scent sound and synaesthesia

10SCENT, SOUND AND SYNAESTHESIA

Intersensoriality and MaterialCulture Theory

David Howes

The importance of attending to the multiplesensory dimensions of objects, architecturesand landscapes is quickly becoming a centraltenet of material culture theory. This sensualturn – or better, ‘revolution’ (Howes 2004) – isevident in the various references to the sensu-ous made by the contributors to The MaterialCulture Reader (Buchli 2002). In ‘Contested land-scapes’, Barbara Bender writes: ‘landscapes arenot just “views” but intimate encounters. Theyare not just about seeing, but about experienc-ing with all the senses’ (2002: 136). In his chapteron ‘Trench art’, Nicholas Saunders discusses theheightened sensory experience of warfare,1 andthe ability of material objects (e.g. recycledmunition shells) to ‘act as a bridge betweenmental and physical worlds’ (2002: 181). In‘Visual culture’, Chris Pinney argues that thefield of visual culture (as currently understood)‘needs to be superseded by an engagement withembodied culture ... that recognizes the unifiednature of the human sensorium’ (2002: 84–5).

Christopher Tilley devotes a chapter to ananalysis of the sensory and social symbolism ofWala canoes. The Wala, a people of Vanuatu,traditionally attributed various sensory powersto their canoes and embodied this understand-ing by carving ears, mouths and ‘moustaches’as well as male and female sexual organs onthe prow and stern. According to Tilley: ‘Thepower of [this] imagery resides in its condensa-tion of reference linked with the sensual andtactile qualities of its material form and refer-ence to the human body’ (2002: 25).

The implication to be drawn from thesehighly stimulating references to the sensuousis that material culture, in addition to material-izing social relations and symbolizing thecosmos, gives expression to a particular set ofsensual relations. Thus, Wala canoes may be saidto condense the sensory – as well as social andsymbolic – orders of Wala culture. They areattributed sentience in the same way that theyrender sensible the cardinal ideas of Walasociety. Otherwise put, Wala canoes, and theiruses, embody Wala ‘ways of sensing’ (Howes2003).

My aim in this chapter is to discuss the sig-nificance of scent, sound and synaesthesia formaterial culture studies. My account opens witha consideration of the model of ‘synaesthesia’(literally, ‘joining of the senses’) advanced byLawrence Sullivan, a scholar of comparativereligion, in a seminal article entitled ‘Sound andsenses’ (1986). It goes on to provide a synopsisof the burgeoning literature in the history andanthropology of the senses, pioneered byConstance Classen (1993a, 1998) and AlainCorbin (1986, 1994), among others, which high-lights the multisensoriality embedded in themateriality of human existence.

The increasingly sensual orientation of mate-rial culture studies and the emergent focuson objects and environments within ‘sensualculture studies’ (a shorthand for the history andanthropology of the senses) represent a happyconfluence.2 Both developments may be linkedto the interdisciplinary counter-tradition that

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has crystallized in recent years partly in reactionto the excesses of ‘textualism’ and ‘ocularce-ntrism’ in conventional social scientific accountsof meaning. Sullivan’s ‘Sound and senses’ was,in fact, published the same year as WritingCulture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) – that is tosay, at the height of the textual revolution (alsoknown as ‘the literary turn’) in anthropologicalunderstanding. The latter revolution began inthe 1970s, when Clifford Geertz (1973) intro-duced the suggestion that cultures be treated‘as texts’. The idea of ‘reading cultures’ provedtremendously productive throughout the 1970sand early 1980s, but then the idea of ‘textual-ization’ (ethnography ‘as writing’) took com-mand. This had the untoward consequence ofdeflecting attention on to styles of text con-struction, and away from the sensuous realitiesthose texts sought to convey. Indeed, in his con-tribution to Writing Culture, Stephen Tyler(1986: 137) went so far as to proclaim that: ‘per-ception has nothing to do with it’ (the ‘it’ beingethnography).3 While it may be etymologicallycorrect to hold that ethnography is tied to writ-ing, it is not epistemologically sound to reducethe anthropological endeavour to an exercise in‘text construction’.

Sullivan intended his model of ‘sensing’ – asopposed to ‘reading’ (or ‘writing’) – culture toserve as a multisensory alternative to ‘the modelof the text’ (Ricoeur 1970, cited in Geertz 1973).That his article has languished in such obscurityis testimony to the extraordinary power of logo-centric models in the humanities and socialsciences, whether inspired by the Saussureandream of a ‘science of signs’ (modelled on lin-guistics) or Wittgensteinian ‘language games’ orFoucauldian ‘discourse analysis’. But ‘the modelof the text’ no longer enjoys the same grip overthe anthropological (or historical) imagination itonce did. For example, while it was fashionablefor a spell to consider consumer culture as ‘struc-tured like a language’ following Baudrillard’slead in The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures(1970/1998) and The System of Objects (1968/1996), many voices now caution against such a‘simplistic equation between language andmateriality, mainly due to the unordered andseemingly unstructured nature of consumption’(Blum 2002: 234, citing Miller 1998).

