Review of “Senses” by Michael Herzfeld
Robin Daniel Z. Rivera
Anthropology 292
14 September 2005
Dr. Michael Tan
The “Othering” of Senses
A couple of years ago, I reported on visual research in a Sociology methods class. In that report, my references pointed to a tyranny of text over images in the realm of social and cultural research. This was because of a perception that, in the natural and social sciences, most observation is conducted using the sense of sight. The report coincided with my own frustrations about the growing, but still limited repertoire of acoustic methods in social science. Today’s review focuses on an even deeper problem, the embryonic stage of anthropological theory and methods regarding the “other” senses, namely smell, touch, and taste. This is based on an article by Michael Herzfeld (2001) on the Anthropology of the Senses.
“Anthropology, like all academic disciplines, is primarily a verbal activity. Even the study of visual media must always be expressed in words. ... We have already seen that the modern representational practices are heavily dependent on visual formats, but even this restriction seems to appear most commonly as an extension of verbal texts.” (Herzfeld, p. 240)
Since the latter half of the 20th century, a number of writers have pointed out an apparent hierarchy of senses in the social sciences. Herzfeld cites Marshall McLuhan (popularly known in mass communication circles for his tag line “the medium is the message”) and his student Walter Ong as having laid the foundation for what would be known as the Anthropology of the Senses. In his book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Ong traces the contrast between two types of knowledge in the west. They posit that in ancient Greek civilization, knowledge was articulated in sound via speech in spite of the fact that most physical observation was conducted visually. But this relationship was profoundly changed with the arrival of written text. By the time of the invention of the printing press, knowledge had become not only gathered, but articulated and disseminated via text. This set the stage for the devaluation of sound, and the primacy of textual literacy. In my experience, it is therefore no mystery that up to this day, textual literacy is highly prized in our western-oriented educational system whether in the natural and social sciences, or in the humanities. The situation has gotten to the point that in some instances, “seeing” is not necessarily the basis of “believing”, but “reading” is. In addition, textual knowledge fits nicely into the modernist paradigm. Because of its ability to isolate, and subdivide knowledge into neatly analyzed “objects”, text is the ideal companion of reason and rationality. Despite Ong’s disclaimer that neither orality nor literacy is superior, Herzfeld is just one in hinting that among scholars, textual literacy is considered higher up the evolutionary ladder than orality.
“Such biases reflect the extraordinary persistence of evolutionism in both popular and scholarly thinking in the West. The reluctance of present-day anthropologists to examine or recognize the cultural importance of smell, taste and touch is due not only to the relative marginalization of these senses in the modern West, but also to the racist tendencies of an earlier anthropology to associate “lower” senses with “lower races. As sight, and to a lesser extent, hearing, were deemed the predominant senses of a “civilized” westerners, smell, taste, and touch were assumed to predominate among a more “primitive” non-westerners.” (Herzfeld, p.246)
Herzfeld goes on to cite a growing number of social scientists that have “bravely” taken on what was to become the “Anthropology of the Senses”. Herzfeld appends his earlier mention of McLuhan and Ong, with the works of such scholars as C. Nadia Seremetakis, Paul Stoller, Constance Classen, and Roy Porter, who is acknowledged as actually having coined the phrase “the cultural anthropology of the senses” in the preface to his book The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagnation (1986).
In the introduction her book “The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination “ (1998), Classens begins with a tirade against Western visual culture:
“Modern Western culture is a culture of the eye.We are constantly bombarded, seduced, and shaped by visual models and representations, from maps and graphs to pictures and texts. This rule of sight carries with it a powerful aura of rationality and objectivity, even though many of its contemporary manifestations, such as advertising images, seem designed to manipulate the emotions more than to exercise the reason. The photographic nature of much of twentieth-century representation helps maintain this aura of objectivity by appearing to provide the viewer with direct access to reality, rather than only mediating reality.
The visualist regime of modernity, in fact, prides itself on its transparency: everything can be seen, everything can be known, nothing is withheld from our inquisitive and acquisitive eyes. The microscopic view and the panoramic view intersect to display our world to us inside and out. However, the very visualism of modernity has, so to speak, thrown a cloak of invisibility over the sensory imagery of previous eras. So thick is this cloak that one can scarcely see through it, or even recognize that there might be some thing worth exploring underneath. When this cloak is lifted, however, the cosmos suddenly blazes forth in multisensory splendour: the heavens ring out with music, the planets radiate scents and savours, the earth springs to life in colours, temperatures, and sounds.”
