultural but still cultural), embodied for example in notions of reciprocity (and its senti- mental concomitant, amity) and its opposite, negative reciprocity, that is revenge (with its senti- mental concomitant, enmity). These emotions are apparent throughout social life and literature, from feuds among African tribes to the revenge theme in Renaissance drama.

Passions were at the centre of interest for seventeenth century philosophers, both to natur- al philosophy for understanding them and to moral philosophy for controlling them. "Passions ... are generally understood to be thoughts or states of the soul which represent things as good or evil for us". These evaluations involve 'emotions that move us and guide our actions'. Moreover passions have instrinsic physical mani- festations which bridge emotion and action and are written on the body .

From a scientific standpoint the modern study of emotions goes back to Darwin's account of The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). He was essentially concerned to docu- ment his evolutionary hypothesis put forward so successfully in The Origin of Species. By showing not simply the transcultural nature of such expression but also its trans-specific character, he countered the creationist view of the insur- mountable gap between man and animals, and indeed between animal species; by trying to show a universality in their expression not only among humans but among the whole of the animal king- dom. The smile is a smile wherever found. He saw some continuity between all these, any differ- ences evolving as the result of an accumulation of adaptive changes. This notion he reinforced in the study of emotions

Influenced by Darwin whose work he edited in 1998, Ekman set out to test the universality thesis in a series of studies which were brought together in a book, Darwin and Facial Expression. There he comes down on the side of universals, using the phrase 'affect program' to describe the 'innate basis of universal expressions' (p. 386). For this account he was strongly criticized by the anthropologist Margaret Mead who for political reasons, she explains, had become very wary of biological determinism, especially in the form of social Darwinism, when it was taken up by the Nazis.

The biological account of emotions has always been heavily politicised, in particular in the assertion of the continuity of genetic control over behaviour. A high degree of such control obviously reduces the element of malleability, of intentionality, of possible socio-cultural interven- tion. The former leads to a reliance on physical interference as a way of ameliorating the lot of (sections of) mankind, as in the eugenic doctrines of the 1930s, in Nazi attempts to elim- inate 'lower races' or indeed in much 'racist' thinking. The alternative is an approach that emphasizes other possibilities for improvement, educational, socio-cultural and political, and was strongly held by many socialists, even to the extent, as with Lysenko in the Soviet Union, of arguing for the possible inheritance of acquired characteristics. Mead was in the midst of such controversies.

Ekman's data do indeed show that there is a tendency for facial expressions to be interpreted in a transcultural fashion. But such trends are not

10 Many modern philosophers separate emotion from desire, seen as the

antecedent of action (James 1997:7). 11 James 1997:4.

24 GOODY

12 Ekman 1998.

universal in that we do find the situation affected by cultural differences; for example Japanese students follow 'display rules' in masking nega- tive emotions in the presence of authority, but if no authority is present, he argues, they show their true colours. Despite criticisms from anthro- pologists and linguists the author concludes that "most scientists consider the universality of facial expression of emotion to be well estab- lished" (p. 390). However he agrees that this applies only to a limited range of emotions or expressions; in pre-literate cultures for example "fear and surprise were not differentiated". Only in the case of "certain strong emotions", when people make no attempt to mask what they feel, "the expressions will be the same regardless of age, race, culture, sex or education" (p. 391). On the other hand there are clearly a number of expressions that do vary with these factors.

There are other problems with this discussion of emotions and their expression. Ekman and Darwin deal largely not with emotions per se but with facial expressions which are a sub-category of gesture; yet Darwin himself recognized "that most symbolic gestures are learned". There are many ways of expressing emotions other than facial or even gestural ones, the most important of which are linguistic, and these are definitely learned. There are obvious difficulties in transla- tion in dealing with the comparative study of what is said (and in some cultures written) in express- ing emotions; elaborations go a long way beyond their crude expression or communication by phys- ical means. These elaborations immediately introduce an element of discontinuity in the evolu- tionary process, a discontinuity that is at the root not only of earlier anti-Darwinian jokes about men and monkeys but also of the more serious discomfort many feel in the wholesale application of animal biology to humans, in for example socio-biology or genetic determinism. We can surely agree that biological considerations are important (hence rejecting the rejectionism of Margaret Mead and of cultural relativists gener- ally) without also accepting that the universality of emotional expression means anything more than that certain facial expressions are widely distrib- uted but may be modified culturally.