It will no doubt come as a surprise to somethat: ‘The limits of my language are not the lim-its of my world’ – or in other words, that theevidence of our senses is equally worthy ofattention. However, this observation wouldappear to be a point of increasingly widespreadconsensus among scholars of material culture:‘a design is not a word and a house is not a text:

words and things, discourses and materialpractices are fundamentally different’, writesTilley (2002: 23–4; see further Pinney 2002: 82;Tacchi 1998; Stahl 2002). It is also fundamentalto sensual culture studies, which has longwarned against the visual and verbal biasesintrinsic to the dominant social scientificaccounts of ‘meaning’ (Classen 1990; Howes1991: 3). Setting aside linguistic models andattending to the multiple respects in whichculture mediates sensation and sensation medi-ates culture can be a source of many insightsinto the ‘interconnectedness’ of human com-munication (Finnegan 2002). ‘Society’, in so faras it is grounded in ‘consensus’ – meaning‘with the senses’ – is a sensory fact, just as thesensorium is a social fact.

THE MODEL OF SYNAESTHESIA

In ‘Sound and senses’, Sullivan presents areview of recent developments in performancetheory, hermeneutics and information theory.His account culminates in the suggestion that:‘The symbolic experience of the unity of thesenses enables a culture to entertain itself withthe idea of the unity of meaning’ (1986: 6). Hegoes on to apply his model of ‘the unity of thesenses’ – or ‘synaesthesia’ – to the interpreta-tion of the myths and rituals of diverse SouthAmerican Indian societies.

Medically speaking, synaesthesia is a veryrare condition in which the stimulation of onesensory modality is accompanied by a percep-tion in one or more other modalities. Thus,synaesthetes report hearing colours, seeingsounds, and feeling tastes (see Marks 1982).4Such inter-modal associations and transposi-tions are also commonly reported by personsunder the influence of hallucinogens. Sullivan’saccount is, in fact, centred on a variety of SouthAmerican Indian societies which make ritualuse of the hallucinogenic Banisteriopsis Caapiplant. However, he also extends the termsynaesthesia to refer to the ritual process ofbringing many or all of the senses into playsimultaneously. This makes his theory of ‘cul-tural synaesthesia’, as it could be called, poten-tially applicable to the interpretation of ritualand cosmological systems the world over.

The strength of Sullivan’s model lies in theway it recognizes ‘the unified nature of thehuman sensorium’, as Pinney (2002) wouldsay; but, from the perspective of the anthropol-ogy of the senses this is also one of its weak-nesses. The weakness stems from Sullivan’s

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presupposition of ‘the oneness of meaning’.The latter presumption derives from the infor-mation theory approach to the study of ritualcommunication, which holds that ‘although thereceiver of a ritual message is picking up infor-mation through a variety of different sensorychannels simultaneously, all these different sen-sations add up to just one message’ (Leach1976: 41). Such an approach imposes a spuriousunity on ritual communication because of theway it treats ‘meaning’ as primary and thesenses as so many arbitrary and basically inter-changeable channels for the delivery of somehypostasized ‘message’. It would be more con-sonant with what we now know about themateriality of communication to regard sensing(seeing, hearing, touching, etc.) as primary andmeaning as mediated. The information theoryapproach also tends to deflect attention fromthe subject of the socialization of the sensesthrough ritual, whereas it is precisely this sen-sual socialization that ought to occupy the ana-lyst. These points of critique may be illustratedby analysing Sullivan’s interpretation of theTukano-speaking Desana myth of the ‘origin ofcommunication’ through the lens of Classen’s(1990) independent account of the Desanasensory order.

As Sullivan relates:

For Tukano speakers of the Northwest Amazonthe crying sounds of a mythic baby called Cajpi arealso the tastes and visual images of the hallucino-genic drink made from his body (the magicalplant, Banisteriopsis Caapi) ‘for as soon as the littlechild cried aloud, all the people ... became intoxi-cated and saw all kinds of colours.’ The divinitynamed Yepa Huaké commanded that the child bedismembered. A piece of his body was given toeach social group. This distribution establishednot only the ranked hierarchy of groups in societytoday but also the different qualities of vision andmodulations of sound that constitute each group’scultural existence as art, musical performance, andspeech.

(1986: 26)

Sullivan goes on to bring the Desana ‘interpre-tation’ of ritual and mythic communicationinto alignment with information theory:

The significance of the ritual beverage and thevisions induced by ritual acts arises originallyfrom the crying sounds of the sacred child. Thatsound in the environment of the unspoiled mythicworld is an image similar to the perfect noise-freechannel that Corcoran, the communication theo-rist, described as lying beyond this imperfectworld of noise and redundancy. It is a unique

message, a unique signal, which bears meaning forall the senses ... [The] Tukano-speakers wouldagree that that kind of clarity and wholeness ofmeaning no longer exists. The dismembered stateof meaning in this world requires and causes theredundant messages sent through different sensesand media.

(1986: 26–7)

What Sullivan accomplishes by means of theabove passage, which stages a conversationbetween Corcoran and an imaginary Tukano-speaker, is a translation of one cosmology intothe terms of another (scientific Western) one.But this conversation is forced, and overridesthe question of whether the Desana shamanwould be willing (or able) to state his‘message’ without recourse to the medium thatmodels it – that is, without insisting thatCorcoran ingest yagé (the Tukano name for themagical Banisteriopsis Caapi plant) first? Let usturn the conversation around, followingClassen’s analysis of the Desana sensory orderin ‘Sweet colors, fragrant songs’ (1990).

