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Senses, Anthropology of
RUPERT COX
University of Manchester, United Kingdom

History

Anthropological interest in the senses is anticipated and informed by modern political

philosophies that specify the ordering and specific attributes of the senses according to
their historical function and circumstance. As Karl Marx writes, “The forming of the
five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present” ([1844]
1988, 109), while Walter Benjamin observes that “During long periods of history, the
mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence.
The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it
is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as
well” (1969, 222). In reference to one particular sense, that of sight, Levin argues that
“our vision is accordingly historical, bearing with itself a past that has figured in many
different narratives, some of them significantly and irrevocably altering the culture of
vision to which they spoke or within which they were inscribed” (1997, 9–10). Marx,
Benjamin, and Levin support an argument central to the anthropology of the senses:
k that our senses are specific to their historical conditions and subject to change. It is this k
approach to the historical and cultural dimensions of sensory experience that Con-
stance Classen (1997) draws on in devising the concept of a “sensory model” to further
explain the meanings invested in each of the senses.
Classen’s sensory model calls for the revaluation of the senses and is informed by
two theses of modernity. The first concerns what Susan Buck-Morss (1992) calls, in
commenting on an essay by Benjamin, “anaesthetics.” This is a term that describes the
negotiations and the numbing of the senses in order to deal with the irresistible stim-
ulations of the modern environment, and it points toward the necessity for a renewed
understanding of perception—something that the anthropology of the senses helps to
fulfill.
The second thesis of modernity concerns vision and a critique of Western “ocu-
larcentrism” which has promulgated seeing as the purest sense in epistemological as
well as moral terms (Jütte 2005; Synnott 1991). The prioritization of vision vis-à-vis
the other senses, which bears on the anthropology of the senses, was a formation,
beginning in the early Enlightenment period (Nelson 2000) and developing in the eigh-
teenth century through taxonomic systems of the natural and material world and new
optical technologies that work through “the disembodied language of abstract visual
representation” (Paterson 2007, 65). These visual systems and technologies inform the
colonial ideologies of the sensorium in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such
that the “lower” senses were associated with the “primitive nature” of the colonized

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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peoples (Taussig 1993). The close association of vision, order, and knowledge expressed
through these ideologies was articulated through the structures of power and authori-
tarian schemes that have outlined concepts such as “descending individualization” and
the “panopticon” (Foucault 1975) and, as James Scott (1998) has shown, were integral
to the formation of the modern nation-state and nationalized citizens. This Western
hegemony of vision and the social, epistemological, and political processes that rely on
it are complicated and undermined as ethnographic evidence emerges from anthropo-
logical study of non-Western societies prioritizing nonvisual modes of experience, like
sound or smell becoming the basis for cross-cultural study (Howes 1991).

Body

Anthropological interest in the senses developed through the accumulation of ethno-

graphic evidence but also through academic questions about theory and representation
that were particular to the interests of the discipline. These questions arose from frustra-
tion with the overemphasis on equilibrium in functionalist analyses of the role of ritual
in everyday life, shown most clearly in Victor Turner’s focus on ritual performance as a
means of resolving social conflict, along with concern for the ways in which the abstract
textuality of structuralist analysis neglected the lived experiences of ritual, myth, and
symbol (Feld 1990). Although Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote a “Fugue for the Five Senses”
k in The Raw and the Cooked, suggesting “other sensory coding systems” (1969, 153) as k
part of his interpretation of Gē mythology, this analysis implied the layered integration
of the senses under one symbolic dimension rather than different points of understand-
ing in relation to the world. What was at stake for anthropologists in this kind of abstract
analysis was a conception of knowledge from sensory experience based on philosoph-
ical ideas about the body, particularly those concerned with the sensory nature of our
being, linked to Merleau-Ponty’s “Phenomenology of Perception,” which addresses the
Cartesian dualism of mind and body and the division of the human subject from the
outside world.
From the 1990s, anthropological scholarship has recognized the need to look “be-
yond the body proper” (Lock and Farquhar 2007), by making the body the “existential
ground of culture and self” and cultural knowledge as embodied from the outset (Csor-
dsas 1994). The argument is that “when the body is recognised for what it is in expe-
riential terms, not as an object but as a subject, the mind–body distinction becomes
much more uncertain,” making corporeality a condition of human experience (Csord-
sas 1994, 37). This notion that the act of knowing is embodied led to a reflexive ques-
tioning of the experiential role of the ethnographer and to questions about how best
to investigate and represent embodied experiences within the world and with others,
diverting the anthropology of the senses into sensory ethnography.
Besides mind/body dualism, another opposition that the embodied and experien-
tial approach to anthropological enquiry addressed was that between language and
the body, with a rejection of discourse and of semiotics as logocentric ways of mak-
ing divisions between culture and nature and between the observer and the observed.
Ethnographies of the senses such as those by Classen (1990), Stoller (1997), Csordas