The Problems of the Senses
Herzfeld’s article goes on to point out a major problem, that smell and taste are difficult to record, thus making them fleeting and subjective. In the 20th century, sound has managed to partially overcome this problem with advances in audio recording. This gave rise to what can be referred to as “secondary orality” But in his review of Ong’s book, Art Bingham (2005) points out that this idea of secondary orality remains undeveloped, and did not anticipate the rise of such technologies as audiobooks, voicemail, and very recently podcasts. Unfortunately, the other senses have not been so lucky. Some efforts to include othered senses in media have been few and far between. The film industry, for example, has tried such gimmicks as “Smell-o-rama” in the 1960's, and “Sensurround” in the 1970's film “Earthquake”. These innovations unfortunately never achieved widespread practice. While these examples are far from academic in nature, it shows how undervalued these senses are in contemporary media, and among the critical mass.
Despite its role in the human experience of the lifeworld, sensory perception is ordinarily accepted not only as a physical and psychological act, but a cultural one as well. Herzfeld recognizes that smell carries considerable weight in the transmission of cultural values. His example uses the radical difference in the reaction of a South East Asian and a European to a Durian fruit. But Herzfeld cautions that the senses are also an arena of agency. This means that even within a culture, there may be a wide range in ways by which individuals may perceive a particular phenomenon with their senses. This, plus the technological difficulties encountered in recording and measuring smell, taste and texture, marginalize them not only against vision, but sound as well. He tentatively suggests that the study of the senses should accompany the study of aesthetics (a later chapter in his book), with aesthetics being defined as a “subjective perception of feeling” in Greek civilization. This does not however completely bridge what I consider a gap between artistic aesthetics, and scientific studies on such things as olfactory preferences between cultures, age groups, genders, etc.
Another problem, experienced mostly and/or cited by Western scholars is that recent Western culture have lost its sensitivity for sensory information.
“To put this another way, the Suya think in smell, whereas we only react to smells, because our culture does not provide us with a framework in terms of which to think of odors as symbolic vehicles. Colors can symbolize concepts for us, as in the case of the traffic light system, where red means "stop," green means "go," and so on. Sounds also have meaning for us, for example, the soundtrack of a movie tells us what emotions we should be feeling as the action unfolds. But odors are not coded by our culture (or more likely, the code has been forgotten), which deprives us of any model in terms of which to organize our olfactory experience. Hence, our response to smells can only be measured in terms of relative pleasure. Of course there is nothing stopping our society from re-developing an olfactory code, but this would require a more integrated and totalizing production and marketing strategy on the part of the fragrance industry than exists at present. (Herzfeld, p.249)”
It is not surprising therefore that Western scholars, who author much of the research on the anthropology of the senses, feel an urgency to find the fuel to reconstitute a sensory framework for their own culture. This is why most “enthosensory” research often leads them outside the West.
To recap, Western social science (including Anthropology) is alleged to have constructed a hierarchy of senses depending on both ontological and epistomological value.
1. Sight - Vision is often cited as the favored sensory facility of modernism. Text is the most utilized form of articulating and transmitting knowledge. Images are a secondary source, but in most cases must be accompanied by explanatory text.
2. Sound - While sound was prized by classic Greek civilization in the form of oral discourse, it was overtaken with the emergence of text-based Western literate cultures. Even music which is primarily an aural medium, has undergone profound changes since the development of notation, and later electro-mechanical recording technologies. Environmental soundscapes have recently emerged as a serious subject of research, but still remain a relatively small area of study.
3. Others - Smell, taste and touch have been marginalized due to their subjective nature, and difficulties in recording and measurement. Only in the late 20th century have Western scholars seemed to have developed an organized interest in this field.
The Anthropolgical Response
Fortunately for us, the Anthropology of the Senses has benefitted not only from recent efforts to develop techniques in recording and measurement, but from late 20th century paradigms and theories. Various post-positivist paradigms have provided fresh artillery for anthropologists to deal with the subjective nature of the “other” senses. In one example given by Herzfeld, Seremetakis is said to have employed “multisensory imaging” in the study of her childhood memories in Greece. In my opinion, this seems every bit like a thick description from the reflexive and/or postmodern school.