In the beginning there was sound (the baby’scry), not a ‘word’ or ‘score’ (another favouritemetaphor of information theory). This soundembodied smells and temperatures, as well ascolours and tastes. These sensations are mean-ingful to different senses now, but were indis-tinguishable from each other in the mythicworld. Thus, the sound of the baby’s cry isviewed as having contained the Tukano ‘senseratio’ (to borrow McLuhan’s 1962 terminology)in embryo.

The division and distribution of the parts ofthe child’s body modulated the original sound,just as it modulated society, partitioning thelatter into ranked groups, each with its ownstyle of singing, speaking and use of colours aswell as other sensory media (odours, tastes).The division of sound, the division of thesenses and the division of society, therefore, allarose together. Thus, the Tukano social andmoral universe is structured in accordancewith a model derived from the interrelation ofthe senses under the influence of yagé.

Social norms are sensory norms. This funda-mental tenet of the Tukano sensory-social orderfinds expression in the way the differentflavours with which each of the social groupswere imbued at the moment of partition are tothis day used to regulate marriage: ‘Compatiblemarriage partners are those with oppositeflavours’ (Classen 1991: 249). It is also embed-ded in the contemporary ritual use of yagé:‘Through the use of hallucinogens, and a con-trolled sensory environment, shamans attempt

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to “make one see, and act accordingly,” “to makeone hear, and act accordingly,” “to make onesmell, and act accordingly,” and “to make onedream, and act accordingly”’ (Classen 1990: 728).The need for the shaman to control the sensoryenvironment follows from the fact that eachsocial group embodies a different modulation ofthe senses. A shaman would not want hispatients to see red where they ought to be seeingyellow, or smell a pungent odour when theyought to smell a sweet one, for it is believed thatwere the senses to be crossed in this way peoplewould commit incest and other contraventionsof the Tukano moral order.

Sullivan suggests that Tukano-speakerswould agree with information theorists thatthe ‘wholeness of meaning’ is gone. He alsoclaims that: ‘Wholeness is seen in retrospectand in mourning’ (Sullivan 1986: 27). This is farfrom clear. If there were only one sense andone meaning – that is, if the Desana sensoryratio had remained in the embryonic form ithad in the mythic world, and never unfolded –then the sound of, say, a flute would convey awealth of meaning, but not be able to evokeimages in other modalities the way it doestoday. The Desana appear to delight in thecross-sensory associations which the unfoldingof the sound of the baby’s cry into the othersenses has made possible. When a boy plays aflute, for example: ‘The odor of the tune is saidto be male, the color is red, and the tempera-ture is hot; the tune evokes youthful happinessand the taste of a fleshy fruit of a certain tree.The vibrations carry an erotic message to a par-ticular girl’ (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1981: 91). Themultiple associations adduced here serve tomultiply the perceived meaning (or connota-tion) of the tune. Alas, the only thing the infor-mation theorist can see in this concatenation ofsensations is redundancy; that is, all the reso-nances of the Desana way of sensing would belost on one such as Corcoran.

Hence, while the theory of cultural synaes-thesia has the potential to illuminate manyaspects of cultural performance, space must bemade within this theory to allow for a morerelational, less unified conception of the humansensorium. Specifically, while the notion of ‘theunity of the senses’ is a helpful point of depar-ture, and certainly more culturally sensitivethan ‘the model of the text’ or ‘score’, moreattention needs to be paid to such issues as:(1) the weight or value attached to each of themodalities, instead of assuming equality andinterchangeability; (2) the sequencing of per-ceptions, instead of assuming simultanaeity;and (3) the way the use of different senses

may give rise to different meanings, instead ofassuming redundancy. Each of these assump-tions (which Sullivan imports into his interpre-tation of the Desana myth owing to his uncriticalreliance on information theory) limit what wesense, whereas the Tukano material challengesus to expand our senses, to recognize their inter-play, and thus discover more meaning insteadof less.

THE MODEL OF INTERSENSORIALITY

A consideration of Dorinne Kondo’s sensuoussymbolic analysis of the Japanese tea ceremonywill help concretize what is meant by the modelof intersensoriality (in place of synaesthesia)advanced here. Kondo notes the emphasis onnon-verbal symbolism in Japanese culture. Thetea ceremony itself entails a cleansing andheightening of perception conducive to a stateof silent contemplation. In the ceremonymeanings are conveyed through sensory shifts,from garden to tea room, from sound tosilence, from the odour of incense to the tasteof tea. Kondo describes the aesthetic order ofthe tea ceremony as an ‘unfolding, a sequenceof movement with tensions, climaxes anddirectionality’ (1983/2004: 197).

As is well illustrated by the sensory sequenc-ing of the tea ceremony, intersensoriality neednot mean a synaesthetic mingling of sensation.The strands of perception may be connected inmany different ways. Sometimes the sensesmay seem to all be working together in har-mony. Other times, sensations will be conflictedor confused. Either state may be employed as asocial or aesthetic ideology.

