The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses 0802059023, 0802068448

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Citation preview

The Varieties of Sensory Experience A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses

Western societies are overwhelmingly dependent on visual and verbal faculties for their experience ofthe world. But different societies use and combine the senses in different ways and to different ends. What is the world like to a culture that takes actuality in less visual, more gustatory or tactile, auditory or olfactory terms than those to which we are accustomed? What is the impact of other 'sensory ratios' on the life of the mind and the emotions? What is the relation of the hierarchy of the senses to social hierarchy, or relations between the sexes? The essays in this collection address these questions, and open up many new directions for research, by breaking with the visualism and verbocentrism of the sensually limited approaches of traditional anthropology, and by focusing on the interplay of ali the senses. Among the topics explored are the visual politics ofthe 'tourist gaze'; matters of taste on an Indonesian island; the use of incense in a Moroccan 'ritual of silent wishes'; the social structuring of sound and emotion in a New Guinea society; the power oftouch in a traditional South Indian medical system; the contrasting sensory orders ofthe cultures ofthe Andes and the Amazon; and the history ofthe senses in Western philosophy. The concluding chapter offers a holistic paradigm for sensing and making sense of other cultures. The book is ideal both for guiding research in the field and for orienting discussion in the classroom. DAVID HOWES is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Concordia University.

THE VARIETIES OF SENSORY EXPERIENCE A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses

Edited by David Howes

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University ofToronto Press 1991 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada

ISBN 0-8020-5902-3 (cloth) ISBN 0-8020-6844-8 (paper)

(~

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: The Varieties of sensory experience (Anthropological horizons ; 1) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8020-5902-3 (bound) ISBN 0-8020-6844-8 (pbk.) 1. Senses and sensation. 2. Senses and sensation Social aspects. l. Howes, David, 1957BF233.V37 1991

152.1

C9 l-094383-4

CONTENTS

Foreword - Michael Lamhek ix Acknowledgments xiii lntroduction: 'To Summon Ali the Senses' - Darid Howes 3

Part

1:

Uncommon Sense

1 The Shifting Sensorium - W alter J. Ong, SJ 25 2 The Sensotype Hypothesis - Mallory Wober 31 3 Ethnopsychological Aspects of the Terms 'Deaf and 'Dumb' - George Devereux 43 4 The Sensory Orders of 'Wild Children' - Constance Classen 47 5 Puzzling over the Senses: From Plato to Marx - Anthony Synnott 61

Contents

VI

Part

11:

The Sensory Construction of Reality

6 Sound as a Symbolic System: The Kaluli Drum - Steven Feld 79 7 The Pulse as an lean in Siddha Medicine - E. Va/entine Daniel 100 8 Matters of Taste in Weyéwa - Joel C. Kuipers 111 9 Olfaction and Transition - Darid Howes 128 1O On Safari: The Visual Poli tics of a Tourist Representation - Kenneth Little 148 Part m: Sensorial lnvestigations

11 Sensorial Anthropology - David Howes 167 12 Fusion of the Faculties: A Study of the Language of the Senses in Hausaland - Jan Ritchie 192 13 'To Render Visible': Making Sense among the Ndembu - Lisa Andermann 203 14 The Ritual of Silent Wishes: Notes on the Moroccan Sensorium - Kit Gr(ffin 21 O 15 A Taste of India: On the Role of Gustation in the Hindu Sensorium - Syfrain Pinard 221 16 'The Great Seeing': The Senses in Zinacanteco Ritual Life - Lisa Andermann 231 17 Creation by Sound / Creation by Light: A Sensory Analysis of Two South American Cosmologies - Constance Classen 239

