Sensory Turn in Anthropology: Smell, Culture, and the Senses

[00:00:00]foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] I'd like to come back to the area of the anthropology of the senses uh an area that uh occupied me uh with the research I carried out in Papua New Guinea and have also carried out in other places uh in tukuman in in Argentina for example and um as you'll recall my trip to Papua New Guinea was financed in part by a grant from the fragrance Foundation from the olfactory research fund um and that money that we got from the ORF um also enabled myself and Constance Classen and Anthony Senate Constance being a cultural historian and Anthony a sociologist to write the book Aroma the cultural history of smell and this book which was published in 1994 was uh no the first attempt to think about smell seriously from a historical anthropological and sociological angle so it was a multi-disciplinary approach to smell most of the research up until that point as in the case of research on the census generally had been within psychology and it was about how um smells make you feel um and how useful smells are to telling you if something is rotten and this kind of thing well I found that research very boring and I found we found um the elaboration of smell across cultures to be truly rich and engrossing just as one example in Papua New Guinea amongst the umeda a man will sleep with a bundle of centered herbs between himself and the Sun and the idea is that the herbs the smell will infiltrate his dreams he will dream of the hunt and then just has to act out the hunt and will enjoy success so very interesting we have the idea of smell is an intuitive sense but this was working in that area also um in to guman when we were there there were um very interestingly these pillows that were full of of scented herbs so you know they were consuming your sleep as well and that idea of aromatizing your dreams okay what a lovely idea uh I think and uh indeed there were many things that we experienced during our time um in um to come on maybe I can just give you one other example this again comes from research in the early 1990s um the coronderos and granderas of tukuman in Northwestern Argentina have um all sorts of medical practices uh you know massage is very popular but mostly they treat ailments of various kinds including bad luck by making little little pouches full of different herbs different combinations and I I have one herb here um and actually it's called which is quechua for love love and I'd like you just to smell it okay because you can I'm sorry there's no smell Channel I'm I'm so sorry um I hope you won't feel you know slighted but um you know what's interesting is that this is from 1992 and yet still um it preserves its scent and if you tried to identify this plant by by looking at it you're not going to get very far okay the whole tradition of Botanical illustration in the west which has to do with morphology but the cranderas and quanderos they would identify what a plant was by sniffing here and uh indeed their classificatory capacities were extraordinary in that regard and often you know you couldn't distinguish one plant from another in these packages but you could distinguish their smell um so you couldn't actually visually discriminate but you could if you had a discriminating nose be able to tell anyway there are all kinds of uses of smell undreamped of in you know mainstream Western psychology we sought to bring those to the table through the book Aroma which is still in print and it's been translated into four or five different languages it's a work of which I'm very proud you know for for bringing a multi-disciplinary perspective to bear on the study of the senses and resting smell from the grip of psychology okay um you know who studies the senses well psychologists well no no no we anthropologists sociologists historians often get in there too because we have more capacious imaginations about what the senses are good for based on you know not just carrying out research in a laboratory but going and doing field work elsewhere anyway um it was while um you know we were writing Aroma um and in the course of my field research in Papua New Guinea um that our interest expanded uh you know to all the senses so not just an olfactory anthropology but a sensory anthropology an anthropology of the senses um and an investigation into the ever-shifting relations between the census from you know one Society to another so um you know already in the early 90s then and it was a special issue of anthropology associate published in 1990 called Le sang songs in which you know this idea of an anthropology of the senses is put forward my contribution to that special issue was a piece called late technique desans obviously you know I borrow a lot here I'm borrowing from mouse in a big way they need to call um you know Mouse doesn't talk about the senses in that wonderful essay from 1929 um you know the idea that there might be techniques of seeing and hearing and so forth he doesn't go there it took until 1990 to really sort of put that idea on the table and you know there was the work that we did here but also especially Paul stoller's wonderful book The Taste of ethnographic things the senses and anthropology that launches the sensory turn anthropology and it's been growing steadily since then um as I'm very pleased to see that sensory turn I've actually uh you know is reflected in a variety of ways there is an anthropology of the senses like the anthropology of the body or medical anthropology it's a distinct subfield but it's also a way of studying culture I want to argue and I'll I'll come back to that point later there's also as a result of these openings within anthropology but also within history thanks to constance's work um you know her book the color of angels which is about the senses in medicine and cosmology and art in history you know begins this opening towards the senses on the part of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences and accordingly in the course of time all of these different sort of subfields history of the senses geography of the senses sociology of the senses come together in an area that we call sensory studies and sensory studies refers to you know an interdisciplinary field composed of multiple disciplines converging on the study of the senses and prying them loose from the Stranglehold of psychology okay which has always been a part of the challenge and you know I would note this goes further because in addition to all these the sensory turn within each of these disciplines there are these interdisciplinary fields that have emerged like visual culture which is an interdisciplinary field looking at visual culture there is auditory culture or sound studies which again is an interdisciplinary field focused on auditory culture there is skin studies or the culture of touch there is taste culture and and so forth the smell culture as well so you know the senses are everywhere and what you find is that what begins in the early 1990s with this you know Awakening of the senses now they've emerged as a focus for research across the humanities and social sciences and um you know that's reflected in this idea of sensory studies and that idea was coined in 2006 in the introduction to a journal called the senses in society which I have the pleasure of of having founded