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(1994), and Geurts (2002) recognized the importance of words, metaphor, and acts of
listening but as part of an approach that treated discourse and communication as phys-
ical, material, and emotional—as a multisensory experience.
Notable ethnographies that deploy phenomenology and a rejection of discourse in
the ways outlined here are Csordas’s (1994) study of charismatic healing experiences
among Catholic communities in America, which also uses practice theory, and Michael
Jackson’s (1989) study among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone of corporeal being in action
and its relation to the senses and phenomenal experience. This investigation of the body
from the perspective of perceptions that derive from their interaction with other beings
and the environment presents multisensoriality as an embodied concept that is partial,
shifting, and contradictory.
The linking of practice to perception in these works is pursued farthest in Tim
Ingold’s work, which draws on James Gibson’s concept of affordances to make an
argument for the lived body moving in the world as a source of perception and a
carrier of practical knowledge and skills through which we dwell in the world (Ingold
2000). A different direction, one that takes in dimensions of power, technology, and
the everyday alongside multisensoriality, is followed in Michael Taussig’s (1993) work,
which makes an argument for the primacy of the senses in the context of postcolonial
formations of authority and knowledge, and in Seremetakis’s work on memory, where
the senses are a means of recovering lost or forgotten experiences through material
artifacts that function as a “meta-sense” (1994, 9).
Seremetakis’s ethnography provides a thread to subsequent anthropological research
k k
that accentuates the important role of matter in developing sensory capacities and pro-
ducing specific affects (Navaro-Yashin 2012) and reiterates the need to go beyond sym-
bols, discourse, linguistic representations, and cognition.

Empire of the senses

At around the same time as these ethnographies were being produced in the early 1990s,
Constance Classen and David Howes, working out of the interdisciplinary Centre for
Sensory Studies at Concordia University in Montreal began their series of works on the
senses that have to a significant degree come to define the anthropology of the senses as
a discrete field in the discipline. In their view, the anthropology of the senses emerged as
a focus for cultural studies in the early 1990s, partly as a reaction to the excesses of “tex-
tualism” and “ocularcentrism” and also as a critical response to semiotic approaches
(Howes 2005b), but more crucially as a constructive attempt to explore how the sen-
sorium is never a natural and presocial matter, as “sensory experience is permeated
with social values, “making perception not just a matter of biology, psychology or per-
sonal history but of cultural formation” (Howes 2005b, 3). Porcello et al. (2010, 53) have
also noted how Howes has linked the anthropology of the senses to a critical engage-
ment with Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan’s theories about the agencies of media in
molding forms of sociality through technological determination of the “ratios” between
the senses and the primacy of one particular sense at a time. Howes takes issue with
McLuhan’s rather heavy-handed idea of ratios, arguing that “the relationships between
vision, hearing, taste, touch, and smell—are socially constituted” (2005b, 10) in a more

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4 S E NSE S, A NT HR OP OL OGY OF

nuanced way and that it is through sensuous experience that cultural productions con-
stitute social relations.
Howes and Classen, as key members of the Sensory Studies groups at Concordia
have taken the ordering, variations, and hierarchization of the senses as the subject for
cross-comparative and historical studies (Classen 1990, 1991, 1998, 2005b; Howes 1991,
2005b). They attempt to show how meaning is made within the cultural and histori-
cal specificity of the senses through the concept of the “sensory model” explained by
Classen:
When we examine the meanings associated with various sensory faculties and sensa-
tions in different cultures, we find a cornucopia of potent sensory symbolism. Sight may
be linked to reason or witchcraft, taste may be used as a metaphor for aesthetic discrim-
ination or for sexual experience, an odour may signify sanctity or sin, political power or
social exclusion. Together, these sensory meanings and values form the sensory model
espoused by a society, according to which the members of that society “make sense” of
the world, or translate sensory perceptions and concepts into a particular world view
(1997, 402)

