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THE SENSORY STUDIES MANIFESTO
Tracking the Sensorial Revolution in the Arts

and Human Sciences
The senses are made, not given. This revolutionary realization has come as of
late to inform research across the social sciences and humanities, and is cur-
rently inspiring groundbreaking experimentation in the world of art and de-
sign, where the focus is now on mixing and manipulating the senses.
The Sensory Studies Manifesto tracks these transformations and opens mul-
tiple lines of investigation into the diverse ways in which human beings sense
and make sense of the world. This unique volume treats the human sensorium
as a dynamic whole that is best approached from historical, anthropological,
geographic, and sociological perspectives. In doing so, it has altered our under-
standing of sense perception by directing attention to the sociality of sensation
and the cultural mediation of sense experience and expression.
David Howes challenges the assumptions of mainstream Western psychol-
ogy by foregrounding the agency, interactivity, creativity, and wisdom of the
senses as shaped by culture. The Sensory Studies Manifesto sets the stage for a
radical reorientation of research in the human sciences and artistic practice.
david howes is a professor of anthropology and co-director of the Centre for

Sensory Studies at Concordia University.
This page intentionally left blank
DAVID HOWES
The Sensory Studies Manifesto

Tracking the Sensorial Revolution
in the Arts and Human Sciences
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press 2022
Toronto Buffalo London
utorontopress.com
Printed in the U.S.A.
ISBN 978-1-4875-2861-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-2864-5 (EPUB)

ISBN 978-1-4875-2862-1 (paper) ISBN 978-1-4875-2863-8 (PDF)
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: The sensory studies manifesto : tracking the sensorial revolution in the arts and
human sciences / David Howes.
Names: Howes, David, 1957– author.
Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2022024099X | Canadiana (ebook) 20220241139 |
ISBN 9781487528621 (paper) | ISBN 9781487528614 (cloth) |
ISBN 9781487528645 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487528638 (PDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Senses and sensation – History. | LCSH: Senses and sensation –
Social aspects. | LCSH: Senses and sensation – Case studies. | LCSH: Senses
and sensation in art. | LCSH: Aesthetics.
Classification: LCC BF233 .H69 2022 | DDC 152.109–dc23
We wish to acknowledge the land on which the University of Toronto Press

operates. This land is the traditional territory of the Wendat, the Anishnaabeg,
the Haudenosaunee, the Métis, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of

Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of
the Government of Ontario, for its publishing activities.
For my children
Contents
List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi
Prologue: Coming to Our Senses 3
Part One: The Sensorial Revolution in the Human Sciences
1 On the Geography and Anthropology of the Senses 23

2 On the History and Sociology of the Senses 45
3 On the Psychology and Neurobiology of the Senses
in Historical and Cross-Cultural Perspective 67
Part Two: Case Studies
4 The Modern Sensorium: A Case Study in Sensory

History, 1920–2001 103
5 Melanesian Sensory Formations: A Comparative
Case Study in Sensory Ethnography 125
Part Three: Multisensory Aesthetics
6 “A New Age of Aesthetics”: Sensory Art and Design 143

7 Sensory Museology: Bringing the Senses
to Museum Visitors 163
8 Performative Sensory Environments: Alternative
Orchestrations of the Senses in Contemporary Intermedia Art 181
viii Contents
Notes 205
References 215
Index 251
Figures
Figure 1 How many senses are there? 83

Figure 2 The McGurk effect 85
Figure 3 A kula canoe on the island of Dobu, Massim region, Papua New
Guinea 129
Figure 4 Men’s house in the village of Tongwinjamb, Middle Sepik River
region, Papua New Guinea 133
Figure 5 Poster for Ellen Lupton’s plenary address at the Uncommon
Senses III conference 176
Figure 6 André Lenz, Xerography: cover illustration of the IFF Avant-
Garden catalogue 192
Figure 7 David Garneau and Garnet Willis, Heart Band, 2019 196
Figure 8 David Garneau and Garnet Willis, Heart Band (details) 198–9
Figure 9 Zab Maboungou completing Heart Band by dancing the
drums 202
Figure 10 Zab Maboungou hand-to-hand with one of the drums in Heart
Band 203
Acknowledgments
The reflections on the social and cultural life of the senses offered here were elab-
orated in the context of a long series of highly stimulating conversations with
fellow sensory studies scholars. Constance Classen, with her exceptional mas-
tery of the history of the senses, has played a vital part throughout. Other key
interlocutors include Dor Abrahamson, Jennifer Biddle, Mikkel Bille, Rosabelle
Boswell, Michael Bull, Fiona Candlin, Mónica Degen, Jennifer Deger, S andra
Dudley, Kathryn Earle, Tim Edensor, Elizabeth Edwards, David Garneau,
Marie-Luce Gélard, Kathryn Linn Geurts, Bianca Grohmann, Sheryl Hamilton,
Anna H arris, Michael Herzfeld, Caroline A. Jones, Carolyn Korsmeyer, M ichael
Lambek, David Le Breton, Fiona McDonald, Richard Newhauser, Mark Paterson,
Marina Peterson, Sally Promey, Chris Salter, Mark M. Smith, Charles Spence,
Paul Stoller, David Sutton, Anthony Synnott, and Boris Wiseman.
I wish to thank the many students who have served as research assistants
on the diverse projects I have directed or otherwise participated in stretching
back to 1988, and “The Varieties of Sensory Experience” project. These projects
would not have been possible without the generous financial assistance of the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de
Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture. I am also mindful of the tremen-
dous debt I owe to my family for their continuous support and encouragement.
This book presents an analysis of the progress that has been made over the
last decades in the cross-disciplinary study of the senses and offers guidelines
for the future development of the field. Parts of this work were published previ-
ously, though they have been revised substantially for inclusion here. Chapters
1, 2, 3, and 6 began as the introductory chapters to the four-volume Senses
and Sensation: Critical and Primary Sources compendium originally published
by Bloomsbury in 2018 and later transferred to Routledge. Chapter 4 is taken
mostly unaltered from my introduction to A Cultural History of the Senses in
the Modern Age, 1920–2000, part of a multivolume series on the history of the
senses edited by Constance Classen, and published by Bloomsbury in 2014.
xii Acknowledgments
The opening section of chapter 6 was first published as the introduction to a