together with Michael bull um a sound studies scholar at the University of Sussex so that was in 2006 we founded the journal and it's very much you know an interdisciplinary Journal where people from across the humanities and social scientists scientists we even allow in the occasional psychologist not very often but we do allow in the occasional psychologists share with us you know what a sociology of a senses and so forth might might yield and Michael and I alternate in editing that journal and I commend many special issues to you um so 2006 you find the the sensory the senses in society journal and then in 2010 um we actually sort of constitute it would take a while for it to achieve recognition a center here at Concordia called the center for sensory studies so 2010 and then it receives a faculty recognition in 2012 and it receives University recognition in 2016 and we've now been renewed for another six years and what the center consists of is a faculty from about 11 different departments there are 18 faculty and about 40 graduate students all you know joined by our interest in the senses and exploring the senses in different Avenues so um you know the uh we house the journal the census in society here at Concordia we have a number research projects on the go I'll come back to one of those in a moment and we have also sponsored a number of international conferences The Uncommon census conference series um so you know it is a very Dynamic field and we you know try to offer a service to sensory studies Scholars by continuously updating a website the sensory studies website that has information about new books and events and a picture gallery and a sound gallery and so forth and maybe the latest chapter if I can call it that in um this area is a book that is coming out later this summer it's called the sensory studies Manifesto and subtitle is tracking the sensorial revolution uh in the Arts and human Sciences is coming out with the University of Toronto press and it's a book in which um I uh track the sensorial revolution so the first part of it deals with the sensory turn in anthropology and history and then in geography and sociology and also certain changes in psychology as well the second part presents two case studies one a kind of survey of my findings in Papua New Guinea and the other a historical inquiry into the senses in the Modern Age which is to say the period from 1920 to 2000. so I edited a book in the cultural histories of the census series and you can see it here in which I brought together a number of Scholars and we looked at the senses in literature the senses in religion the senses in medicine and the senses in the marketplace and so forth nine domains in all over the course of the 20th century I was completely out of my league I am no historian but I had some wonderful contributors and I think it's a really important book for sensitizing it us to just how much baggage our senses carry uh and how if you're going to do sensorial research you need to be aware of that baggage and those biases the final section of the sensory studies Manifesto is about sensory Art and Design and what it does is look into in part in one of the chapters a very interesting you know transformation in the field of Museum studies or um what I call sensory musiology you're familiar with the museum as a place of single sense epiphanies you go and you shouldn't talk too loud you shouldn't wear too much cologne um you're not allowed to eat in the gallery you just go and look okay and that idea of you know the museum is presenting a series of object lessons sort of begins in the mid 19th century and just dominates the field there are various departures from that now excuse me which are very interesting to consider but in the early days of the museum 16th 17th century um actually constance's work has revealed in a book called The Museum of the senses that a museum was not this place where you had to check all your senses except for sight of the door rather the museum is a kind of sensory gymnasium people were hefting things they were gnawing on things they were shaking them and all of this was permitted and you know it was thought if somebody didn't do those things then it was like inviting them to dinner and they didn't eat any of the meal this was the rigor and that was because all of these senses were useful sources of information taste because how else are you supposed to find out the chemical composition of something except for by chewing it in the days before the now there are all kinds of ways in which knowledge of the senses was key well all that gets shut down in the 19th century continues for much of the 20th century but now what we find is museums you know trying to bring their exhibitions to the senses of the visitor and very interesting developments in that way all kinds of interact with exhibits smell exhibits and so forth so the museum is a sensory gymnasium again I'd like to just finish this section by speaking about two very interesting initiatives in this idea of museums as sensory gymnasia one is a project in collaborative archeology by a student who is also a PhD student at McGill attached to the sensory Museum project some years ago and what she did was invite Inuit Elders who were in Montreal for medical appointments to come to the McCord Museum and there in a room all of the objects that have been collected by the McCord are spread out on a table and you don't have to wear gloves to interact with them and so you know those long sticks for braiding hair oil lamps and Ulus and model dog sleds and so forth we're all there on the table the gloves were off and the elders you know picked them up manipulated them and mentioned a variety of uses for them the curators had no idea of so you know through the manual exploration through a Hands-On approach to interacting with objects uses were discovered that had otherwise been forgotten and these objects came alive again during these sessions the sessions were were filmed were videotaped and the museum actually makes it possible if you want to view these videotapes while you're looking at the collection and so this has been a real expansion in our understanding of the meanings and uses of these objects one last example and that has to do with this slide um of um false face masks like the ones in the collection of the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau and very interestingly the museum actually almost two decades ago now established a sacred materials program and what that does is it involves two medicine men from the Six Nations Confederacy coming to the museum each year and there they chant the masks they feed the masks mush cornmeal mush and they smudge them with tobacco smoke so smoke in the museum food in the museum chanting in the museum what I admire about you know this program is precisely that yes all those things are allowed and considered necessary to taking proper care of the senses of the Sacra these are not objects in a collection these are sentient beings and if you are to treat them appropriately then you must acknowledge and address them through the senses that is sensory musiology so quite apart from all of the wonderful experiments in making museums more interactive what I think has been important about this development is the way it's enabled us to recognize objects in Museum collections not as objects but as sentient beings