“The grandma sits on a wooden stool...... her face dark, her hair tied in a bun, her hands frekled and rough. The child slips into her lap. It is time for fairy tales. Slipping into her lap is slipping into a surround of different smells and textures, sediments of her work in the field, the kitchen, with the animals.” (Seremetakis 1994: 30, in Herzfeld, p. 250)
Another example of recent work in this field comes from the CONSERT group (once again lead by Classens). Their website contains a selection of studies, among which is a meta-study entitled The Anthropology of Odor (1990-1994). The study begins by stating that Americans are culturally underdeveloped in respect to their olfactory apparatus. It then goes on to survey cultures in may be considered “olfactorily richer”. One of many “lists” in their study is the “six most basic uses of odor for classificatory purposes”.
1) Classifying people, animals and plants by their natural odor.
2) Classifying people, animals and plants by the symbolic odors attributed to them. For example, it is commonly supposed that different races each have a different smell, and even that "the `other' race stinks" - but there is no empirical evidence to support this belief.
3) Classifying groups within a society; for example, men and women, children and adults, by natural and symbolic odors.
4) Classifying space by reference to the environmental odor of different territories.
5) Classifying the cosmos through odor. For example, assigning contrasting symbolic odors to sun and moon (as among the Batek Negrito of Malaysia), or odorizing fundamental cosmic and social principles such as "structure" and "change" (as among the Bororo of Brazil).
6) Establishing a value system based on olfactory symbolism. For example, characterizing certain odors as good or bad and assigning them to different beings or states in order to signify the latter's moral goodness or badness.
The study acknowledges that the results can benefit such areas as the fragrance industry and alternative medicine (i.e. aromatherapy). While this study seems to want to emerge from the realm of symbolic, and/or interpretative anthropology, the acknowledged value to commercial ventures may have just as much to do with Marxist theories of political economies.
Minor and Major Quibbles
One small but contentious statement caught my attention in the article. This is as Herzfeld’s suggests that this chapter be read in association with a proceeding one on aesthetics.
"The addition of smell and taste is rare, half humorous (calling a chef as “artist” has all the metaphorical ring of artifice), and confined to relatively few domains." (Herzfeld, p.241)
This statement could be read in two ways. He could be referring to the recurring theme on the marginalization of smell and taste in the social sciences. But on the other hand, it is difficult to imagine why Herzfeld, after trying to prop up the importance of subjectivity and art in the evolution of the Anthropology of the Senses, would discriminate against the elite practitioners of Western culinary arts. This possibly reveals an obsolete perception of the state of art studies. This momentary lapse of judgement is bound to raise not just a few hackles from those in the arts, as well as the Anthropology of Food (yes, there is such a field!).
Aside from this minor quibble, there is problematic pattern that presents itself in Herzfeld’s, as well as a number of related articles I read in the course of preparing for this review. The amount of academic energy spent complaining about the “othering” of the Anthropology of the Senses can get irritating at a certain point. Some of the articles I read in preparation for this report usually devote at least one section to problematizing the lack of research in this area due to the hegemony of text and visual thinking. This may be partly traced to the fact that the anthropology of the senses is a relatively new field. It may be said to have surfaced during the cusp between modernism and post-modernism. It is no surprise therefore to note its disdain towards various versions of evolutionism, similar to that taken by with several late 20th century theoretical positions. But Herzfeld states that the Anthropology of the Senses has hope in this century because:
“.... all the more so as it increasingly intersects with medical anthropology no longer tied to cartesian models of causation, but sensitive to the needs of an anthropology that is attuned at once ..... to both empirical and phenomenological concerns. The older mode of sense-less description indeed now begins to smell rather fishy. (Herzfeld, p. 253).
I understand the nature of these complaints, given my own problems of often having to repeatedly explain and rationalize my work in the area of sound studies. But I feel there will have to come a point wherein these complaints will have to end because it wastes precious energy. This can only happen if Anthropology (and social science in general for that matter) can augment orality and literacy with a new state of sensorial awareness and articulation, be it on an ontological, epistomological, or methodological level. Maybe then the proponents of the Anthropology of the Senses can get on with the work at hand, and stop having to offer extended prefaces to their work.