This sensory model is worked out and demonstrated in a series of works that have
become less concerned with the critique of ocularcentrism and less overtly political than
some of the early ethnographies like those by Taussig (1993) and Seremetakis (1994),
focusing more on taking readers on a cross-cultural and historical tour of understand-
ings of the everyday practices of particular sensoria:
k Sight is the most thoroughly investigated of the senses by anthropologists, domi- k
nated by the long-standing and complex metadiscourse of the field of visual anthro-
pology, which is difficult to separate off from the theorizations of its relationship to the
specific mediums of its presentation: film, photography, and digital media and artis-
tic forms of drawing and painting; now designated “multimodalities.” This has led to
the identification of some key filmmakers like Jean Rouch and David MacDougall as
being deeply committed to an ocularcentric project (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009) albeit
through styles of vision that do not lay claim to the “powerful aura of rationality and
objectivity” (Classen 1998, 1) or to the “well established Indo-European connection
between seeing and truth which is often associated with evidence” that comes from the
Enlightenment-derived Western notion of modern vision (Bloch 1998, 22). The rela-
tionship and slippage of sight with other sensory modalities, which is not so readily
addressed by visual anthropology’s concerns with presentational media, is described
in studies of color that explore its materiality as an agential quality of things (Young
2006) and as a colonial, political subject that resists the designations of language (Taus-
sig 2009) while remaining productive of social relations.
Taste has been the focus of various anthropological arguments about memory
(Seremetakis 1994), nationalism (Caldwell 2010), and aesthetics (Lochlann Jain 2006).
In Stoller’s (1997) influential account of sharing in the sauces that were cooked for
him personally and as part of a household or a group of visitors while living among
the Songhay of Nigeria, taste reflected social and ethnic relationships and ideas about
hospitality and hidden conflict that would otherwise have been inaccessible to him.
Touch or tactility, has, since the Aristotelian categorization of the five senses, been
the sense that does not have a clear connection to a particular organ (Paterson 2007)

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but that, in Western traditions, is primarily located in the skin and the hand and is
ubiquitously conflated with feeling and emotion. Its relation to other senses and its
public as well as private aspect mean that “the culture of touch involves all of culture”
(Classen 2005b, 1) and that it has been fundamental in arguments for the integra-
tion of and thinking beyond the five senses (Howes 2009, 22–29) toward an inclusive
sense of tactility, what Paterson (2007) calls “somatic senses of touch.” Geurt’s (2002)
ethnography has shown how in Ghana, among the Ewe, kinaesthesia—the sensation of
movement of the body and limbs—known as seselame, is a primary sense that is learned
through a process of continually falling and picking oneself up again and that expresses
the social and cultural knowledge of a person and a sense of moral pride.
Sound, like sight, has become a discrete field of anthropological investigation in itself,
largely through the pioneering ethnographic work on sound of Steven Feld (1990),
about the acoustemology of the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea. This has been
expanded into a variety of ethnographic projects about the significance of listening
in different cultural settings. In these works and in others that explore the acoustic
ecologies between the natural and human worlds and the technological mediations and
politics of recorded and transmitted sound, the complexities and varieties of cultures of
listening are addressed.
Smell and the elusive and tricky sixth sense have received altogether less attention
than the other senses. Smell is often identified as a lower sense, possessing a quality of
“radical interiority” (Classen, Howes, and Synott 1994) and it has received a concise
k treatment (Drobnick 2006) that proposes the term “olfactocentrism” as a neologism for k
a methodological prioritization of smell and, in general, indicates a shift in attention
from smell as a physical impression to smell as a political construction. The sixth sense
is not easily identifiable in scientific or cosmological models of perception because, like
touch, it may include all the other senses but only if it can be estimated that these
senses are already known. Arguing against the notion of five distinct senses so as to
include the idea of a sixth sense that is not bound by dualisms of mind/body and cog-
nition/sensation, Howes advocates substituting “senses” with “sensorium” (2009, 1). It
is a stance that reveals again the complex relationship of the anthropology of the senses
with models of perception based on language and discourse.