special issue of The Senses and Society on “Sensory Museology” (vol. 9, no. 3).
The middle section of chapter 8 is derived from an essay called “Immersion
and Transcendence: Some Notes on the Construction of Performative Sensory
Environments” in Par le prisme des sens: Mediation et nouvelles réalités du
corps dans les arts performatifs, edited by Isabelle Choinière, Enrico Pitozzi,
and Andrea Davidson, and published by Presses de l’Université du Québec
in 2019. I am grateful to the above-mentioned publishers for permission to
reuse this material here. I also wish to express my thanks to the Office of the
Vice-President Research and Graduate Studies of Concordia University and the
Centre for Sensory Studies for grants in aid of publication of this book.
It is important to acknowledge that Concordia University is on land that has
long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst Indigenous peoples,
including the Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabeg nations. My work has involved
engaging with Indigenous scholars and artists, and I am acutely conscious of
the need to attend to Indigenous perspectives and histories in our contempo-
rary world.
The two anonymous reviewers chosen by the press provided insightful com-
ments on an earlier draft of the manuscript. They enabled me to better see the
overarching narrative of this treatise, and I am deeply appreciative of their
input. I am grateful to the artist-designer Erik Adigard for his compelling cover
art for the book. The medallions that adorn the front and back covers convey
the experience of intersensoriality discussed inside the book in a striking visual
form. Other variations from Adigard’s “Collideroscope series” can be seen on
the half-title pages that divide this book into three parts.* Finally, to the edito-
rial team at the University of Toronto Press, and especially Jodi Lewchuk, I wish
to say that it is ever so good to be working with the Press again, thirty years after
UTP first published The Varieties of Sensory Experience!
*For full-colour reproductions of the medallions designed by Erik Adigard used

on the half-title pages of this Manifesto see the “Collideroscope” entry on the
Picture Gallery page of the Sensory Studies website (http://www.sensorystudies
.org/picture-gallery/). There you will also find an animated version of the cover
illustration.
THE SENSORY STUDIES MANIFESTO
Prologue: Coming to Our Senses
If a revolt is to come, it will have to come from the five senses!

