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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 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. |
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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. |
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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 "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 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. |
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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 |
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