Despite the recency of Herzfeld’s essay, he stops short of projecting on what form of articulations the Anthropology of the Senses may take in the future. This is similar to Ong’s failure to fully develop the concept of secondary orality. Thankfully, modernity and post-modernity may have already begun to provide some methodological solutions to this problem. For example, science has, as far as I have heard, been working on new ways of accurately measuring othered sensory information. I recently witnessed a report on CNN of a psychological experiment that tried to measure gender preferences for specific smells. One the other hand, and as mentioned earlier, the rise of subjectivity has enabled new forms of writing and production that facilitate multi-sensory presentations. My own bold forecast coincides with a number of efforts to rework the concept of a “document”. One such effort found traction the 1980's with the development of “hypermedia”. In this case, documents have been reconceptualized into both non-linear and multi-linear streams of information that contain text, images and sounds. This can be augmented with Baudrillard’s move towards the study of “simulations” in which the othered senses are not just appended as “special effects”, but integral to the production and experience of an event. If “Star Trek: The New Generation” is to be believed, not only our vacations, but academic documents will become sensorial simulations that blur the lines between physical and virtual reality. These, and a number of other disparate, but significant developments from a variety of disciplines may pave the way for a more vigorous Anthrpology of the Senses in the near future.
Cited Works
Art Bingham. “Review of Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy”. 7 July 2005. http://www.engl.niu.edu/wac/ong_rvw.html .(15 September 2005).
Constance Classens. “Introduction to The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination”. (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). http://alcor.concordia.ca/~senses/Classen.htm .(15 September 2005).
Michael Herzfeld. “Senses” in Theoretical Practise in Culture and Society. (Unesco, Blackwell Publishers: USA, 2001).
David Howes, Anthony Synnott and Constance Classens. “Anthropology of Odor (1990-1994)”. http://alcor.concordia.ca/~senses/Consert-Odor.htm.(15 September 2005).
Walter J. Ong. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New Accents. Ed. Terence Hawkes. (New York: Methuen, 1988).
Robin Daniel Z. Rivera
Anthropology 292
14 September 2005
Dr. Michael Tan
The “Othering” of Senses
A couple of years ago, I reported on visual research in a Sociology methods class. In that report, my references pointed to a tyranny of text over images in the realm of social and cultural research. This was because of a perception that, in the natural and social sciences, most observation is conducted using the sense of sight. The report coincided with my own frustrations about the growing, but still limited repertoire of acoustic methods in social science. Today’s review focuses on an even deeper problem, the embryonic stage of anthropological theory and methods regarding the “other” senses, namely smell, touch, and taste. This is based on an article by Michael Herzfeld (2001) on the Anthropology of the Senses.
“Anthropology, like all academic disciplines, is primarily a verbal activity. Even the study of visual media must always be expressed in words. ... We have already seen that the modern representational practices are heavily dependent on visual formats, but even this restriction seems to appear most commonly as an extension of verbal texts.” (Herzfeld, p. 240)
Since the latter half of the 20th century, a number of writers have pointed out an apparent hierarchy of senses in the social sciences. Herzfeld cites Marshall McLuhan (popularly known in mass communication circles for his tag line “the medium is the message”) and his student Walter Ong as having laid the foundation for what would be known as the Anthropology of the Senses. In his book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Ong traces the contrast between two types of knowledge in the west. They posit that in ancient Greek civilization, knowledge was articulated in sound via speech in spite of the fact that most physical observation was conducted visually. But this relationship was profoundly changed with the arrival of written text. By the time of the invention of the printing press, knowledge had become not only gathered, but articulated and disseminated via text. This set the stage for the devaluation of sound, and the primacy of textual literacy. In my experience, it is therefore no mystery that up to this day, textual literacy is highly prized in our western-oriented educational system whether in the natural and social sciences, or in the humanities. The situation has gotten to the point that in some instances, “seeing” is not necessarily the basis of “believing”, but “reading” is. In addition, textual knowledge fits nicely into the modernist paradigm. Because of its ability to isolate, and subdivide knowledge into neatly analyzed “objects”, text is the ideal companion of reason and rationality. Despite Ong’s disclaimer that neither orality nor literacy is superior, Herzfeld is just one in hinting that among scholars, textual literacy is considered higher up the evolutionary ladder than orality.