Michel Serres
An intense new focus on the cultural life of the senses has swept over the
social sciences and humanities. With its roots in the disciplines of history and
anthropology, this transformation in the study of perception has directed at-
tention to how the senses are constructed and lived differently across cultures
and periods, and thus disrupted the monopoly that the discipline of psychology
formerly exercised over this domain. The burgeoning literature on the cultural
mediation of “sensory processing” has resulted in a drive to liberate the senses
from the artificial confines of the psychology laboratory and explore how they
function “in the wild,” as Michel Serres1 would say, or “everyday life” (de Cer-
teau 1983b; Seremetakis 2019). The multi- and interdisciplinary approach to
the analysis of sense experience that has emerged out of this “sensory turn” in
the human sciences goes under the name of sensory studies (Bull et al. 2006).
Sensory studies involves a cultural approach to the study of the senses and a
sensory approach to the study of culture. It treats the senses and sensations as
both object of study and means of inquiry.
The first two chapters of this Manifesto survey how geographers, anthropol-
ogists, historians, and sociologists have come to train their disciplinary skills
on documenting and analysing the varieties of sensory experience across cul-
tures and over time. Various foundational late twentieth-century texts will be
identified and discussed in this survey. As regards anthropology and geogra-
phy, these include Paul Stoller’s The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in
Anthropology (1989) and The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in
the Anthropology of the Senses (Howes 1991); Yi-Fu Tuan’s Passing Strange and
Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture (1993) and Paul Rodaway’s Sensuous
Geographies: Body, Sense and Place (1994). As regards history, we will examine
4 Prologue
Alain Corbin’s extensive corpus of works on “the history of the sensible” (e.g.,
Corbin [1982] 1986, [1994] 1998) and Constance Classen’s Worlds of Sense
(1993) and The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagina-
tion (1998); within sociology, we will touch on The Body Social: Symbolism, Self
and Society (1993) by Anthony Synnott and The Senses in Self, Society and Cul-
ture: A Sociology of the Senses (Vannini, Waskul, and Gottschalk 2012). First,
however, a few words are in order concerning the genesis of this paradigm shift
in the conceptualization and approaches to studying the life of the senses.
The sensory turn in anthropology and cognate human sciences arose after the
linguistic turn of the 1960s and ’70s, which privileged language-based models of
culture (e.g., culture as “language game” or as “structured like a language,” cul-
ture “as text” or “discursive formation”).2 It also succeeded the pictorial turn of the
1980s, which gave rise to visual culture studies and the steady proliferation of im-
age-based models of meaning and communication (e.g., culture as “world view” or
“world picture,” “the image society,” “visual literacy”). The emergent field of sen-
sory studies, with its emphasis on sense-based inquiry, both critiques and seeks to
correct for the verbocentrism of language-based models and the ocularcentrism of
image-based models by analysing the sensorium as a whole and striving to articu-
late the sensory order – or “model” (Classen 1993b, 1997) – that informs how peo-
ple in different cultures and historical periods sense the world. Crucially, sensory
studies plays up the double meaning of the term “sense.” This term encompasses
both sensation and signification, feeling and meaning (as in the “sense” of a word)
in its spectrum of referents. Sensation-signification is seen as forming a continuum,
which is modulated by the sensory order. In this regard, the field of sensory studies
can be seen as charting a middle course between cognitivism and empiricism. The
former treats perception as determined by cognition. The focus is on analysing
the “cognitive map” of the individual subject that is supposed to dictate how their
senses function. The latter views the mind as a tabula rasa and the senses as passive
receptors of the impressions made on them by the exterior world. The former is
too top-down, and the latter too bottom-up. Both approaches ignore the mediating
role of culture and the socialization of the senses in addition to overlooking the
agency and interactivity of the people sensing and of the senses themselves.
The sensory turn also figures as a successor to the corporeal turn of the 1980s
(Csordas 1990). The latter turn was predicated on affirming the unity of mind
and body. It gave rise to such theoretical constructs as “the embodied mind”
and “mindful body.” The sensory turn complicates this merger, by redirecting
attention to the mix. For example, in Buddhist philosophy the mind is regarded
as a sixth sense, hence on a par with the other senses rather than occupying
a privileged position over and above the body and senses (Howes 2009, 27);
some traditions do insist on a bipartite (body/mind), tripartite (body/mind/
soul), or quadripartite, etc., schema. What is more, sensory studies scholars are
interested in investigating how the senses are distinguished from one another
Prologue 5
and how they may conflict, and not simply how they merge in some putative
“synergic system” or “prereflective unity” (Merleau-Ponty 1962; Ingold 2000).
Thus, sense-based inquiries attend to the differential elaboration or hierarchi-
zation and modulation of the senses in history and across cultures.
Finally, the sensory turn crystalized at roughly the same time as two other
paradigm shifts – namely, the material turn and the affective turn. The former
emphasized the material underpinnings of social life and has important things
to say about the agency of objects, materials, and environments (Appadurai
1983; Dant 1999, 2005; Tilley et al. 2006). The latter undermined the hegemony of
reason in social and political life and has unleashed a torrent of speculation con-
cerning precognitive triggers and affective intensities – or, in short, the visceral
(Manalansan 2005; Longhurst, Johnston, and Ho 2009; Panagia 2009; Trnka et
al. 2013). It can prove difficult to disentangle the material, affective, and sensory
shifts. For example, the term “feeling” resonates in both sensory studies (as tac-
tility) and affect studies (as affectivity). Unpacking the meaning and spelling out
the implications of this amorphous and highly fluid notion of “feeling” is best
approached from both of these perspectives – the affective and the sensitive.
Summing up all these strands of thought, in “Foundations for an Anthro-
pology of the Senses,” Constance Classen observed that when we examine the
meanings vested in different sensory faculties and sensations across cultures
we find a cornucopia of potent sensory symbolism. Sight may be linked to reason or

to witchcraft, taste may be used as a metaphor for aesthetic discrimination or for sex-
ual experience, an odour may signify sanctity or sin, political power or social exclu-
sion. 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 … There will likely be challenges to this model from within the society, persons
and groups who differ on certain sensory values [and practices], yet this model will
provide the basic perceptual paradigm to be followed or resisted. (Classen 1997, 402)
Classen’s introduction of the seminal concept of the sensory model dovetails with
the recent recuperation of another notion – that of the sensorium. This notion had
been obscured beneath the neurological reductionism and mentalism that took
hold as a result of the cognitive revolution in modern psychology (as will be dis-
cussed in chapter 3). The idea of the sensorium was both physiological and cos-
mological in its original definition. It referred primarily to the “percipient centre,”
or “seat of sensation in the brain,” and still carries this sense today. But it also ex-
tended to include what could be called the circumference of perception. In illustra-
tion of the latter point, the Oxford English Dictionary quotes one usage from 1714:
“The noblest and most exalted Way of considering this infinite Space [referring to
‘the Universe’] is that of Sir Isaac Newton, who calls it the Sensorium of the God-
head”; and another from 1861: “Rome became the common sensorium of Europe,
6 Prologue
and through Rome all the several portions of Latin Europe sympathized and felt
with each other.” This expanded sense (cosmological and social) of the term “sen-
sorium” had been all but lost until the media theorist Walter J. Ong retrieved it
in a little section of The Presence of the Word (1967) entitled “The Shifting Senso-
rium,” which was in turn reprinted as the lead chapter in The Varieties of Sensory
Experience (Howes 1991). Building on Marshall McLuhan’s notion of cultures as
manifesting contrasting “sense-ratios” in accordance with the prevailing media of
communication (e.g., speech that privileges the ear versus writing or print that
privilege the eye), Ong proposed that “given sufficient knowledge of the senso-
rium exploited within a specific culture, one could probably define the culture as a
whole in all its aspects,” including its cosmology or “world view” (Ong 1991, 28).
The implication is that perception is not just “down to our DNA” (Hollingham
2004), nor does it just go on “in some secret grotto in the head” (Geertz 1986,
113). It is also up to our culture, for as Oliver Sacks once said, “culture tunes our
neurons” (cited in Howes 2005b, 22). Hence, as Ong (1991, 26) proposed in “The
Shifting Sensorium”: “the sensorium is a fascinating focus for cultural studies.”
Ong’s remark hints at an alternative genealogy of and for the sensory turn in
contemporary scholarship. In addition to unfolding along the disciplinary tra-
jectories discussed above, which gave rise to such subfields as the anthropology
of the senses, history of the senses, sociology of the senses, and so forth, sen-
sory studies can be conceptualized along sensory lines as divisible into visual
culture, auditory culture (or sound studies), smell culture, taste culture, and the
culture of touch. There is much to commend the latter framework, as we shall
see, though it also raises certain questions.
The “fascination” (Ong 1991) that the study of the sensorium holds for cul-
tural studies is exemplified by the rich profusion of readers, handbooks, and
introductions that started appearing in the 1990s and continues unabated. A
key text in this connection is Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (Classen et al.
1994), which advanced the history, anthropology, and sociology of olfaction
in one comprehensive and groundbreaking move. We shall come back to this
work presently, after noting how the other senses were stirring.
The publication of Visual Culture: The Reader (Evans and Hall 1999) started
a trend that generated Visual Sense: A Cultural Reader (Edwards and Bhau-
mik 2008), Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Sturken and
Cartwright 2008), The Handbook of Visual Culture (Heywood and Sandywell
2011), and Global Visual Cultures: An Anthology (Kocur 2011), among other
works. The publication of The Auditory Culture Reader (Bull and Back [2003]
2016) opened the way for The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Pinch and
Bijsterveld 2011), The Sound Studies Reader (Sterne 2012), The Routledge Com-
panion to Sound Art (Cobussen et al. 2017), The Routledge Companion to Sound
Studies (Bull 2018), and The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of
Sound (Schulze 2021).
Prologue 7
Tracing the genealogy of the sense-specific subfields of sensory studies

