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SECTION I
HISTORY OF THE SENSES
PRODUCING SENSE, COMSUMING SENSE, MAKING SENSE: PERILS AND PROSPECTS FOR SENSORY HISTORY
| By Mark M. Smith |
University of South Carolina |
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Can You Hear, See, Smell, Taste, Touch Me, Now?
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It is a good moment to be a sensory historian. Sensory history—also referred to as the history of the senses, sensate history, and sensuous history—is booming among historians. George H. Roeder, Jr.'s claim that "ours is a nearly senseless profession" was true when he wrote it; now, a decade or so later, sensory history is brimming with promise, so much so that recent bangs will likely prove, upon reflection, prefatory whispers, smells, anticipatory whiffs, touches, mere caresses, tastes, alluring nibbles, and sights just glimmers in what is a rapidly growing "field."1 |
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In that delightful anticipation, though, problems loom, especially concerning methodology and presentation. In part, the dangers are a product of the very speed with which sensory history has gained ground, particularly in a spate of work on U.S. history. In the rush to see, hear, smell, touch, and taste the past, some of its practitioners have hop-scotched careful engagement with the conceptual and empirical insights of related work. The result is an often undertheorized field of inquiry, more empirically fleshed out than intellectually considered. Sensory history currently ventures in two directions, one offering an appropriate historicization of the senses, the other positing a usable but ahistorical past. In the midst of the recent flurry of sensory history studies, this essay offers a place to pause, a space in which to evaluate where we are now and where we might go.2 |
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This essay has three aims. First, it defines sensory history, explains some of the methodological and interpretive problems facing historians of the senses, and offers a rough, interpretive trellis for future sensory histories. In so doing, it argues that we need to historicize the senses and resist the temptation to create a usable but ahistorical sensory past. I argue that if sensory history is to realize its full promise, we need to distinguish between the production and consumption of the senses. While it is possible to reproduce, say, a particular sound from the past, the way we understand, experience, "consume" that sound is radically different in content and meaning to the way people in the past understood and experienced it. Failure to distinguish between sensory production (something that can, at least theoretically, be replicated in the present) and sensory consumption (something that is hostage to the context in which it was produced) betrays the promise of sensory history. In short, we must be careful always to historicize the senses. Second, the essay considers how sensory history is best presented by scholars. Is print, the traditional historical monograph, up to the task of presenting histories of smell, sound, taste, and touch or do we need to embrace new, non-print technologies to effectively convey our findings? Third, the essay points to the promise of sensory history for U.S. historians, noting especially the way in which the topic grants us deeper access to—and offers a more complicated understanding of—the relationship between the senses and modernity and the connections between the senses, emotion, space, and metaphor. |
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