Just as the model of intersensoriality doesnot necessarily imply a state of harmony, nordoes it imply a state of equality, whether sen-sory or social. Indeed, the senses are typicallyordered in hierarchies. In one society or socialcontext sight will head the list of the senses, inanother it may be hearing or touch. Such sen-sory rankings are always allied with socialrankings and employed to order society. Thedominant group in society will be linked toesteemed senses and sensations while subordi-nate groups will be associated with less valuedor denigrated senses. In the West the dominantgroup – whether it be conceptualized in termsof gender, class or race – has conventionallybeen associated with the supposedly ‘higher’senses of sight and hearing, while subordinategroups (women, workers, non-Westerners)have been associated with the so-called lower



senses of smell, taste and touch (Classen 1998:154–6).

Within each sensory field, as well, sensationsdeemed relatively unpleasant or dangerouswill be linked to ‘unpleasant’, ‘dangerous’social groups. Within the field of smell, forexample, the upper classes were customarilyconsidered to be fragrant or inodorate, whilethe lower classes were held to be malodorous.George Orwell described this olfactory divi-sion of society forcefully when he wrote that‘the real secret of class distinctions in the West’can be summed up in ‘four frightful words . . .The lower classes smell’ (quoted in Classen et al.1994: 166). This perception of malodour hadless to do with practices of cleanliness than ithad to do with social status: according to thesensory classification of society a low socialstatus translated into a bad smell. Thus Orwellstated that a nasty smell seemed to emanatefrom ‘even “lower class” people whom youknew to be quite clean – servants, for instance’(Classen et al. 1994: 167). Here we can see howsensations of disgust are a matter not just ofpersonal distaste but of social ordering (Miller1997). The transformation of class distinctionsinto physiological sensations is a powerfulenforcer of social hierarchies (see Corbin 1986;Classen 2001).

An instructive comparative example is pro-vided by Anthony Seeger’s analysis of the sen-sory order of the Suyà Indians of the MatoGrosso region of Brazil in ‘The meaning ofbody ornaments’ (1975). Suyà men pride them-selves on their ear discs and lip discs. Theseornaments are understood to make one ‘fullyhuman’ (me). The faculties of speech and hear-ing are, in fact, ‘highly elaborated and positivelyvalued in Suyà society’ (Seeger 1975: 215). Forexample, the Suyà word for hearing, ku-mba,means not only ‘to hear (a sound)’ but also‘to know’ and ‘to understand’. Thus, when‘the Suyà have learned something – evensomething visual such as a weaving pattern –they say, “It is in my ear”’ (1975: 214). The earis the primary organ through which the worldis cognized. It is also the organ through whichthe human subject is socialized: both boys andgirls are fitted with ear discs at puberty. Aperson who is fully social – that is, one whoconforms fully to the norms of the group –‘hears, understands and knows clearly’ (1975:214). Only senior men and chiefs are permittedto wear lip discs, and (by virtue of this oralmodification) engage in ‘plaza speech’ or‘everybody listen talk’ as well as perform thesongs which are so central to the Suyà sym-bolic order and sense of cultural identity.

Significantly, ‘the eyes are not ornamented,tattooed or specially painted’, nor is the nose(1975: 216). This diminution of the eyes andnose (in contrast to the extension of the lipsand ears) is linked to the fact that only certainhighly dangerous and elusive game animalsare credited with a keen sense of smell, as wellas ‘strong eyes’. Related to this is the fact thatadult men are presumed to be ‘bland smelling’while adult women, who are deemed to partic-ipate more in nature than society, are said to be‘strong smelling’ (Seeger 1981: 111). Witchesare also credited with ‘strong eyes’, and theirtransgressive position within the moral (whichis to say, aural) bounds of society is furtherunderscored by the fact that they are poor ofhearing and engage in ‘bad’ or garbled speech.

It is of historical interest to note that Seeger’sanalysis in the ‘Body ornaments’ piece wasinspired in part by McLuhan’s notion of mediaas ‘extensions of the senses’. WhereasMcLuhan’s point in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)was that our media become us, Seeger’s pointis that body decorations do much the same.The ear-minded sensory order of the Suyà isprecisely what one would expect of an ‘oral-aural’ (as opposed to chirographic, typographicor electronic) society, in McLuhan’s terms.However, Seeger also complicates McLuhan’stypology by attending to the different meaningsand values of the different faculties in the Suyàsensory order, and in those of other Gê-speakingpeoples of the Mato Grosso. For example, theneighbouring Kayapo mark the attainment ofpuberty by fitting boys with penis sheaths, anddo not wear ear discs (only strings of beads).Adult Kayapo men do wear lip discs, but theyare not very ornate. This makes them less thanhuman by Suyà standards, and this rankingis, of course, mutual. The Suyà economy ofthe senses thus differs from that of the Kayapo,as regards the salience and direct/indirectregulation of aurality and tactility (or sexuality)respectively. This suggests that, contrary toMcLuhan’s theory, not all ‘oral societies’ are ofone mind with respect to the ranking and usesof hearing relative to the other senses – a pointwhich has been confirmed by numerous subse-quent studies (Classen 1993a, 1997; Geurts 2002;Howes 2003).