“Such biases reflect the extraordinary persistence of evolutionism in both popular and scholarly thinking in the West. The reluctance of present-day anthropologists to examine or recognize the cultural importance of smell, taste and touch is due not only to the relative marginalization of these senses in the modern West, but also to the racist tendencies of an earlier anthropology to associate “lower” senses with “lower races. As sight, and to a lesser extent, hearing, were deemed the predominant senses of a “civilized” westerners, smell, taste, and touch were assumed to predominate among a more “primitive” non-westerners.” (Herzfeld, p.246)
Herzfeld goes on to cite a growing number of social scientists that have “bravely” taken on what was to become the “Anthropology of the Senses”. Herzfeld appends his earlier mention of McLuhan and Ong, with the works of such scholars as C. Nadia Seremetakis, Paul Stoller, Constance Classen, and Roy Porter, who is acknowledged as actually having coined the phrase “the cultural anthropology of the senses” in the preface to his book The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagnation (1986).
In the introduction her book “The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination “ (1998), Classens begins with a tirade against Western visual culture:
“Modern Western culture is a culture of the eye.We are constantly bombarded, seduced, and shaped by visual models and representations, from maps and graphs to pictures and texts. This rule of sight carries with it a powerful aura of rationality and objectivity, even though many of its contemporary manifestations, such as advertising images, seem designed to manipulate the emotions more than to exercise the reason. The photographic nature of much of twentieth-century representation helps maintain this aura of objectivity by appearing to provide the viewer with direct access to reality, rather than only mediating reality.
The visualist regime of modernity, in fact, prides itself on its transparency: everything can be seen, everything can be known, nothing is withheld from our inquisitive and acquisitive eyes. The microscopic view and the panoramic view intersect to display our world to us inside and out. However, the very visualism of modernity has, so to speak, thrown a cloak of invisibility over the sensory imagery of previous eras. So thick is this cloak that one can scarcely see through it, or even recognize that there might be some thing worth exploring underneath. When this cloak is lifted, however, the cosmos suddenly blazes forth in multisensory splendour: the heavens ring out with music, the planets radiate scents and savours, the earth springs to life in colours, temperatures, and sounds.”
The Problems of the Senses
Herzfeld’s article goes on to point out a major problem, that smell and taste are difficult to record, thus making them fleeting and subjective. In the 20th century, sound has managed to partially overcome this problem with advances in audio recording. This gave rise to what can be referred to as “secondary orality” But in his review of Ong’s book, Art Bingham (2005) points out that this idea of secondary orality remains undeveloped, and did not anticipate the rise of such technologies as audiobooks, voicemail, and very recently podcasts. Unfortunately, the other senses have not been so lucky. Some efforts to include othered senses in media have been few and far between. The film industry, for example, has tried such gimmicks as “Smell-o-rama” in the 1960's, and “Sensurround” in the 1970's film “Earthquake”. These innovations unfortunately never achieved widespread practice. While these examples are far from academic in nature, it shows how undervalued these senses are in contemporary media, and among the critical mass.
Despite its role in the human experience of the lifeworld, sensory perception is ordinarily accepted not only as a physical and psychological act, but a cultural one as well. Herzfeld recognizes that smell carries considerable weight in the transmission of cultural values. His example uses the radical difference in the reaction of a South East Asian and a European to a Durian fruit. But Herzfeld cautions that the senses are also an arena of agency. This means that even within a culture, there may be a wide range in ways by which individuals may perceive a particular phenomenon with their senses. This, plus the technological difficulties encountered in recording and measuring smell, taste and texture, marginalize them not only against vision, but sound as well. He tentatively suggests that the study of the senses should accompany the study of aesthetics (a later chapter in his book), with aesthetics being defined as a “subjective perception of feeling” in Greek civilization. This does not however completely bridge what I consider a gap between artistic aesthetics, and scientific studies on such things as olfactory preferences between cultures, age groups, genders, etc.
Another problem, experienced mostly and/or cited by Western scholars is that recent Western culture have lost its sensitivity for sensory information.