Critique

There are some important critiques and potential correctives to the anthropology of
the senses as advanced through the studies of the Centre for Sensory Studies. The first
of these takes issue with a perceived reductionism and overdeterminism in the con-
structivist approach to the senses that is the legacy of McLuhan’s and Ong’s assertions
about their historical and cultural particularities. As Porcello and colleagues (2010, 56)
have observed, drawing on Leavitt and Hart (1990), this determinist tendency means
that there can be a relative lack of regard for “considering either neurobiological find-
ings or specific understandings and uses of the senses in different cultures” and they
note Leavitt and Hart’s alternative proposal for a reclamation of the notion of aesthet-
ics, configured in an anthropological frame as an “ethno-aesthetics that would involve

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both a study of the senses in their cultural context, and of sensorial prolongations and
elaborations operating in the arts” (Leavitt and Hart 1990, 83).
A more radical and stringent critique of the compartmentalization of the senses
as discrete objects of study has come from the work of Tim Ingold, who argues that
Howes’s approach “reduces the body to a locus of objectified and enumerable sense
whose one and only role is to carry the semantic load projected onto them by a
collective, supersensory subject—namely society—and whose balance or ratio may
be calculated according to the load borne by each” (2000, 284). Ingold’s argument,
based on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception and James Gibson’s
ecological psychology, suggests that the senses as analyzed and described by Howes
exist in a disembodied “culture” that does not take account of the ways in which they
are synergistically entangled, “intertranslatable,” and in Merleau-Ponty’s terminology
“pre-reflective.” This is an argument apparently supported by recent neurobiological
research showing that “the five senses do not travel along separate channels, but
interact to a degree few scientists would have believed only a decade ago” (Cytowic
2010, 46); but it is potentially problematic in anthropological terms because it univer-
salizes sensations, emphasizing the individual over the social perspective, and finds
it difficult to account for ambiguities and conflicts between the senses and therefore
of the politics of perception (Howes 2010, 335). A key issue in this argument between
Ingold and Howes about perception and the differentiation of sensory modalities is
what may be meant by their “separation” and what the now-considerable body of
k work about the relationships between the senses has revealed about “what may be k
called intersensoriality, that is, the multi-directional interaction of the senses and of
sensory ideologies” (Howes 2010, 334). This nuanced take on the “separation” and
“relationships” of the senses indicates, as Howes has stated, “a shift from an original
interest in sensory symbolism to a contemporary concern with sensory experience
and practice” (Howes 2010, 334) and critically aligns the anthropology of the senses
not only with ideas from phenomenology as advanced by Ingold but also with their
analysis by cultural theorists of modernity like Susan Buck-Morss who observes
that “The nervous system is not contained within the body’s limits. The circuit from
sense-perception to motor response begins and ends in the world. The brain is thus not
an isolated anatomical body, but part of a system that passes through the person and
her or his open (culturally specific, historically transient) environment” (1992, 10).
The anthropology of the senses is a significant element of what has been called “the
sensory turn” in the humanities and social sciences, which, as a turn away from dis-
course and models of perception drawn from language, is important to consider in
relation to “affect” and “the affective turn.” The turn to affect has shed light on the inten-
sities that escape or remain in excess of the speaking subject (Blackman 2012) and is
interested in other sign systems apart from language that may reveal the intersubjective
intensities and dynamics immanent in bodily perceptions and matter in general (Mas-
sumi 2002). For Massumi affect is beyond representation, being a preconscious, direct,
embodied response to events, an instinctual force or “power” that, as Blackman has it,
“works ‘autonomically’ bypassing reason and criticality and seizing body at the level of
neural circuits [and] the nervous system” (2012, xi). It is interesting to consider how
affect, as a subjective and phenomenological experience of an undifferentiated force or

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intensity of the world, is turned into a cultural category of emotion like sadness or joy
and what this can tell us about how embodied experience is translated into the cultural
differentiations of the senses and an understanding of the directions of inter-sensorial
relationships. In theorizing affect, Massumi (2002) argues that it is possible to make
a distinction between the body and meaning making and to envisage two conjoined
tracks operating when a force of the world hits the body, one of intensity or affect and
the other of quality or discourse. The debate about how these two tracks are aligned and
work, or if there are even two tracks, like the debate about the nature of the “separation”
and the “relationship” between the senses, bears on a broader question of the represen-
tation of sensory experience and embodied phenomena in anthropology and of what
has become known as “sensory ethnography.”