SENSORY WORLDS

The field of material culture studies stands tobe significantly enriched through attending tothe multiple sensory dimensions of ‘material



worlds’ (Miller 1998). As Daniel Miller observesin ‘Why some things matter’: ‘through dwellingon the more mundane sensual and materialqualities of the object, we are able to unpick themore subtle connections with cultural lives andvalues that are objectified through these forms,in part because of the qualities they possess’(1998: 9). My focus in this section shall be onartefacts as extensions of the senses and theemergent notion of emplacement, or the sensu-ous reaction of people to place.

Artefacts

Every artefact embodies a particular sensorymix. It does so in terms of its production (i.e.the sensory skills and values that go into itsmaking), in the sensory qualities it presents,and in its consumption (i.e. the meanings anduses people discover in or ascribe to it in accor-dance with the sensory order of their culture orsubculture).

The shell valuables (armshells and necklaces)which circulate in countervailing directionsaround the vast inter-island system of ceremo-nial exchange known as the ‘kula ring’ in theMassim region of Papua New Guinea providea good example of artefacts as extensions ofthe senses. The sonic, kinetic and visual as wellas olfactory characteristics of these objects(together with their attachments) are keyed tothe Massim hierarchy of sensing and scale ofself-constitution. The shell valuables provide astandard in terms of which the social status andpersuasive powers of their (always temporary)possessors can be judged and communicated.In the Massim world, every man of the kulawants to progress from being a face with noname (i.e. admired for his visual and olfactoryappearance when he goes on a kula expeditionto visit his partner on a neighbouring island) tobeing a name with no face (i.e. have his namecirculate quite apart from his body in concertwith the named shells of note that have passedthrough his possession).

According to Annette Weiner’s revisionistanalysis of kula exchange, the kula is not about‘the love of give-and-take for its own sake’, asMalinowski suggested, ‘but creating one’s ownindividual fame through the circulation ofobjects that accumulate the histories of theirtravels and the names of those who have pos-sessed them’ (quoted in Howes 2003: 67). Thecardinal value of Massim civilization is, in fact,butu, which means both ‘noise’ and ‘fame’.This value is condensed in the sensual qualitiesof the attachments which serve as an index of a

kula valuable’s status or rank. The attachmentsconsist of trade beads, seeds, other types ofshells, and bits of plastic or tin, which are tiedeither to the valuable itself or to a frame.Basically, the attachments serve to augment thespace of the valuable by extending its bound-aries, by suggesting motility and by making achiming or tinkling noise. It is fitting that theattachments enlarge the body of the shell,extending it outward in space, given the con-nection between beautification and exterioriza-tion that is so fundamental to Massim aesthetics(Munn 1986; Howes 2003: 72–3). It is also fit-ting that they impart motion (specifically, atrembling motion) to the shell, since theessence of a valuable lies in its mobility – itsbeing for transmission. The main function ofthe attachments, however, is to signify successin kula exchange through sound, hence the sig-nificance of the chiming or tinkling sound theymake. (In many parts, kula transactions are infact concluded at night, so that it is the soundof a kula valuable being carried off to the beachthat signals success on the exchange.) As NancyMunn observes, ‘the mobile decor makes asound that ramifies the space [of the shell] – asif putting it into motion – so that what may beout of sight may nevertheless be heard’ (quotedin Howes 2003: 82).

The sensory meaning of an object or artefactmay change over time. Consider the case of therose. The transformation of the rose from a pre-modern symbol of olfactory and gustatory per-fection to a modern symbol of formal visualperfection indexes the shifting balance of thesenses in Western history – specifically, thevisual eclipse of smell. While in pre-moderntimes ‘A rose by any other name would smellas sweet’ and rose petals were frequently usedin cooking, in modern times, many varieties ofroses look quite splendid but have, in fact, losttheir scent owing to selective breeding. Thisshift did not go uncontested. William Morris,for example, railed against ‘the triumph of sur-face over essence, of quantity over quality’,represented by the way in which showy gar-dens had come to replace scented gardens inVictorian England (Classen 1993a: 31).

The sensory meanings of objects also varyacross cultures. Analysing commodities as bun-dles of sensual relations, susceptible to multipleappropriations (or appraisals), can help eluci-date the sensory as well as social biographiesof things in the course of their domestication(see Dant 1999: 110–29). It can also can help toexplain the often innovative meanings anduses ascribed to foreign products in contexts of‘cross-cultural consumption’ (Howes 1996).5



For example, the Algonquin Indians traded fursfor glass beads of various hues with the Frenchin seventeenth-century Québec, and there wasalso a significant traffic in prayer beads. But theAlgonquians did not admire the beads simplyfor their ‘brilliance’, they also occasionallyground them up and smoked them because ‘therespiratory route’ was the standard sensorychannel for the ingestion of power-laden sub-stances (von Gernet 1996: 170–6). To take a con-temporary example, Johnson & Johnson’s babypowder is a popular trade item in Papua NewGuinea. Rather than being applied to babies,however, it is used for purifying corpses andmourners, asperging the heads of ritual per-formers, and for body decor.6 This decorativeuse of baby powder (as a substitute for crushedshell) has the effect of intensifying the visualand olfactory presence of the person in waysthat accord with the emphasis on exteriorizationin the Massim aesthetic order, as discussed else-where (see Howes 2003: 217–18).