Ekman's interest in the expression of emotions concentrates on the physical, espe- cially the face; and such physical features are considered to be expressions in a second sense, that is of underlying emotions. They were not

simply communicative devices but had an inter- nal origin in similar emotions. Darwin's thesis has been criticized on just this point by relativists and others. The universalist hypothesis seems tenuous because the link between external 'expressions' and internal states is not easy to establish. While there is a limited measure of continuity at the level of gesture, there are also major differences, especially if one considers that our emotions are expressed not only in gestures but in words which in his highly pro- Darwinian edition of The Emotions Ekman admits may be relevant: "Are words required for such an awareness and consideration of emotional feel- ings?" - a rhetorical question to which he gives no answer12. For if he did, that would threaten his universalistic assumptions.

In the human context, how would we conceiv- ably express emotions without words? The phys- ical expression alone would not get us far. For words not only express emotions, they elaborate them and in some instances may actually be said to create them. To make this point is not to adopt the extreme relativist position, which Ekman right- ly criticizes. On the other hand, it is to insist that universalism pure and simple is insufficient to account for what we observe. In considering the modes of human communication we recognize similarities and continuities but we also have to acknowledge discontinuities as well. One of these was certainly the advent of language (of words). Another was that of writing (of visible words). As Ekman remarks the "lack of emotion words can change emotional experience" (p. 392) and more controversially, that languages differ in "the extent to which a word gives subtle nuances or combines emotions or tells us what caused the emotion" (p. 393). I do not wish to fall into a nominalistic fallacy here, common in linguistic analysis; the paucety of basic colour terms does not mean that Africans cannot perceive other differences, nor create patterns with thread and yarn of a greater variety of colours, but their absence does limit their power to manipulate their conceptuality. The same is true of emotions.

We return here to those debates that see language (for Chomsky) or classification (in Fiel's work) as wired in to the human species and there- fore subject to genetic laws, as distinct from other linguists who see natural languages as highly differentiated and subject to cultural learn- ing. Undoubtedly there are universal features that

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE SENSES AND SENSATIONS 25

13 Such cultural variabili- ty has recently been considered by Harr6 (ed.) 1986, by Lutz 1988 and 1986, by Wierzbicka 1995 and by Turner (forthcoming).

may or may not be genetically controlled; there are also many cultural variations in the expres- sion of emotions 13. Amity, cathexis, is obviously as widespread as the feuds and enmity to which we have referred and the basis of a considerable range of social life; kinship, Fortes maintained, embodies "the axiom of amity". Amity, friendship, is a diluted form of love; or love an intensified form of amity. That is especially so with sexual love, whether between the same or opposite sex, which is discussed under various headings, passionate, romantic, conjugal and more recent- ly congruent. A dominant view of Europeans is that their continent invented this sentiment, or at least that of romantic love. De Rougement and many others, including the great medievalist George Duby, have seen it as emerging in twelfth century France at the time of the troubadours. In my view this contention gives insufficient weight to the Islamic influences on Spain from which the troubadours drew so extensively. A much later beginning, still European, is envisaged by modern historians like Lawrence Stone and following him by sociologists like Anthony Giddens who have seen the development of love as taking place during the eighteenth century, predominantly in England, along with capitalism, industrialisation, 'modernisation' and the nuclear family. Romantic love has been regarded as a characteristic aspect of the unrestricted choice of partners, when this process was freed from parental constraints. It came to mark not only the relations between the couple but those with their children as well, giving rise to the 'affective family' of modernity.

Such a periodisation of the history of the sentiment of love has not been accepted by all. Other historians, like Paul Veyne on Rome, have seen these discussions as being thoroughly ethnocentric, or rather chronocentric. Certainly, in the domain of literature, there were expressions of love of all varieties in the work of Sapho as in that of Ovid, not to speak of the records of Roman Egypt analysed by Keith Hopkins. And if one looks at Indian literature, including Sanskritic love poet- ry and the books of instruction in love-making like the Kama Sutra, and further east too at the anthologies of Chinese poetry that date from well before the Greeks had developed their alphabet, one has evidence of similar sensations, emotions and sentiments in Asia.

