Iara Cury
Week #2 Trinity Term
Inge Daniels
Anthropology and the Senses
Anthropologists struggle with Descartes’ legacy. There is no way around it: the Cartesian
mind/body dualism has permeated our analytical thinking since the foundation of the
discipline. Yet through an emerging anthropology of the senses we have developed an
ambiguous relationship with philosophy. Making extensive use of phenomenology,
anthropologists proceed to berate philosophers for not daring to ask the kinds of questions
that lead to a better understanding of lived experience. This critical stance originates in a
postmodern realization of and struggle against the primacy of the “representationalist
theory of knowledge” in the Western tradition. Beyond the hegemonic limitations of such
visualism, some anthropologists have argued, lies a world of rich multi-sensorial,
experiential knowledge. Independent of mental representations—unbounded by them—
this world must be explored if we are ever to make sense of the “sensuous interrelationship
of body-mind-environment” (Howe, 2005, p.7) at the root of human existence.
In the introduction to the book, Empire of the Senses, D. Howe explains how some
anthropologists have embarked on an “ideological revolution” to “recover a full-bodied
understanding of culture and experience” (2005, p.1). In particular, overcoming the
analytical framework of language and graphic-spatial conceptualization has allowed the
discipline a return to basics—to how people derive meaning and enact life based on
sensory experience. The notion of embodiment and emplacement has gained currency in a
variety of fields, including the study of memory, identity and power.
Yet, interestingly enough, this rediscovery of the ground beneath our feet has challenged
the traditional naturalization of the senses, an attitude ideologically significant for an
exclusive focus on ideas inside the mind. Instead of taking the senses to be “the raw
material of bodily sensations” (Ingold, 2000, p.282), that is, objective data upon which we
build our understanding of the world and out of which we create sociality and culture,
Howe asserts that the senses are themselves culturally shaped. According to him, “just as
human nature itself is a product of culture, so is the human sensorium”; furthermore, the
senses are “carefully hierarchized and regulated so as to express and enforce the social and
cosmic order (2005, p.3).
The present effort to reconstitute our conceptualization of the senses touches anthropology
in its foundations. It brings about the question of whether different cosmologies among
different cultures arise because of differences in the way people perceive the world around
them. Ingold states, “it is supposed that where vision predominates, people will apprehend
the world in one way, and where hearing predominates they will apprehend it in another”
(2000, p.281). But focusing on the example of Western culture, widely believe to privilege
vision above all senses, he further argues that in reality things are more complicated.
In the book chapter entitled, “Stop, Look and Listen! Vision, Hearing and Human
Movement”, Ingold outlines a strong critique of the anthropology of the senses. For him,
people around the world have access to a similar range of sensory information; different
cultural emphases on specific senses originate in “the ideal realm of mental
representations” and not in divergent sensorial or cognitive abilities (2000, p.284).
Likewise, the West’s obsession with vision, termed visualism, is inherently linked to a
Cartesian “representationalist theory of knowledge”, where vision is equated with
visualization—not an over reliance on visual input per say (p.282). Based on this
philosophical framework, vision has been co-opted “in the service of a peculiarly modern
project of objectification” (p.253). Within the Western tradition, it is strongly associated
with rationality and objectivity, a perspective where reality is “there to be seized by the
eyes, analysed by science, exploited by technology and dominated by power” (p.246).
Ingold’s extensive analysis of vision and hearing drives home the point that vision as
normal Westerners experience it is absolutely interdependent on the other senses,
particularly that of hearing. “[I]t is the incorporation of audition into the process of visual
perception that converts passive spectating into active looking” (p.277), he affirms, citing
Merleau-Ponty’s belief that the body is a synergic system (p.268). Not only that, Ingold
points out that scholars too often neglect the fundamental reciprocal and intimate aspects
of vision, for example the significance of eye to eye contact for human sociality. His
conclusion is that “any attempt to separate out the discourse surrounding vision from the
actual practices of looking, watching and seeing is unsustainable” (p.286). Lived experience
should be probed independently of the predominant discourse and set of values associated
with the senses.
An appropriate case study for illustrating the incompatibility of anthropology’s “visualism”
or single-minded search for “social structures” is C. Helliwell’s book chapter, “Space and
sociality in a Dayak longhouse”. Eschewing the usual structuralist agenda, Helliwell
communicates that much understanding resides in the admission of the complex fluidity of
human social relations within longhouses in Borneo. She details how daily life inside of
private apartments is quite open to the scrutiny and support of the longhouse community.
Mainly through the sense of hearing, but also using vision and the movement of goods
across permeable partitions, people create an atmosphere of sharing and conviviality. In
Helliwell’s words, “within the longhouse, voices create a powerful sense of community”
(1996, p.138).
Interestingly enough, this diffuse kind of sociality is also a method of social regulation: “the
openness of the lawang section of an apartment to the gaze and audit of neighbors places
those inhabitants under much greater pressure to conform to recognized community
standards of behavior” (p.142). Thus “private” apartments quite open to the scrutiny of the
internal community, something that previous ethnographic studies of the Dayak have failed
to determine through visual observation alone. The point that Helliwell makes is that the
variety of forms of sociality across cultures goes much beyond what “visualism” can
identify and what researchers focused on “‘structure’ as opposed to ‘process’” can analyze
(p.129).