brings out a different array of foundational works, or “overtures.” For exam-
ple, the origin of visual culture studies is usually traced either to John Berger’s
Ways of Seeing (1972), or to Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in
15th Century Italy (1972) and Svetlana Alpers’ The Art of Describing: Dutch Art
in the Seventeenth Century (1983) (see further Sturken and Cartwright 2009;
M. Smith 2007b). From its cradle in art history, visual culture quickly spread
to encompass film, television, fashion, advertising, and architecture. The in-
vention of visual culture was famously responsible for toppling the hierarchical
division between “high” and “low” (or “popular”) culture. What is not so often
recognized is how visual culture studies contributed to reproducing and fur-
ther entrenching the hierarchical division of the senses. The rapid uptake and
exponential growth of visual culture can be explained in part by reference to
vision being first among the senses in the West. If an attack on “the hegemony
of the text” or “the prisonhouse of language” was to come, it was (culturally)
inevitable that it would come from the angle of vision. Paradoxically, however,
the vaunted status of vision also smuggled in a certain blindness with respect to
the multisensory character of most human experience: vision, being the para-
gon sense, could stand for all the senses, with the result that the “other” senses
were easily ignored or assimilated to a visual model. Indeed, the proliferation
of visual culture studies has been challenged by some. For example, there are
those who question the ranging of architecture with visual culture because of
how this deflects attention from the acoustic, tactile, thermal, and other sen-
sory qualities of buildings (Palasmaa 1996; Blesser and Salter 2009; Ong 2012).
The subfield of sound studies can be seen as having its origin in the notion of
the “soundscape,” which was coined by the maverick Canadian composer and
“acoustic ecologist” R. Murray Schafer in the 1970s (Schafer 1977). The idea of
an “auditory turn” was theorized by art historian Douglas Kahn in “Digits on
the Historical Pulse” (2002). In an essay entitled “How Sound Is Sound His-
tory?” Renaissance literary scholar Bruce R. Smith reflected on the principles
that hold the field of sound studies (or auditory culture) together:
At least three principles in particular seem to unite [sound studies practitioners]