Contents Conclusion: Sounding Sensory Profiles _ David Howes and Constance Classen 257 References 289 Notes on Contributors 317 Index 319

vii

FOREWORD

The Varieties of Sensory Experience is no mere collection of articles around a theme. Instead it offers us David Howes's imagination of a ncw field, an anthropology of the senses. In its various segments this book pro vides a history of the field, a set of theoretical arguments conccrni ng the significance of the senses, a series of pictures of selected portions of the world seen from the new angle of vision, and a variety ofpractical illustrations. It even concludes with a manual ofinstructions on how to go about gaining access to the view for yourself. All of this is tied together by the lucid and brilliant textual interventions of the editor who constructs and sustains bis own argument throughout the text in counterpoint with the portraits of senses and culturally particular sensory ratios painted by bis guests. Hencc my first sensory impression of this book is one of bedazzlement. A dazzling of multiple facets, cut from the nuggets of cultural descriptions and revealed by the strongly focused light that Howes and his cohort cast upon them. The book offers us a new angle of vision on cultures and cultural texts with which we have grown overly familiar. Likc the invention of the microscope it opens up for our inspection another dimension of the world that we had hitherto missed. It renews thc sen se of wonderment at cultural difference and wonderment at difference and human sameness in the face of one another. . Bedazzlement leaves a splinter in the eye. My second reaction is to instantly retract all the visual imagery in which I have just represented by experience and invited yours, to recompose it in the key of taste or smell, sound or touch, or better still sorne delicious, polyphonous mix of these. This book will make you scratch with interest against the rub

X

Foreword

of its ideas, direct you to portions ofyour anatomy you never imagined could itch. It is a harmonious feast of varied yet balanced proportions, an Indonesian rijstaffel of delícacies to make you salivate, to satisfy your palate, and to stir your digestive juices into postprandial eructation - all laid out around the substantive rice mound of Howes's judicious reasoning. In its focus on the senses this book alerts us to our dependence on the sense of vision for conceptualizing experience, thought, and understanding (en/ightenment). Alternate metaphors induce stumbling, confusion, vertigo, indigestion, nausea. They sound foolish. But ultimately the book instructs us that all metaphor is based on the senses; indeed that metaphor is nothing but the selective ways in which we experience the world and conceptualize, report on, or attempt to solicit that experience in others. It demonstrates the intrinsic link between sense (reason, thought) and the senses. And further, if sensation is essential to living, so is selective attention. We know that we select phonemes from the range of sound, discarding other variation as noise and eventually not even hearing it. But so too, this book argues, do we select certain components of each ofthe senses and certain combinations, what are here called sense ratios, among them. It is this understanding that invites us to new experience, to new appreciation of cultural particularities and similarities, to new thinking about our contemporary condition, our hypervisuality and tactile impoverishment, in relation to the sensory, hence sensible, worlds of others. To give a sense of the ambition as well as the possible scope and importance of this work, consider that Howes's direction is not so different from that of Roman Jakobson when he attempted to apply the insights of phonology to poetics, to literature, and to communication more broadly. Yet Howes would begin not just with sound but with all the senses. Strong poetry resituates us by changing the tropes through which we imagine the world, but all metaphor is sense based. Along this path from primary experience to poiesis a whole series of doors appear. In the ethnographic case studies, in the range of senses investigated, in the questions of theory and connection addressed, this book does not neglect to open them. The Varieties of Sensory Experience is a superb work with which to introduce the University ofToronto Press's new series 'Anthropological Horizons.' It moves us beyond the horizon of vision itself into as yet to be charted sensory worlds of taste, touch, sight, and smell, and the conjunctions among them. And yet, in my view it is nota radical break with the hermeneutic tradition. In bis metaphor of expanding horizons Gadamer suggests we expose our prejudices to the conversations we

Foreword

xi

engage with others. We can bring our prejudices to consciousness, perhaps the better to change them, but we cannot detach ourselves from the chains of prejudice itself to float, somehow freely, to a vantage point above the horizon. So too there is less need to regret visualist metaphors or textualizing procedures per se than to learn how to enjoy them. To appreciate a cultural world composed more immediately of touch and smell than of sight is to engage in an act of imagination. To report on our experience rather than merely to go native is to engage in translation. To reflect on it is to engage in theory. We are not replacing a hermeneutics for an erotics of culture (pace Sontag) but are engaged instead in an exciting new hermeneutic departure . .\1ichae/ Lambek