Perhaps the key realization in Helliwell’s account is the fact that people employ all of their
senses in the transformation of a space into a place—into a familiar and safe physical
context where life can take root. K. Hetherington expresses a similar interpretation, stating
that our experiences depend on our “ability to make us of such proximal and performative
forms of knowledge”, particularly of haptic familiarity, in the making of place (2002,
p.1936). Touch, for this author, is one of the more powerful means to achieve proximal
knowledge—“embodied, sensory and unsightly” (p.1935)—where boundaries between
bodies and objects are blurred and meaning emerges without the mediation of conscious
thought.
Hetherington’s emphasis on the significance of nonrepresentational practice and
knowledge (p.1934) accords well with Ingold’s discussion of the evident difference
between representationalist versus experience-based accounts of the earth.
According to Ingold, “creatures live in the land and not on it” (2007, p.S33). In experiencing
the world as an environment replete with sentient beings and dynamic natural processes,
our capacity for feeling wind, weather and movement leads us to an completely different
understanding of what “in reality” is a sphere suspended in space. Yet which is the more
valid reality? Ingold, Helliwell and Hetherington’s accounts all stand in agreement that
hearing and the “contact” senses of touch, smell and taste are essential inasmuch as they
constitute a large part of the intricate sensorial fabric of sociality and affect our physical,
psychological and social experience of place. The consensus appears to be that the Western
penchant for the visual representation of information has, until recently, stood in the way
of a holistic approach to sensory experience that literally disfigures our understanding of
living culture.
Overall, anthropological work attuned to the new current of phenomenology suggests that
a narrow focus on the visual is non-anthropological for the basic reason that human life
deeply surpasses the experience of sight. Yet as much as scholars attribute this intellectual
lens to ‘western’ practices and theories, things may not be so simple. Through technologies
related to literacy and the recording of images we are bombarded by amounts of visual
information that exceed all other kinds of sensory input. Does this state of affairs originate
from a Western, Cartesian visualism or a representationalist theory of knowledge? Are
people intuitively drawn towards the visual? Or is this an artifact of the material
practicality of the inscription of visual information as opposed to auditory, tactile, gustatory
and olfactory information?
Perhaps Ingold is correct in noting that for people that live in a dense, closed forest
environment, vision is less important than the other senses for practical reasons (p.253).
What anthropologists would do well not to forget is that today a majority of people live in
an urban environment where vision is paramount for physical orientation as much as for
social engagement. How can anthropologists’ interpret the demonstrable quantitative
difference between visual data and information transmitted through the other senses in
modern, urban life? Could quantity be marker of hierarchy—the more visual information,
the more important vision?
With regards to Ingold’s critique of the theory of visualism, is it possible that through the
power of discourse people’s cognitive make-up can be modified so that they indeed
experience the world in discourse-oriented ways? It is important to remember that sensory
perception has both “a history and a politics”. D. Howe finds this all the more reason for
“analyzing social ideologies conveyed through sensory values and practices” (2005, p.4),
keeping in mind that “intersensoriality” does not imply order or equality, either in the
sensory or social realm. He gives the example of how the sense of smell is used to associate
the upper classes with pleasant smells and the lower classes with repulsive odors, stating
that “this perception of malodor had less to do with practices of cleanliness than it had to
do with social status” (p.10).
The point is that sensations of disgust go much beyond natural physiological reactions,
molded as they are by social and cultural ideology. Ingold’s opinion is that an analysis of
discourse is meaningless when divorced from an accurate understanding of lived
experience. Anthropology is acutely aware that discourse is not simply superimposed on
people’s experiences—it is continually crafted and modified; yet its existence does affect
these very experiences in a feedback loop. The question that Ingold tackled remains on the
table: to what extent is cognition malleable and in which cases do cosmologies convey
cognitively different experiences rather than diverse cultural or social discourses? If
visualism is comprised of a reduction of the richness of the senses to a narrow range of
visual practices, is this reduction discursive rather than phenomenological, as Ingold
maintains? Human intersensoriality is a reality to be acknowledged and incorporated into
anthropological analysis. However, in itself intersensoriality is not incompatible with a
hierarchy of the senses rooted in cognition, whether this hierarchy arises “naturally” or
from social influence. Ascribing such a hierarchy to the discursive level Ingold neglects to
probe not only the possibility but also the mechanisms that might produce a
hierarchization out of interdependent or synergetic sensory organs.
At the end of the day, ethnographers may be justified in focusing their limited datacollection resources on the visual because of its substantial role in human life. Meanwhile,
anthropology must continue to probe how the visual is inextricably integrated with the
other senses and what is its role in the practice of sociality and reciprocity. On the whole,
one thing is clear—vision is an extraordinary ability and as such deserves extraordinary
attention.
Bibliography
Howes, D. 2005. Introduction. In D. Howes (ed.). Empire of the Senses: The sensual culture
reader. Oxford: Berg Publishers.
Ingold, T. 2000. Stop, look, Listen! Vision, Hearing and Human Movement. The Perception of
the Environment. Oxford: Routledge.
Ingold, T. 2007. Earth, Sky, Wind and Weather. JRAI Special Issue: 19-38
Helliwell, C. 1996. Space and sociality in a Dayak Longhouse. In M. Jackson (ed.) Things as
they are: New directions in Phenomenological Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Hetherington,K. 2003. Spatial Textures: place, touch, and praesentia. Environment and
Planning A35: 1933-44.