Sensory ethnography

Sensory ethnography is perhaps best known within anthropology today through the
various films and audio and visual works of the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Har-
vard University, under the direction of Lucien Castaing-Taylor. The mission statement
on its website declares that it is an “experimental laboratory” that “explores the aesthet-
ics and ontology of the natural and unnatural world” and “encourages attention to the
many dimensions of the world, both animate and inanimate, that may only with diffi-
culty, if at all, be rendered with propositional prose. Most works produced in the SEL
k take as their subject the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human and animal exis- k
tence.” The anthropology of the senses is not cited as a reference point for its activities
and intellectual agendas, with the language of “experiment,” “aesthetics,” “ontology,”
and “human and animal existence” pointing to a set of concerns, first, for the descrip-
tion and analysis of difference at a level of ontological questions about being in the world
and therefore of ecological, human–animal, or interspecies relations; and, second, for
what Paul Stoller (1997) has called “sensuous scholarship” and Cox, Wright, and Irving
(2016) have described as anthropology “beyond text.”
The movement “beyond text” is not proposed as a rejection of ethnographic writing
but as an attempt to demonstrate “how the relationship between text and sound and
image may be productively reconfigured in fieldwork and other contexts so as to lead to
new forms of practice and representation in anthropology and beyond” (Cox, Wright,
and Irving 2016, 7). It sees this attempt as a necessary recognition that “encounters
with difference do have the capacity not only to defamiliarize or unsettle the ordinary
but also vice versa, that is, to domesticate unknown exotic and alien cultural artifacts by
bringing them into the realm of common knowledge, theory and familiar moral spaces”
(2016, 1) and, as such, uses the kinds of questions raised in the anthropology of the
senses about the distinction between the body and meaning making as an opportunity
for the experimentation with forms of ethnographic representation.
This questioning and experimentation with representation, which from the point
of view of the ethnographer asks if there is enough of you and of me to convey an
experience of the field, is the entry point for Paul Stoller in his various styles of writing
ethnography—blogging, memoir, fiction, and essays—relevant to the theme of sorcery
among the Songhay of Niger. Stoller’s original research about the ritual language of the

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8 S E NSE S, A NT HR OP OL OGY OF

Songhay of Niger in 1976–77 was transformed by a long-term immersion in the worlds

of sorcery and possession that together with his interest in Merleau-Ponty’s critique
of the Cartesian mind/body split, turned his focus from linguistics to knowledge
arising from multisensory experience. This led to his calls for a new kind of “sensuous
scholarship” and for ethnographers to gain understandings of others by attending
to the “sensuous body—its smells, tastes, textures and sensations” in an attempt to
overcome the “disembodied observation” and “disembodied representation” of the
discipline of anthropology (Stoller 1997, xiii–xiv).
Sensuous Scholarship (Stoller 1997) can also be seen as a response to a “crisis of repre-
sentation” in the 1980s that, led by the work of Clifford and Marcus (1986), challenged
the hegemony of text in anthropology and rhetorical modes of authority and instigated
a debate about going beyond conventional forms of “writing culture.”
Sarah Pink’s book Doing Sensory Ethnography (2009) also tackles this crisis of rep-
resentation, pushing anthropologists to explore the possibilities of different forms of
media, including multimedia, performance and installation, in order to convey sensory
experience. These new and varied forms of ethnographic representation require new
ways of doing anthropology and of acknowledging the methodological challenges in
what Robben and Slukka describe as “sensory fieldwork” (2007). For Pink (2009) the
idea of sensory ethnography responds to three theoretical challenges: emplacement,
sensory interconnection, and practice as a way of knowing.
Emplacement involves a more intense level of participation than ethnographic
k research might normally require because it demands multisensory types of engage- k
ment through activities such as walking or eating with others, rather than the kind
of distanced, sensory attenuation that established research activities of careful obser-
vation and note taking suggest. Such emplacements might, as Howes has suggested,
include a wider range of “vibrant, interactive and provocative” models for “engaging
with the cultural life of the senses” than walking and could include dance and martial
arts (Howes 2010, 336). This is what Pink indicates in the idea of the interconnected
senses, referring to activities that do not privilege distanced observation and break
down the phenomenological notion that experience is multisensorial. This can have
implications for the way we think about the interview as a sensorial “event” and not
simply as a method led by the interactivity of speaking and writing. Finally, there is
the well-established notion of the ethnographer as an apprentice who learns about
others by acquiring skills and sensory knowledge alongside them and documenting
the process as they go along.
Central to these theoretical challenges to ethnography and particularly to the idea
of practice as a way of knowing is the reflexive stance needed so as to empathetically
extend one’s own experience into other people’s lives and experiences. An example of
this is Nadia Seremetakis’s (1994) argument for a “reflexive anthropology” based on
her writing about her sensorial experiences of conducting fieldwork in rural Greece.
Accounts such as Seremetakis’s and Stoller’s remind us that fieldwork has always been
a sensuous experience for ethnographers and their subjects. Francois Laplantine com-
ments on this and the nature of ethnographic fieldwork as follows: “we observe, we
listen, we speak with others, we partake of their cuisine, we try to feel alongside them
what they experience” (2005, 11). At a certain level, then, sensory ethnography is a way