across their disciplinary differences: (1) They agree that sound has been neglected
as an object of study; (2) they believe that sound offers a fundamentally different
knowledge of the world than vision; and (3) they recognize that most academic
disciplines remain vision-based, not only in the materials they study, but in the
theoretical models they deploy to interpret them. (2004, 390–1)
All three of Smith’s points are valid. At the same time, his account occludes the
deeper historical reasons for the momentum behind the auditory turn. Hearing
is “the second sense” (after sight) in the conventional Western hierarchy of the
8 Prologue
senses (Burnett, Fend, and Gouk 1991). Thus, if an attack on “the hegemony
of vision” or “precession of the image” (vis-à-vis reality) was to come, it was
(culturally) inevitable that it would come from the angle of sound and hearing.
Put another way, were it not for the pictorial turn, there might have been no au-
ditory turn: for just as the pictorial turn questioned the privileging of linguistic
models and the idea of culture “as text” by exposing the increasing salience of
visual cognition and communication in contemporary culture, so the auditory
turn arose as a corrective to the overemphasis on the visual entrained by the pic-
torial turn – that is, it was motivated in no small part by a “critique” or “rejection
of visualism.” Thus, we can discern a constant jostling among the faculties in the
development of sensory studies, as each faculty hove into view only to become a
target for critique from the standpoint of the next faculty in the hierarchy.
There is no Archimedean point, independent of any culture or period, from
which to conceptualize the bounds of sense, or assess the different senses’ contri-
bution to the advancement of knowledge. This makes it a matter of first impor-
tance to reflect on the sensory biases embedded in mainstream Western thought
and culture, instead of taking such biases, or essentialisms, as given. The influ-
ence of these biases can be rendered perceptible and moderated to a significant
degree by cultivating the capacity to “be of two sensoria” – one’s own and that
of the culture or period under study, and continuously tacking back and forth
between them (Howes 2003, 10–14). To develop such a hyperacute awareness of
sensory difference does not come easily. It requires a high degree of discipline,
attunement, and reflexivity, or being in and out of one’s own body and senses at
once. But for all the cognitive dissonance that being of two sensoria might entail,
it is crucial to the successful pursuit of “sensuous scholarship” (Stoller 1997).
The field of tactile culture studies was nurtured by Ashley Montagu’s Touch-
ing: The Human Significance of the Skin ([1971] 1986), even with all that work’s
shortcomings from a historical and cross-cultural perspective. These lacunae,
which stemmed from Montagu’s overemphasis on physiology, were corrected
in Claudia Benthien’s Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World
(2002), Constance Classen’s The Book of Touch (2005a) and The Deepest Sense
(2012), and David Parisi’s Archaeologies of Touch (2018), thanks to these au-
thors’ resolutely cultural approach to the description and analysis of haptic ex-
perience. The field of “skin studies” (which overlaps to a considerable extent
with the culture of touch) has also blossomed in the ensuing period (see La-
france 2012 and 2018 for an overview).
It is more difficult to pinpoint an urtext for the domain of taste culture stud-
ies, although Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment
of Taste ([1979] 1984) and the chapters on food in Mary Douglas’ In the Active
Voice (1982) would certainly figure in any such genealogy (see Sutton 2010).
The philosopher Carolyn Korsmeyer consolidated the field of taste culture stud-
ies by editing The Taste Culture Reader ([2005] 2016) in which she expanded
Prologue 9
her earlier work on taste and philosophy (Korsmeyer 1999) into a sociology,
anthropology, and history of gustation. The companion interdisciplinary field
of food studies, which was strangely oblivious to considerations of taste in its
first two decades (see Sutton 2010 and Hamilakis 2014), has also become sig-
nificantly more flavourful in recent years (e.g., Bégin 2016; Rhys-Taylor 2017;
Counihan and HØglund 2018).
Smell was first constituted as an object of multidisciplinary investigation in
Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (Classen et al. 1994). Aroma devoted equal
space to the history, anthropology, and sociology of olfaction. Part 1 of Aroma,
which is entitled “In Search of Lost Scents,” delves into the significance of odour
in antiquity (ch. 1) and then “follows the scent” from the Middle Ages to mo-
dernity (ch. 2). Part 2, “Explorations in Olfactory Difference,” investigates the
universes of odour or “osmologies” of a range of African, Asian, Melanesian,
and Indigenous Latin American societies (ch. 3) before turning to consider the
ritual uses of smell (ch. 4). Part 3, “Odour, Power, and Society,” brings a critical
perspective to bear on the politics of smell. It highlights how olfaction is mobi-
lized in the interests of social inclusion and exclusion and also analyses the une-
venness to its distribution – smell pollution (ch. 5). The final chapter is entitled
“The Aroma of the Commodity: The Commercialization of Smell.” It addresses
such topics as the problematization of body odour, gender stereotyping and
perfumery, the fragrancing of products, and the trademarking of scents.
Aroma concludes by offering a series of reflections on the connection be-
tween olfaction and the postmodern condition. It notes the manner in which
smell, denied and ignored by scholars of modernity, has attained a new lease
on life in late modernity. For example, odour, being by nature personal and
local, enables olfactory values to be used to reinforce social intimacy and dis-
tancing. Another key feature is that smells resist containment in discrete units,
“they cross borders, linking disparate categories and confusing boundary lines”
(Classen et al. 1994, 205) in a manner consistent with the privileging of pastiche
and promiscuity under postmodernism. Finally, the exponential growth of the
artificial flavour and fragrance industry betokens the arrival of the “Age of the
Simulacrum” wherein the world has come to be “completely catalogued and
analyzed and then artificially revived as though real” (Baudrillard 1983, 16). Yet,
Postmodernity … in no way allows for a full range of olfactory expression. Odours

are rather eliminated from society and then reintroduced as packaged agents of
fantasy, a means of recovering or recreating a body, an identity, a world, from
which one has already been irrevocably alienated. The question is, will smell, se-
duced by an endless procession of olfactory simulacra, succumb to its postmod-
ern fate, or will it – ever elusive – transcend its postmodern categorization to
remind us of our organic nature and even hint at a realm of the spirit. (Classen
et al. 1994, 205)
10 Prologue
Aroma opened the way for numerous subsequent sociohistorical studies