It is not only in contexts of cross-culturalconsumption that commodities acquire newuses and meanings on account of localappraisals of their sensual qualities. Take thecase of Kool-Aid – that icon of American middle-class family life – which is used as a (cheap yetcolourful) hair dye by numbers of rebelliousNorth American ‘tweens’ (i.e. those aged 10 to13). Here tween subculture is the determiningfactor in ‘making sense’ of what Kool-Aid isgood for, converting a taste into a sight.

Emplacement

The sensuous reaction of people to place hasreceived increased attention of late thanks tothe pioneering work of Yi-Fu Tuan (1974, 1995)and Steve Feld (1996), among others. Theirexample has led geographers and anthropolo-gists alike to foreground the notion of sens-escapes in place of the conventional notion oflandscape, with its primarily visual connota-tions (see Porteous 1990), and to pay height-ened attention to processes of ‘emplacement’(Rodman 1992; Fletcher 2004) as distinct from(but inclusive of) processes of ‘embodiment’(Csordas 1990).

In his contribution to Senses of Place, Feldprobes the seemingly transparent meaning ofthe word ‘sense’ in the expression ‘sense ofplace’ by asking: ‘How is place actually sensed?’He goes on to argue that ‘as place is sensed,senses are placed; as places make sense, sensesmake place’ (1996: 91). Feld’s point is nicelyexemplified by numerous subsequent studies

of the sonic dimensions of social life (orsonorization of the material world), such asthose collected in Music, Sensation, and Sensuality(Austern 2002), The Auditory Culture Reader(Bull and Back 2003) and Hearing Cultures(Erlmann 2004).

The odorization of the material world, bothhistorically and across cultures, has also comeunder increased investigation (Corbin 1986;Classen et al. 1994; Rasmussen 1999; Drobnickforthcoming). Vishvajit Pandya’s ethnographyof Ongee ‘osmology’ (or science of scent) pre-sents a particularly illuminating case study ofthe socialization of olfaction. Among theOngee, a hunting and gathering people ofLittle Andaman Island in the Bay of Bengal,smell is the primary sensory medium throughwhich the categories of time, space and theperson are conceptualized. Odour, accordingto the Ongee, is the vital force which animatesall living, organic beings, and life, for theOngee, is a constant game of olfactory hide-and-seek. They seek out animals in order to killthem by releasing their odours, and at thesame time try to hide their own odours bothfrom the animals they hunt and from the spiritswho hunt them.

Space is conceived of by the Ongee not as astatic area within which things happen but as adynamic environmental flow. The olfactoryspace of an Ongee village fluctuates: it can bemore expansive or less, depending on the pres-ence of strong-smelling substances (e.g. pigmeat), the strength of the wind, and otherfactors. The Ongee smellscape, then, is not afixed structure but a fluid pattern that can shiftaccording to differing atmospheric conditions.The Ongee convey the fluid nature of odour byemploying the same word, kwayaye, for boththe emission of odours and the ebb and flow oftides (Pandya 1993; Classen et al. 1994: 97–9).

When Pandya observed that his official mapof the island did not correspond with his expe-rience of it among the Ongee, an Ongee infor-mant replied:

Why do you hope to see the same space whilemoving? One only hopes to reach the place in theend. All the places in space are constantly chang-ing. The creek is never the same; it grows largerand smaller because the mangrove forest keepsgrowing and changing the creek. The rise andfall of the tidewater changes the coast and thecreeks. . . . You cannot remember a place by what itlooks like. Your map tells lies. Places change. Doesyour map say that? Does your map say when thestream is dry and gone or when it comes andoverflows? We remember how to come and go



back, not the places which are on the way of goingand coming.

(Pandya 1991: 792–3)

Among the Ongee, space is as fluid as theodours which animate the world. How woulda Western cartographer begin to map the com-plexities of the Ongee’s fundamentally non-visual sense of place?6

A culture’s sensory order is also projected inits architecture. A good comparative examplewould be the nineteenth-century European fash-ion for balconies versus the windowless walleddomestic compounds found in many parts ofAfrica. The architectural form of the balconyallowed the bourgeois subject to gaze but not betouched while the walled compound inhibitssight and fosters tactile engagement. The latterarrangement is important to a people such as theWolof of Senegal, for whom touch is the socialsense and vision the sense of aggression andtransgression (Howes 1991: 182–5). Anotherinteresting comparative example is the Inuitsnowhouse or ‘igloo’ versus the modern bour-geois home. According to Edmund Carpenter,‘visually and acoustically the igloo is “open,” alabyrinth alive with the movements of crowdedpeople’ (1973: 25). By contrast, the proliferationof rooms within the bourgeois dwelling has hadthe effect of privatizing what were once moresocial functions (the preparation and consump-tion of food, the elimination of bodily wastes,sleeping) by confining each to a separate com-partment. The fragmented understanding of thesensorium with which most modern Westernsubjects operate is at least partly attributable tothis great nineteenth-century repartition of spaceand bodily functions.