Each of those societies possessed writing and developed a discourse and sentiment of love

in literature, in the written word. Significantly one finds little elaboration of the discourse of love in the oral cultures of Africa, except in those areas where Islam, with its written love poetry and epic, has made an impact. Elsewhere certainly the conception of amity and of loving relationships exists. Not all is pure lust and sex as some Euro- peans, whose own interaction in that continent may have been virtually limited to the commercial or exploitive, suppose. Indeed the Africans may have had reason to take a similar view of Euro- peans when one recalls their demands on the population, much less events in West Africa as recounted in the life of Trader Horn where a local woman was locked in a cage with a monkey to amuse the onlookers, not to speak of the innu- merable crudities and cruelties of slavery and the slave trade. But what we do not find in Africa South of the Sahara, in my experience, is any extensive verbalisation of those sentiments in oral forms (in song, in folktale, in mythical recita- tions) and perhaps in ordinary speech itself. What an elaboration of the sentiment of love requires is a measure of separation and idealisation that writing (which permits verbal communication at a distance) encourages. As with the kind of exten- sive love-play found in Indian and Chinese sources, it was also assisted (like writing) by the existence of a leisure class who could freely engage in such elaboration. In this respect it is significant that the particular cultures to develop these sentiments to a high degree were post- Bronze Age ones possessing writing. Even the periods chosen, wrongly I think, as marking the origin of love in Europe, were ones where the use of the written word greatly expanded, in the twelfth century at the time of the troubadours, at the Renaissance with the acquisition of printing, in the eighteenth century with the expansion of the reading public and the development of the novel, and for 'congruent love' with the mass circulation of newspapers and magazines that have further opened up and elaborated the subject for a wider audience.

In other words while the basic sentiments (feelings, sensations) of love and hate are univer- sal (and in this context I find Fortes' anthropo- logical universalism more intellectually satisfying than the historian's ethnocentric particularism), their elaboration is a feature of written cultures, not necessarily of all, and it occurs in different ways at different times, so that practices differ somewhat in France and in England. Nor can this

26 GOODY

'" Burke 1998: 198. 15 Burke 1998: 198.

elaboration (and these differences) be consid- ered a superficial, external matter because it takes place in writing; the written is externalised thought which is in turn reflexively interiorised by the reader and indeed by the writer. For example, the written expressions of others are incorporat- ed into our own system of feelings. The line "my love is like a red red rose" becomes part of our own perceptions of the nature of the relationship; that is one of the functions of poetry and why we turn so readily to Robert Burns or to John Donne or to Shakespeare when we are in love.

That suggestion seems strongly reinforced by Peter Burke's comments on the discourse of love in the European Renaissance. A social practice through which the Renaissance entered every day life, he claims, was writing verses, expecially sonnets about love in the manner of Petrarch to Laura. "The praises of the lady in terms of roses, lilies, coral and alabaster, and the paradoxes of the beloved a 'dear enemy', the lovers' 'sweet torment' (dolce tormento) and the 'icy fire' all passed into the language of love" 14. "To speak or write in this way was a kind of game". The writing of letters, especially love-letters, was another practice which owes much to classical and Italian models. Like sonnets, letters were supposed to be an elegant expression of commonplaces, a new permutation and combination of items already familiar. Model love-letters formed a genre of their own. "The charms of the loved one were described in a formalistic manner", in the manner of Petrarch 1'.

Does the same happen with other emotions, feelings, sentiments, sensations? Are any of the other emotions similarly 'stretched' in writ- ten communications? In situations of ingrati- tude we may well have recourse to the words of Lear's daughter Cordelia or in the moments of impotence to those of Lear himself:-"As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods". Shake- speare's words govern our feelings. Harold Bloom has recently elaborated this idea of the dramatist's influence on our emotions and our attitudes to life. Nor is poetry the only source of elaboration, though the concentrated, metaphoric quality of its 'memorable speech' makes it particularly repeatable. The Bible can serve a similar purpose, whether the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastices, or injunctions to charity. Basically this process of incorporation is an aspect of the reflexivity of writing, all the more significant when we are dealing with great liter-

ature. It is not so much literature reflecting life as life literature.