of the power of smell. These include Jim Drobnick’s The Smell Culture Reader
(2006), Kelvin Low’s Scent and Scent-sibilities (2009), Holly Dugan’s The Ephem-
eral History of Perfume (2011), James McHugh’s Sandalwood and Carrion
(2012), William Tullett’s Smell in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social Sense
(2019), Mark Smith’s Smell and History: A Reader (2019), and Hsuan Hsu’s The
Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics (2020b).
This alternative genealogy of sensory studies (by sense rather than by disci-
pline) is provisional. It will require further elaboration. Even in this provisional
form, however, it raises interesting questions. Why the unevenness to the de-
velopment of these subfields – that is, why are some senses (e.g., sight, hearing)
better represented than others (e.g., smell, touch)? What is the role of institu-
tions in maintaining and/or changing the current “distribution of the sensible”
(Rancière 2004)? How else might the sensorium be divided for purposes of cul-
tural analysis? What of the senses beyond the customary five, such as the sixth
sense (Howes 2009), the seventh sense (Kivy 2003), etc.? And, perhaps most
pressing, while it remains customary to speak of “turns” when describing these
openings – as in “the pictorial turn” (Mitchell [1992] 1994; Curtis 2010), “the
auditory turn” (Kahn 2002), and so on – might it not be time to think of this
quickening of the senses as more in the nature of a revolution (Howes 2006)?
While it is only possible to recognize visual culture, sound studies, taste cul-
ture, etc., as flowing into sensory studies in retrospect (since the term “sensory
studies” did not exist, or was not used in this way, prior to 2006 [see Bull et al.
2006]), it is nevertheless apparent that these previously independent streams
now form a vast, fast-flowing river. Indeed, it could be argued that the sensory
turn now rivals the aforementioned linguistic, pictorial, corporeal, and mate-
rial turns in terms of its impact on scholarship in the humanities and social
sciences. Rather than being just another turn, then, the uptake of the senses
across the humanities and social sciences is revolutionary.
Insofar as one major impetus behind the sensory revolution was to liberate the
study of sense perception from the psychology laboratory and insert it (back) into
society by insisting on the historicity and sociality of sensation, it has succeeded,
as the wealth of literature surveyed in the chapters that follow will attest. How-
ever, there remain many important issues to be addressed. One of these concerns
theorizing the interactivity of the senses. This problem can be illustrated by con-
sidering an observation Bruce R. Smith makes in passing in The Acoustic World of
Early Modern England (1999) to the effect that, in the early modern period, it was
thought that a person’s handwriting might carry the sound of the writer’s voice.
This observation illustrates how the interface of the senses (here, sight and hear-
ing) deserves no less attention than their specificity as modalities of perception.
To cite another example, many premodern thinkers (following Aris-
totle) viewed taste as “a form of touch” whereas in the modern period taste
Prologue 11
is commonly seen as most closely connected to smell (i.e., a fellow chemical

sense). To add a cross-cultural twist: among the Dogon of Mali, sound and
odour are understood to have a common origin in vibration (Howes and Clas-
sen 1991, 268), and the “vibration theory” of olfaction also has a few propo-
nents in contemporary Western culture (e.g., Turin 2006; Burr 2002). However,
it is sound and touch, the audible and the palpable, that are now seen as having
the greatest overlap, in terms of vibration (Connor 2004; Trower 2012; Eid-
sheim 2015). Finally, there is the example of synaesthesia, the “union of the
senses,” which takes many different forms, and also scrambles conventional no-
tions of the senses as discrete channels. Thus, charting the relations among the
senses, and how these relationships shift over time, should occupy us no less
than seeking to fathom the depths of each of the senses in any given historical
period or culture.
All of these variations to the individuation and/or integration of the senses
underscore the importance of adopting a relational approach to the study of the
divisions of the sensorium and attending to the role of culture in shaping how the
senses are constructed and lived. This was, in fact, the starting point of Empire of
the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Howes 2005b), the inaugural volume of
the Sensory Formations series, and it is also the premise underpinning this Man-
ifesto. This relational focus is given in the notion of “intersensoriality.” This term
refers to how the relations between the senses, and the correspondence or con-
flicts amongst their deliverances (colours, sounds, perfumes, etc.), are consti-
tuted differently in different societies and epochs. It bears noting that this focus
on intersensory relations dovetails with an important opening in contemporary
experimental psychology. Alongside the traditional unimodal or one-sense-at-
a-time, one-sensation-at-a-time approach to the study of sense perception, there
has emerged a new focus on the interaction and integration of the senses in
perceptual processes. This multimodal approach has been pioneered by Charles
Spence, who heads up the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at Oxford Univer-
sity. Spence’s work will figure centrally in the discussion in chapter 3.
Sensualizing Theory
The senses are our means of perception. As the psychologist Rudolf Arnheim
(1969) showed in Visual Thinking, they are also our means of cognition. In
contrast to the view that vision is the handmaiden of cognition, in this book
Arnheim advanced a theory of thinking as a continuation of seeing. This in-
terpretation holds well for Western thought and culture, but as the sensory
anthropologist would be quick to point out, it immediately comes to grief
when it is extended to such other, more “ear-minded” cultures as that of the
Suyà of Brazil, who associate knowing with hearing (Seeger 1975, 1981), or
“nose-minded” cultures like that of the Ongee of the Andaman Islands (Classen
12 Prologue
1993b, ch. 6). The Ongee will refer to themselves by pointing to their nose and
ask “How is your smell?” when they greet each other. They navigate the forest
by sniffing and are careful to “bind” their smell to their bodies (so as not to
attract the attention of jealous spirits, themselves scentless). Furthermore, their
calendar is “a calendar of scents.” Thus, personhood, space, and time are all
theorized through the sense of smell among the Ongee.
The orchestration of the senses in Suyà as in Ongee culture does not line up
with any of the customary ways in which the senses have been arranged in the
history of Western culture. Recognizing this fact and striving to “lead with the
senses” in our research, rather than some hypostatized notion of cognition and
the primacy of vision, can open our minds to myriad other ways of sensing and
making sense of the world.
Leading with the senses also has implications for how we theorize the senses
(and much else, for that matter). The term “theory” comes from the Greek
theōria, which means “a beholding, speculation” according to the Concise Ety-
mological Dictionary of the English Language – that is, theory means “to look at.”
This imports a visual bias into the basis of theory-building, whatever its object
(e.g., the senses, society, the cosmos). What if theorizing had to do with sensu-
alizing rather then visualizing phenomena? To sensualize theory would involve
opening a space in which other senses could come to the fore. It would mean
upending the conventional Western hierarchy of the senses and establishing a
democracy of the senses, or, if that is too much to hope for, at least a heterarchy
of the senses, in its place. The time has come for overhauling theory in the in-
terests of sensualizing its practice – that is, for acknowledging the senses (all of
them, not just vision) as potentially “direct theoreticians in practice.”3
Manifesto for Sensory Studies
To pursue this notion of the senses as theoreticians, I would like to propose a