Most studies of emplacement have tended tofocus on the ordering or integration of thesenses. However, it is important to consider theunderside of emplacement as well – namely,the sense of displacement typically experiencedby marginal groups within society. For exam-ple, Chris Fletcher (2004) has coined the term‘dystoposthesia’ to describe ‘the incompatibil-ity of bodies to the space they inhabit’ experi-enced by those who suffer from ‘environmentalsensitivities’ (ES). For sufferers of ES, the visualworld is dangerously deceptive. Through theeye-catching facades of modern life – furniture,paint, rugs, cosmetics – seep invisible toxicfumes, turning the dream worlds of consumercapitalism into corporeal nightmares. ES suffer-ers have no evident reason for their derangedsensations, for the world they perceive asthreatening is judged by others to be safe.Indeed, ES is medically unrecognized and often

dismissed as a ‘garden variety mental disorder’.In order to retain a sense of sanity, ES sufferersmust ‘work out a bodily logic of what remainsillogical’ (Fletcher 2004: 384).

The term dystoposthesia might also beapplied to the life world of the homelesspersons in Boston studied by Robert Desjarlaisin ‘Movement, stillness’ (2004). Whether onthe street or in a shelter the homeless areincompatible with their sensory environment.Both sites offer a continual series of sensoryassaults; brutal in the case of the street, dis-tracting in the case of the shelter, with its con-stant hum of activity. Desjarlais describes howthe homeless develop various sensory tech-niques to cope with their situation. When a‘quiet place’ cannot be found, the body itselfbecomes ‘silent’, numb to the world outsideand the feelings inside: the homeless ‘playdead’, even though this strategy exposes themto additional risks.

SENSORIAL INVESTIGATIONS

Victor Buchli has drawn attention to the curiousneglect of materiality in material culture stud-ies. He observes that ‘material culture’ trans-forms ‘a mostly inarticulate realm of sensualexperience into the two dimensions of a schol-arly text or the “nature-morte” of the museumdisplay’ (2002: 13). He wonders whether there isany alternative to this seemingly inexorable‘decrease in physicality’ (or movement towards‘the dimensionless and ephemeral’) whenobjects are reduced to writing or subject to clas-sification and exhibition in glass cases.

I am in sympathy with Buchli’s critique ofthe neglect of materiality in material culturestudies, though I would be more inclined tospeak of the sensuality of material culture. I amalso in agreement with his attack on the ideol-ogy of ‘conservation’. (Conservation, accord-ing to Buchli, conserves nowhere near as muchas it ‘produces’ a particular order of things.)However, I also believe that a number of ques-tionable assumptions remain embedded inBuchli’s state-of-the-art critique, and that thesehave the effect of limiting what he is able toconceive of by way of alternative modes ofpresentation. Why suppose that artefacts arenot for handling? Why prioritize the visualappearance of an object?7 This last question isprompted by Buchli’s observation that:

Most of our publications deny us any visual repre-sentation of the very physical objects we explore.This was never the case in the beautifully illustrated



discussions of material culture in the past and theirexquisite display when the affects of these objectswere at their most problematic ... [from a contem-porary postcolonial perspective]. Their visualityand form was the primary vehicle of authority andinformation, the text was merely supplementaryand discursive.

(2002: 14)

To truly access the materiality of an object, Imaintain, it is precisely those qualities whichcannot be reproduced in photographs – thefeel, the weight, the smell, the sound – whichare essential to consider. As the previoussections of this chapter have indicated, thesenon-visual qualities are also often of key impor-tance within an artefact’s culture of origin.Appreciating the visual design of a Tukanobasket would tell one nothing of the range ofsensory characteristics which are meaningfulto the Tukano, right down to the odour of thevines from which a basket is made. To accesssuch non-visual qualities, however, ofteninvolves breaking one of the most sacred muse-ological taboos and actually handling a col-lectible. This fear of touch is not intrinsic to themuseum. Early museums often gave visitorstactile access to their collections, of which visi-tors took full advantage. Thus seventeenth andeighteenth-century diarists record lifting, feel-ing and smelling artefacts in the collections theyvisited (Classen and Howes forthcoming). It iscertainly the case that most early curators didnot share the modern preoccupation with con-servation. However, it is even more true that thesensory values of the time gave an importanceto tactile knowledge which has since been dis-counted. Even though it might endanger thecollection, visitors were still allowed to touchbecause of the belief that touch was essential forappreciation. The current sensory order of themuseum resulted from the confluence of awidespread hypervaluation of vision in moder-nity and a new emphasis on the preservation ofthe material past (Classen 2005).8

Owing to its association with museumstudies and to its development within a partic-ular culture of vision, material culture studieshas tended to overlook the multisensory prop-erties of materiality. While this is now chang-ing, as we have seen, old habits die hard.Examining the sensuous worlds of non-Western peoples such as the Tukano and theOngee brings out the importance of exploringall the sensory dimensions of material life,even the olfactory – the most denigrated sen-sory domain of modernity. The model of inter-sensoriality, in turn, compels us to interrelate

sensory media, to contextualize them within atotal sensory and social environment. While allmedia may not be conveying the samemessage, or given the same attention, they arenonetheless all playing on each other. Thestudy of material culture, from this perspec-tive, becomes the exploration of sensory rela-tionships and embodied experience withinparticular regimes or systems of cultural values.It is only through such multisensory investiga-tions that material culture studies can becomea full-bodied discipline. After all, a materialculture that consisted solely of images wouldbe immaterial.