At the most general level, writing encourages reflexivity and meditation. Indeed such reflection is intrinsic to writing in a quite mechanical way, since the activity of writing, and above all of read- ing, call for a measure of separation from the other activities of social life in order to get the task done. Silence is (optimally) required; the dialogue has to stop. However reading the elabo- rated thoughts of others, transforms, as Burke indicates, one's own expression of emotions.

These suggestions attempt at once to recog- nise universal and particular elements in senti- ments and sensations, like jealousy, shame, anger, and to draw attention to their elaboration in writing, I am suggesting a mechanism for the development of certain cultural differences, one that may well explain that old chestnut of shame and guilt cultures, the first being oral, the latter written. This is a far cry either from notions of the incomparability of cultures, popular with post- modernists, or from those of 'mentalities', popu- lar with some historians. I shall not elaborate on the first since my analysis of love would place limits on particularism and incomparability. But the notion of mentality might seen closer to my position. It is not; as G. Lloyd has argued it is a crude notion that is often applied in a highly ethnocentric manner. Take the paradigmatic case of Aries' study of changing attitudes to childhood, which he locates in sixteenth century Europe, but which is now largely discredited. Accordingly to him, and the thesis is adopted and supported by Lawrence Stone for England, the shift in senti- ments, described in even broader terms as a shift in mentalities, occurred when the rates of infant mortality were reduced and when parents no longer saw their children as temporary visitors to this world but as more permanent denizens on whom one could lavish affection without experi- encing an almost inevitable disappointment, disil- lusionment, indeed rejection, as the result of their premature death. After that shift, children had toys, were no longer just little adults, but were part of a whole construction of childhood. Factually Aries is simply wrong about earlier and other cultures. At that time the difference in mortality between Europe and Asia was not all that great and in any case there were many ways of coping with loss. Other societies certainly had a concept of childhood; other children had toys, games and some life of their own. There were

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE SENSES AND SENSATIONS 27

differences between cultures and epochs but not at the broad level implied. Children were almost invariably cherished by their parents and their deaths were always mourned.

What is also wrong with the concept of 'mental- ity' in this context is that it is given an ethnocentric twist; 'they' do not have the same capacities for sentiment as 'we' have. And that deficiency is projected into the whole mental make-up, just as L6vy-Bruhl did in his discussion of Primitive Mental- ity, which was based on the kind of assumption about differences that Rivers was trying to test at the physiological level. One doesn't need to be an extreme cultural relativist to see this as an inade- quate response to difference.

In conclusion, physiologically the activities of the senses are characteristic of the human species, and little average difference is apparent, though individual ones are. But culturally the senses are differently conceived and emphasized in various cultures, with the conceptual inter-rela- tionships being especially elaborated in written ones. As with images and other forms of repre- sentation, at various times and places human cultures have expressed doubts about the validi- ty of sense data as a means of knowing about the world. Such doubts seem less prevalent in oral cultures, perhaps because they have not devel- oped the more precise categorisation of sense

experience that we find in written cultures (for example, the Aristotelian); and in any case writing always tends to make the implicit more explicit.

The important influence of literacy is yet more apparent with sensations, in the form of feelings, emotions or sentiments. While there are many similarities across cultures, and while there are specific societal interests and conceptions, one main difference comes about with the invention of writing, the reflexivity of which promotes the elaboration of sentiments and of sensation. The written mode of communication stimulates such reflexivity, encouraging a concern with the sens- es, sensations and sentiments, but both posi- tively and negatively. That is to say, it may promote both their recognition and their rejec- tion; the emotions may have to be controlled in the interests of social intercourse or indeed of social differentiation, restraint for example some- times marking the high from the low; at the same time the senses may be suspect as a way of knowing the world. At times one element of this polarity may be stressed, at times another. But in considering the senses, we have to take into account the widespread human worries about the validity of the data we receive through them and those doubts may well affect the sensations and sentiments that result from and govern our inter- action with the external world.

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