set of twelve propositions for sensory studies (inspired by Heywood and Sandy-
well’s example in The Handbook of Visual Culture [2011, ch. 29]). The first few
propositions are expressed negatively to underscore the extent to which they
depart from the received wisdom about the senses (and language) in Western
philosophy and culture. The last few propositions are expressed in the active
(and also affirmative) voice. They bring out the sociality of sensations, and
highlight a series of topics in the expanding field of sensory studies to be ex-
plored in depth in the chapters that follow.
1 The senses are not simply passive receptors. They are interactive, both with
the world and each other.
2 The senses overlap and collaborate, but they may also conflict. The unity
of the senses should not be presupposed.4
Prologue 13
3 Language influences perception, but it is equally true that the senses in-
fuse language with sense. The senses come before language and also ex-
tend beyond it.5
4 Perception is not solely a mental or neurobiological or individual phe-
nomenon. “The perceptual is cultural and political.”6
5 There is no Archimedean point, independent of culture or history, from
which to gauge the bounds of sense or assess the different senses’ contri-
bution to the advancement of knowledge.
6 The rise of sensory studies has precipitated a shift from a focus on the or-
gans of perception to practices of perception, or techniques of the senses,
ways of sensing. Approached from this standpoint, “the senses are infinite
and innumerable.”7
7 “The senses are everywhere.”8 They mediate the relationship between idea
and object, mind and body, self and society, culture and environment.
8 Every society and historical period elaborates its own ways of understand-
ing and using the senses. No one sensory model will fit all.
9 No account of the senses in society can be complete without due atten-
tion being paid to sensory discrimination. It is here, in particular, that
the necessity of going beyond an examination of sensory techniques to
investigate underlying sensory models and social systems is revealed to be
essential.
10 Sensory critique is the beginning of social critique.9
11 The methodologies of sensory studies are grounded in “feeling along with
others what they experience” (sensory ethnography), “sensing between the
lines” (sensory history), and “research-creation” (or arts-based research),
which is situated “between art and science.” All of these sense-based meth-
ods and others disturb our conventional habits of perception, and lead to
the discovery of other modes of being and knowing.10
12 As advocated throughout this Manifesto, there is a growing urge and in-
creasing need for more crosstalk among the disciplines regarding the cul-
ture-nature of sense perception and action.
Origin of This Work
The idea for this Manifesto was first planted in my head at a talk I attended
in the Senior Common Room at Trinity College, Toronto, in 1979. The talk
was presented by Marshall McLuhan and was entitled “Laws of Media.” I was
intrigued by McLuhan’s notion of cultures as embodying contrasting “sense-
ratios” determined by the prevailing medium of communication (most notably
speech, which privileges the ear vs. writing and print, which privilege the eye).
A decade later, when I went to Papua New Guinea, I had the opportunity to
14 Prologue
explore the relevance of McLuhan’s hypothesis within the context of two pre-
dominantly “oral” communities (as will be recounted in chapter 5).
That initial idea has been nurtured by my collaboration with diverse schol-
ars, most notably the cultural historian Constance Classen, co-author of Aroma
(1994) and Ways of Sensing (2014), among other works; the sociologist An-
thony Synnott, co-founder of the Concordia Sensoria Research Team (1988–);
the media theorist Michael Bull, co-founding editor of The Senses and Soci-
ety (2006–); Chris Salter (Design Art), co-creator of a series of “performative
sensory environments”; and Bianca Grohmann (Marketing), co-director of the
Centre for Sensory Studies (2016–).
Chapters 1 and 2 build on the survey of research in the anthropology and
geography, and history and sociology, of the senses that I posted on the Sensory
Studies website in 2013 under the title “The Expanding Field of Sensory S tudies”
(www.sensorystudies.org). This overview was keyed to book-length studies
published or translated into English and the occasional synthetic journal article.11
This material was reworked to form the subject matter of the introductions to
the first two volumes of the Senses and Sensation: Critical and Primary Sources
compendium (originally published by Bloomsbury in 2018 and later transferred
to Routledge). The other two volumes in the Senses and Sensation set include one
on “Biology, Psychology and Neuroscience” and one on “Art and Design.” The
introductions to all four volumes of Senses and Sensation have been reprised and
revised to form the basis of chapters 1, 2, 3, and 6 of this Manifesto.12
Outline of the Book
Part 1 of this Manifesto consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 documents the