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the fall of 1987, together with three of my colleagues - Anthony Synnott (Sociology), Charles Davis (Religious Studies), and Michael Bross (Psychology) - I applied to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a grant to study 'The Varieties of Sensory Experience.' The council's generous financia) assistance made possible the formation of an inter-disciplinary research team, consisting of Synnott, Da vis, Bross, myself, and ali of the contributors to part III of this book, as well as Sylvat Aziz, Kathleen Buddle, Josette Dupuis, and Marc Lalonde. On behalf of ali of the abo ve, I wish to thank the council for the many hours ofreflection and exchange its support made possible. The views expressed in my own contributions to this book were otherwise forged in dialogue with numerous friends, colleagues, and teachers. Those I particularly wish to thank, for their uncommon sense and support, include: Gilles Bibeau, Chanta) Collard, Rosemary Coombe, Ellen Corin, Wlad Godzich, Valerie Guilbeault, Michael Herzfeld, Laurence Kirmayer, Michael Lambek, John Leavitt, Ken Little, Margaret Lock, Roger McDonnell, Rodney Needham, Michael Oppenheim, Michelle Ronback, Jéróme Rousseau, Paul Stoller, David Turner, and Sheila van Wyck. I am also indebted to Virgil Duff, Suzanne Rancourt, and the many others at University of Toronto Press whose encouragement andad vice transformed the task of preparing this book for publication into a pleasure. My deepest thanks go to Constance Classen, who shared with me her expertise on the anthropology of the senses, and inspired me beyond measure. Finally, this book is dedicated to my mother and father, with thanks for having educated my senses in so many stimulating ways.

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Acknowledgments

Permissions

Walter J. Ong, 'The Shifting Sensorium,' in The Presence of the Word (New Haven: Vale University Press 1967). Reprinted with the permission of the publisher. Mallory Wober, 'Adapting Witkin's Field lndependence Theory to Accommodate New Information from Africa,' British Journal of Psychology 58 (1967): 29-38. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher. George Devereux, 'Ethnopsychological Aspects of the Terms "Deaf' and "Dumb,'" Anthropo/ogical Quarterly 37 (1964): 68-71. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher. Constance Classen, 'The Sensory Orders of "Wild Children."' This article appeared in French as 'La perception sauvage: Etude sur les ordres sensoriels des enfants "sauvages,"' Anthropo/ogie et Sociétés l 4 (2; 1990) Steven Feld, 'Sound as a Symbolic System: The Kaluli Drum.' An earlier version of this article appeared in Charlotte Frisbie, ed., Explorations in Ethnomusico/ogy in Honor of David P. McAl/ester (Detroit Monographs in Musicology 9; Detroit: Information Coordinators 1986), 14 7-58. The present version is substantially revised. E. Valentine Daniel, 'The Pulse asan Icon in Siddha Medicine,' Contributions to Asian Studies 18 ( 1983): 115-26. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher. Joel C. Kuipers, 'Matters of Taste in Weyéwa,' Anthropo/ogica/ Linquist ics 26 ( 1984): 84-1 O1. Reprinted with the permission of the author. David Howes, 'Olfaction and Transition: An Essay on the Ritual Uses of Smell,' The Canadian Review of Socio/ogy and Anthropo/ogy 24 (3; 1987). Reprinted with the permission of the publisher. David Howes, 'Sensorial Anthropology,' Anthropo/ogie et Sociétés 14 (2; 1990). Reprinted with the permission of the publisher. Constance Classen, 'Sweet Colors, Fragrant Songs: Sensory Models of the Andes and the Amazon,' American Ethno/ogist 17 (4; 1990). Reprinted with the permission of the American Anthropological Association.