“To put this another way, the Suya think in smell, whereas we only react to smells, because our culture does not provide us with a framework in terms of which to think of odors as symbolic vehicles. Colors can symbolize concepts for us, as in the case of the traffic light system, where red means "stop," green means "go," and so on. Sounds also have meaning for us, for example, the soundtrack of a movie tells us what emotions we should be feeling as the action unfolds. But odors are not coded by our culture (or more likely, the code has been forgotten), which deprives us of any model in terms of which to organize our olfactory experience. Hence, our response to smells can only be measured in terms of relative pleasure. Of course there is nothing stopping our society from re-developing an olfactory code, but this would require a more integrated and totalizing production and marketing strategy on the part of the fragrance industry than exists at present. (Herzfeld, p.249)”
It is not surprising therefore that Western scholars, who author much of the research on the anthropology of the senses, feel an urgency to find the fuel to reconstitute a sensory framework for their own culture. This is why most “enthosensory” research often leads them outside the West.
To recap, Western social science (including Anthropology) is alleged to have constructed a hierarchy of senses depending on both ontological and epistomological value.
1. Sight - Vision is often cited as the favored sensory facility of modernism. Text is the most utilized form of articulating and transmitting knowledge. Images are a secondary source, but in most cases must be accompanied by explanatory text.
2. Sound - While sound was prized by classic Greek civilization in the form of oral discourse, it was overtaken with the emergence of text-based Western literate cultures. Even music which is primarily an aural medium, has undergone profound changes since the development of notation, and later electro-mechanical recording technologies. Environmental soundscapes have recently emerged as a serious subject of research, but still remain a relatively small area of study.
3. Others - Smell, taste and touch have been marginalized due to their subjective nature, and difficulties in recording and measurement. Only in the late 20th century have Western scholars seemed to have developed an organized interest in this field.
The Anthropolgical Response
Fortunately for us, the Anthropology of the Senses has benefitted not only from recent efforts to develop techniques in recording and measurement, but from late 20th century paradigms and theories. Various post-positivist paradigms have provided fresh artillery for anthropologists to deal with the subjective nature of the “other” senses. In one example given by Herzfeld, Seremetakis is said to have employed “multisensory imaging” in the study of her childhood memories in Greece. In my opinion, this seems every bit like a thick description from the reflexive and/or postmodern school.
“The grandma sits on a wooden stool...... her face dark, her hair tied in a bun, her hands frekled and rough. The child slips into her lap. It is time for fairy tales. Slipping into her lap is slipping into a surround of different smells and textures, sediments of her work in the field, the kitchen, with the animals.” (Seremetakis 1994: 30, in Herzfeld, p. 250)
Another example of recent work in this field comes from the CONSERT group (once again lead by Classens). Their website contains a selection of studies, among which is a meta-study entitled The Anthropology of Odor (1990-1994). The study begins by stating that Americans are culturally underdeveloped in respect to their olfactory apparatus. It then goes on to survey cultures in may be considered “olfactorily richer”. One of many “lists” in their study is the “six most basic uses of odor for classificatory purposes”.
1) Classifying people, animals and plants by their natural odor.
2) Classifying people, animals and plants by the symbolic odors attributed to them. For example, it is commonly supposed that different races each have a different smell, and even that "the `other' race stinks" - but there is no empirical evidence to support this belief.
3) Classifying groups within a society; for example, men and women, children and adults, by natural and symbolic odors.
4) Classifying space by reference to the environmental odor of different territories.
5) Classifying the cosmos through odor. For example, assigning contrasting symbolic odors to sun and moon (as among the Batek Negrito of Malaysia), or odorizing fundamental cosmic and social principles such as "structure" and "change" (as among the Bororo of Brazil).
6) Establishing a value system based on olfactory symbolism. For example, characterizing certain odors as good or bad and assigning them to different beings or states in order to signify the latter's moral goodness or badness.
The study acknowledges that the results can benefit such areas as the fragrance industry and alternative medicine (i.e. aromatherapy). While this study seems to want to emerge from the realm of symbolic, and/or interpretative anthropology, the acknowledged value to commercial ventures may have just as much to do with Marxist theories of political economies.
Minor and Major Quibbles
One small but contentious statement caught my attention in the article. This is as Herzfeld’s suggests that this chapter be read in association with a proceeding one on aesthetics.