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of attending to what anthropologists have long been doing and been aware of but have
perhaps excluded from their accounts, and it is interesting to consider what a “nonsen-
sory ethnography” might actually look like.
The unconventional, experimental aspects of the representational forms and
methodological practices of sensory ethnography contribute to phenomenological,
ontological, and aesthetic theorizations about the world and may remind anthropol-
ogists of otherwise hidden or neglected elements of their own field research; they
also make a distinctive contribution to the discipline as forms of public and applied
knowledge.
As a mode of public engagement and collaboration across disciplines and
specialisms—most notably with artists—that do not necessarily rely on the specialist
language and knowledge of theory that academic anthropology produces and demands,
sensory ethnography is an emergent field with great potential for social impact.
A cautionary note for this field, which takes us back to the conflation of distinctions
between the senses with the ratios of different media and the rejection of language,
is in the idea of new media technologies creating body and sense interfaces that can
convey the specificity of ethnographic understandings about intersensoriality. The
ethnographic promise of “sensory media” to communicate embodied knowledge is
enabled but may not be fully realized through media theory notions such as Deleuze
and Guattari’s (1987) concept of the “haptic” and Laura Marks’s (2002) notion of
the “fold.” This is because such notions do not necessarily communicate the kind of
nuanced digital materiality or, say, the particular quality of texture in an image, which,
k k
for example, Jennifer Deger’s (2006) film work shows. This work demonstrates what the
aesthetic notion of “shimmer” among the Aboriginal Yolungu of Australia, is able to
achieve, by making a conceptual argument about sensory apperception as a technical
strategy for anthropological understanding. The challenge for this sensory media work
in acquiring ethnographic value is that the materiality and specificity of media forms
are made inseparable from the particular conceptualizations of the senses that are at
stake. These new media insights into the study of the senses need not exclude language
and discourse which, as Porcello and colleagues have argued, might be productively
integrated to add “important insights to understanding the cultural constitution
of the sensorium” (2010, 60). It is in the creative and critical layering of text with
visual and audio media so as to reveal “the relationship among artifacts, technologies,
personhood, and the body, enabling an understanding of the senses not only as a
means of knowing the world, but also as an ontological object of anthropological
study” (Porcello et al. 2010, 60) that a future for sensory ethnography may be located.

wbiea1365 SEE ALSO: Ethnographic Film; Tactility; Skilled Vision; Smell; Corporeal Vision;
wbiea1396
wbiea1657 Embodied Learning; Indigenous Media; Visual Anthropology; Reflexivity; Shimmer;
wbiea1752
wbiea1794 Embodied Cognition; Walking; Touch; Fieldwork; Ethnography; Mindful Body; Taste;
wbiea1905
wbiea1944
Multimodality; Sound, Anthropology of
wbiea1969
wbiea1976
wbiea2043
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
wbiea2098
wbiea2106
wbiea2178
Benjamin, Walter. 1969. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illumi-
wbiea2192 nations, 217–51. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books.
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wbiea2264
wbiea2293
wbiea2304
wbiea2378

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Blackman, Lisa. 2012. Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation. London: SAGE.
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Please note that the abstract and keywords will not be included in the printed book,
but are required for the online presentation of this book which will be published on
Wiley’s own online publishing platform.
If the abstract and keywords are not present below, please take this opportunity to
add them now.
The abstract should be a short paragraph of between 50 and 150 words in length and
there should be at least 3 keywords.

ABSTRACT
The anthropology of the senses is based on Constance Classen’s deceptively simple
proposition that sensory perception is a cultural as well as a physical act, but it derives
from modern theses about their determination by the forces of history, ocularcentrism,
and technological mediation and from anthropological debates about the role of the
body, the representation of experience, the philosophy of phenomenology, and the
material role of the senses in the politics of perception. Anthropological research on
the senses has stressed their centrality in the shaping of social practice and culture and
also their role in the conduct and reflexive experience of fieldwork, raising questions
k about and suggesting alternatives to ethnographic forms of representation. Debates k
about the nature of the “separation” and the “relationship” between the senses have had
implications for the representation of sensory experience and embodied phenomena
in anthropology and for what has become known as sensory ethnography.

KEYWORDS
acoustic; anthropology of art; anthropology of the body; body; touch