European Politico-economics QA Mega-thread - Page 1284

Sensory orders are not static: they develop and change over time, just as cultures do. Some of the sensory expressions of a society, manifested in its language, rituals, and myths, may be relics or survivals from an earlier sensory order. This is particularly evident in societies `with his­tory’ (i.e. where records of earlier ways of life are extant). For example, Mackenzie Brown (1986) gives a fascinating account of how visuality came to dominate aurality in the history of the Hindu tradition, based on a reading of India’s sacred texts.2 As another example, the Latin-­based word `sagacious,’ which now means only `wise,’ originally, at a more olfactory-conscious period, meant ‘keen-scented’ as well. In so­cieties `without history’ (i.e., those for which earlier records do not exist), this kind of sensory layering is more difficult to discern, but not impossible. In Do Kamo: Person and Myth in the Melanesian World, Maurice Leenhardt (1979) was able to trace the origin of certain olfactory and visual representations of the body to different stages of Melanesian civilization by relating the representations in question to evolving concepts of space (see further Howes 1988). In such cases, the contemporary relevance of a given sensory expression can only be determined by relating it to the total sensory dynamic of the culture.
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Every culture strikes its own balance among the senses. While some cultures tend toward an equality of the senses, most cultures manifest some bias or other, either privileging a particular sense. or some cluster of senses. In order successfully to fathom the sensory biases of another culture, it is essential for the researcher to overcome, to the extent possible, his or her own sensory biases. The first and most crucial step in this process is to discover one’s personal sensory biases.3 The second step involves training oneself to be sensitive to a multiplicity of sensory expressions. This kind of awareness can be cultivated by taking some object in one’s environment and disengaging one’s attention from the object itself so as to focus on how each of its sensory properties would impinge on one’s consciousness were they not filtered in any way (see Merleau-Ponty 1962; Rawlinson 1981). The third step involves devel­oping the capacity to be `of two sensoria’ about things (Howes 1990c), which means being able to operate with complete awareness in two perceptual systems or sensory orders simultaneously (the sensory order of one’s own culture and that of the culture studied), and constantly comparing notes.

The procedure sketched above may be illustrated by taking the ex­ample of blood. Blood has a variety of sensory properties: it is warm, viscous, red, salty and odorous. The salience of these properties, how­ever, depends on the sensory order within which they are perceived. Thus, North Americans tend to think of blood in terms of its visual appearance, its redness. In South India, practitioners of Siddha medicine give priority to the tactile dimension of blood; the pulse it produces within the body (Daniel, ch. 7 VSE). This holds true in Guatemala as well, although there the pulse is said to be the `voice’ of blood, suggesting an audio-tactile perceptual framework (Tedlock 1982: 53, 134). Among the Ainu of Japan, it is the odour of blood that is most salient, as the smell of blood is thought to repel spirits (Ohnuki-Tierney 1981: 97). In the myth of the Wauwalak sisters as told in northern Australia, there is reference to both the smell of blood and to ‘blood containing sound’ (Berndt 1951: 44), which implies an audio-olfactory bias.