"The addition of smell and taste is rare, half humorous (calling a chef as “artist” has all the metaphorical ring of artifice), and confined to relatively few domains." (Herzfeld, p.241)
This statement could be read in two ways. He could be referring to the recurring theme on the marginalization of smell and taste in the social sciences. But on the other hand, it is difficult to imagine why Herzfeld, after trying to prop up the importance of subjectivity and art in the evolution of the Anthropology of the Senses, would discriminate against the elite practitioners of Western culinary arts. This possibly reveals an obsolete perception of the state of art studies. This momentary lapse of judgement is bound to raise not just a few hackles from those in the arts, as well as the Anthropology of Food (yes, there is such a field!).
Aside from this minor quibble, there is problematic pattern that presents itself in Herzfeld’s, as well as a number of related articles I read in the course of preparing for this review. The amount of academic energy spent complaining about the “othering” of the Anthropology of the Senses can get irritating at a certain point. Some of the articles I read in preparation for this report usually devote at least one section to problematizing the lack of research in this area due to the hegemony of text and visual thinking. This may be partly traced to the fact that the anthropology of the senses is a relatively new field. It may be said to have surfaced during the cusp between modernism and post-modernism. It is no surprise therefore to note its disdain towards various versions of evolutionism, similar to that taken by with several late 20th century theoretical positions. But Herzfeld states that the Anthropology of the Senses has hope in this century because:
“.... all the more so as it increasingly intersects with medical anthropology no longer tied to cartesian models of causation, but sensitive to the needs of an anthropology that is attuned at once ..... to both empirical and phenomenological concerns. The older mode of sense-less description indeed now begins to smell rather fishy. (Herzfeld, p. 253).
I understand the nature of these complaints, given my own problems of often having to repeatedly explain and rationalize my work in the area of sound studies. But I feel there will have to come a point wherein these complaints will have to end because it wastes precious energy. This can only happen if Anthropology (and social science in general for that matter) can augment orality and literacy with a new state of sensorial awareness and articulation, be it on an ontological, epistomological, or methodological level. Maybe then the proponents of the Anthropology of the Senses can get on with the work at hand, and stop having to offer extended prefaces to their work.
Despite the recency of Herzfeld’s essay, he stops short of projecting on what form of articulations the Anthropology of the Senses may take in the future. This is similar to Ong’s failure to fully develop the concept of secondary orality. Thankfully, modernity and post-modernity may have already begun to provide some methodological solutions to this problem. For example, science has, as far as I have heard, been working on new ways of accurately measuring othered sensory information. I recently witnessed a report on CNN of a psychological experiment that tried to measure gender preferences for specific smells. One the other hand, and as mentioned earlier, the rise of subjectivity has enabled new forms of writing and production that facilitate multi-sensory presentations. My own bold forecast coincides with a number of efforts to rework the concept of a “document”. One such effort found traction the 1980's with the development of “hypermedia”. In this case, documents have been reconceptualized into both non-linear and multi-linear streams of information that contain text, images and sounds. This can be augmented with Baudrillard’s move towards the study of “simulations” in which the othered senses are not just appended as “special effects”, but integral to the production and experience of an event. If “Star Trek: The New Generation” is to be believed, not only our vacations, but academic documents will become sensorial simulations that blur the lines between physical and virtual reality. These, and a number of other disparate, but significant developments from a variety of disciplines may pave the way for a more vigorous Anthrpology of the Senses in the near future.
Cited Works
Art Bingham. “Review of Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy”. 7 July 2005. http://www.engl.niu.edu/wac/ong_rvw.html .(15 September 2005).
Constance Classens. “Introduction to The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination”. (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). http://alcor.concordia.ca/~senses/Classen.htm .(15 September 2005).
Michael Herzfeld. “Senses” in Theoretical Practise in Culture and Society. (Unesco, Blackwell Publishers: USA, 2001).
David Howes, Anthony Synnott and Constance Classens. “Anthropology of Odor (1990-1994)”. http://alcor.concordia.ca/~senses/Consert-Odor.htm.(15 September 2005).
Walter J. Ong. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New Accents. Ed. Terence Hawkes. (New York: Methuen, 1988).