NOTES

1 Saunders’s point is that the Great War of1914–18 was a crisis of synaesthetic propor-tions, and not simply a ‘crisis of vision’, asothers maintain (e.g. Jay 1993: 211–15).

2 The sensual revolution in material culturestudies is not confined to the work of theUniversity College London Material CultureGroup, as the examples cited thus far mightsuggest. For example, Nadia Seremetakismakes an eloquent case for treating ‘percep-tion as material culture in modernity’ in TheSenses Still (1994), and David Sutton (2001),building on the work of James Fernandez(1986), has highlighted the sensory dimen-sions of memory and food. There is a wholesub-field of archaeology now dedicated tothe ‘archaeology of perception’ (Houstonand Taube 2000; Ouzman 2001). Other lead-ing proponents of the sensory analysis ofartefacts include Richard Carp (1997) andJules Prown (1996).

3 In drawing out this logical implication ofthe ‘writing culture’ position, Tyler is, ofcourse, exposing the limits of representa-tion, unlike the other contributors to theClifford and Marcus volume (1986), whowould appear to condone and even cele-brate them (see Howes 2003: 22–3).

4 There is a quality to synaesthetic expres-sions, such as ‘crumbly yellow voice’, whichsome perceive to be akin to metaphor.Similarly, one finds the term ‘synaesthesia’being used interchangeably with ‘metaphor’in the works of anthropologists such asIsbell (1985). This is untoward, for synaes-thesia is a sensory process, not a linguisticone like metaphor, and its value as a theo-retical concept may consist precisely in theway it enables us to analyse rituals from aperspective that is beyond metaphor – that



is, from a perspective which treats rituals as‘ways of sensing’ the world (Howes 2003).Such an approach builds on the manifoldsenses of the word ‘sense’ – ‘sense’ as ‘sen-sation’ and ‘signification’, to which onemight add ‘direction’ (as given in the Frenchword sens).

5 Also of note in this connection are thosestudies which highlight the struggle fordominance of conflicting constructions of thesensorium in situations of culture contact(see Classen 1993b; Hoffer 2003).

6 Ongee osmology, in addition to defying car-tography, poses a significant challenge tophenomenological approaches to the studyof human-environment relations. To take aparadigm case, in The Perception of theEnvironment (2000) Tim Ingold dwells exten-sively on sight and sound and ‘motion’ (oraction) but his text is virtually devoid of ref-erences to smell or taste or touch. The Ongeewould thus find little or nothing to perceivein Ingold’s phenomenologically reduced‘surroundings’ – but then, this should not beso surprising, given that phenomenologycomes from the Greek phainen, which means‘to appear’. Ingold’s work, in addition tobeing open to critique for (uncritically)reflecting certain conventional Westernperceptual biases in its account of ‘the envi-ronment’, must be challenged for theEurocentrism with which it champions thetheories of perception advanced by philoso-pher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and psycholo-gist J.J. Gibson as if the universal validityof those theories were a given, instead ofremaining to be seen (see Ingold 2000:Chapter 14; Howes 2003: 239–40 n. 8).

7 To these questions one might add: whyassume that writing must be a two-dimensional medium? There exist counter-examples, such as the Inca quipu, whichconsists of a series of knotted strings, andis best characterized as a multidimen-sional and multisensorial form of writing(Classen and Howes forthcoming; see fur-ther Küchler 2002 and Connor 2003: 40–1on the multisensory symbolic significanceof knots and knotting). Given the unlikeli-hood of Inca writing ever being revived,much less becoming the lingua franca ofthe academy, it might be objected that ourwriting about material culture meanscontinuing to frame it within a two-dimensional medium. To this objection Iwould respond that it is nevertheless possi-ble to hone our powers of (verbal) descrip-tion to the point that our words mingle

with their referents, thereby sensualizinglanguage instead of merely verbalizingthings. This path is suggested by the workof historian Alain Corbin who, by recuper-ating past phrases, such as aura seminalis,miasma, etc., has succeeded at renderinghistory sensible (see Corbin 2000: 62). It isalso exemplified by certain contemporarywriters, such as Seamus Heaney (1991) andSusan Stewart (2002), who exploit the mate-riality (or better sensuality) of language inuntold ways. So too can what Buchli (2002)calls the dimensionless ‘“nature morte” ofmuseum displays’ be complicated sensori-ally by curating exhibitions for all the senses,as exemplified by the work of Displaycult(Drobnick and Fisher 2002).

8 For an account of the florescence of the‘exhibitionary complex’, or visual eclipse oftouch, in the mid-nineteenth century seeThe Birth of the Museum (Bennett 1995), andfor an analysis of the prehistory and fall-out of this transformation in perception seeClassen (forthcoming) and Candlin (2004).

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to acknowledge the support of the SocialSciences and Humanities Research Councilof Canada and the Quebec Fonds pour laFormation de Chercheurs et l’Aide à laRecherche, as well as all the stimulation I havereceived from my conversations with Jean-Sébastien Marcoux and other members of theConcordia Sensoria Research Team (http://alcor.concordia.ca/~senses).



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