THE VARIETIES OF SENSORY EXPERIENCE

INTRODUCTION

'To Summon Ali the Senses' David Howes

Just as time and space are not perceived by the vast majority of human societies as a regular continuum and grid, so the fsensoriumj is rarely thought of in strictly biological terms ... The five senses are given diflerent emphases and diflerent meanings in diflerent societies. A certain sense may be privileged as a sensory mode. lt is important to analyse how people think they perceive. Anthony Seeger, Nature and Society in Central Brazil (1981) This book brings together a series of essays in anthropology and adjacent disciplines (psychology, linguistics, cultural history) which are noteworthy for the attention they pay to the senses as shapers and bearers of culture. The approach / field of study these essays articulate rnay be called the 'anthropology of the senses.' 1 The anthropology of the senses is prirnarily concerned with how the patterning of sense experience varíes frorn one culture to the next in accordance with the rneaning and ernphasis attached to each of the modalities of perception. It is also concerned with tracing the influence such variations have on forrns of social organization, conceptions of self and cosmos, the regulation of the ernotions, and other dornains of cultural expression. The rnost basic tenet of this ernergent field of study is that it is only by developing a rigorous awareness of the visual and textual biases of the Western episterne that we can hope to rnake sense of how life is lived in other cultural settings. The anthropology of the senses grows out of the interest in bodily modes ofknowing, and the place ofthe body in the rnind, which gripped the irnaginations of ethnographers and philosophers alike in the 1980s

Introduction

4

(see Jackson 1983, 1989; Fernandez 1985; Lock and Scheper-Hughes 1987; Johnson 1987; Csordas 1990). But its goal is not simply to expand social science discourse on the body so as to include the senses. Rather, it is hoped that the wisdom gained by plunging into the realm of the non-visual senses - and exploring how the possibilities of awareness contained· within these senses have been exploited by others - can help to liberate us from the hegemony which sight has for so long exercised over our own culture's social, intellectual, and aesthetic life (Foucault 1979; Tyler 1984; Summers 1987; Synnott, ch. 5). The World outside. the 'Civilization of the lmage'

The need for us to experiment with other ways of sensing the world has never been more acute. Indeed, if we do not 'come to our senses' soon, we will have permanently forfeited the chance of constructing any meaningful alternatives to the pseudo-existence which passes for life in our current 'Civilization of the Image.' This rather dire prognosis is based on Richard Kearney's analysis of the image of today as compared to those of bygone centuries in The Wake of lmagination: now the image precedes the reality it is supposed to represent ... This reversal is evident at a number of levels. In politics, we find presidents and prime ministers being elected beca use of the media image they represent ... [At] the economic level, it is now a welldocumented fact that our consumerist society ... can sustain material production only by means of the 'hidden persuaders' of new brand-images and ever more elaborate advertising campaigns. Even at the everyday social level, we notice the image taking pride of place over the real, as in Boorstin's humorous anecdote about the contemporary suburban housewife who responds to a neighbour's compliment to her child with the boast: 'Yes, he is lovely, but you should see the photograph.' (1988: 2) It is instructive to inquire into the origins ofthe hyper-visual aesthetic expressed by Boorstin's suburbanite, an aesthetic within which the 'real' child figures as but a pale reflection of its technologically generated image. The origin of this aesthetic can be traced to the invention of linear perspective vision by the fifteenth-century Italian painter Alberti. Linear perspective does not come naturally to humans; initially it required the support of a physical structure, a grid, which served to fix the eye upon its object, as in Dürer's etching of a Man Drawing a Reclining Woman (Figure 1). The cultural repercussions of Alberti's little invention have been many

I-{owes: 'To Summon Ali the Senses'

5

FIGURE 1 Albrecht Dürer, Man Drawing Rec/ining Woman

and far-reaching. I shall not dwell on them here, far they have already been described in detail in Technology as Symptom and Dream (1989), where Robert Romanyshyn