sensorial revolution within the disciplines of anthropology and geography.
Chapter 2 traces how this paradigm shift unfolded within the disciplines of
history and sociology. Chapter 3 interrogates the disciplining of the senses
within experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience from an orthog-
onal angle, informed by the insights of sensory studies. Each of the aforemen-
tioned chapters is divided into two sections. The first section is called “Laying
the Foundations” and presents a genealogy of sensory studies by discipline. The
second is called “Probes,” on which more in a moment. Read together, these
chapters offer a Grand Tour of research in sensory studies, which is also quite
intense, due to the formidable dynamism of sensuous scholarship in the hu-
manities and social sciences since the 1990s.
Part 2, “Case Studies,” opens with a chapter entitled “The Modern Senso-
rium,” which presents a case study in the cultural history of the senses, with a
particular focus on how the senses were fashioned and refashioned during the
period 1920–2001. The ensuing chapter, “Melanesian Sensory Formations,” of-
fers a comparative case study in the anthropology of the senses, centring on the
Prologue 15
field research that I carried out in two regions of Papua New Guinea in the early
1990s. In effect, these two chapters substantiate the theoretical reflections of
previous chapters by engaging in what Michael Herzfeld (2001) calls “a practice
of theory” or “theoretical practice.” Their focus is on research “with” the senses
instead of “on” or “about” the senses – that is, on “doing sensory history” by
sensing between the lines of historical sources and on “doing sensory ethnog-
raphy” by striving to sense and make sense together with others (which is one
way of describing the methodology of participant sensation employed here).
Part 3, “Multisensory Aesthetics,” also consists of three chapters. The dis-
cussion in chapter 6 links back up with the discussion in the chapters of Part
1. It offers a genealogy of research on the senses in the history of art and
design. The two ensuing chapters introduce a further shift – from research
(Herzfeld’s “theoretical practice” or “practice of theory”) to research-creation.
Research-creation “combines discursive, analytic and critical theories and
methods from the social sciences and humanities with the embodied, exper-
imental and situated practices of creative artistic expression producing new
ways of knowing and being.”13 By uniting artistic expression, scholarly investi-
gation, and material experimentation, research-creation opens up a space “be-
tween art and science” (Born and Barry 2010; Sormani et al. 2018; Galison and
Jones 2014) or “between art and anthropology” (Schneider and Wright 2010;
Elliott and Culhane 2017).
The museum has emerged as a prime site for such experimentation, as re-
counted in chapter 7, “Sensory Museology.” Curators use the medium of ob-
jects in place of monographs or films to engage not only the intellects but also
the senses of their visitors in knowledge production and/or transfer. Chapter 8
shifts the focus from curating to creating. Among other things, it recounts my
experience of the end-of-term production put on by the Fine Arts students in
a course directed by R. Murray Schafer called “The Theatre of the Senses”; of
creating a scent called “Sacred Now” in collaboration with a perfumer at In-
ternational Flavors and Fragrances. Inc. (not your ordinary academic output);
and of collaborating with new media artist Chris Salter to design and evalu-
ate audience response to a series of “performative sensory environments” (i.e.,
multimodal installation artworks). In the performative sensory environment,
art comes off the wall, immersion takes the place of representation, the senses
are rearranged, and the visitor gets to try out new ways of knowing and being.
Probing the Senses, the Senses as Probes
One of the novel features of this Manifesto is the “Probes” sections that take up
the latter half of chapters 1, 2, 3, and 6. There is some resemblance in the archi-
tecture of these sections to such works as Key Debates in Anthropology (Ingold
1996) or Raymond Williams’ Keywords (1976). However, I chose to call these
16 Prologue
sections “Probes” with a tip of the hat to Marshal McLuhan. In my estimation,

with some caveats (to be discussed later), McLuhan theorized the senses more
capaciously than any other scholar. The probes also evince McLuhan’s style of
thinking, which he described as “mosaical.” Indeed, McLuhan railed against the
strictures of linear perspective vision in painting just as he railed against the
linealization of thought brought on by the technology of repeatable type – both
inventions of the Renaissance. His alternative model of the “collideroscope”
of the sensorium can only be evoked mosaically. Expanding on that model,
through and by bringing multiple disciplinary lenses to bear on the study of the
senses and sensation, holds great promise for advancing the extrapsychological
take on “sensory processing” advocated in this Manifesto.
In these sections, then, my aim is to probe the wisdom on the senses that has
been built up within each of the disciplines concerned, and also use the senses
as probes to trouble that wisdom. The selection of topics is based on my first-
hand knowledge of the field, as co-director of the Concordia Centre for Sensory
Studies and chief organizer of the Uncommon Senses conference series, general
editor of the Sensory Formations and Sensory Studies book series, and manag-
ing editor (a mission I share with Michael Bull) of The Senses and Society, the
premier journal in the field.
Here is an overview of the topics to be probed.
1 Ontology. The “ontological turn” in the human sciences, particularly

within anthropology, has resulted in the jettison of the idea of there being
one nature and many cultures and introduced the notion of “multinatures”
in its place. While this shift has generated many keen insights, the pre-
cession of ontology (or science of “what is”) has precipitated a recession
in reflection on just “how” we know what is (i.e., epistemology or “know-
how”). This subsection argues for the reintroduction of a concern with
sensuous epistemologies and sensory cosmologies.
2 Emplacement. The notion of emplacement is of central concern to geogra-
phy, where it goes under the name of landscape studies. This probe argues
that it could usefully be taken up by other disciplines for the way this notion
directs attention to the situatedness of the mind-body in a particular locale
(mind-body-environment) and brings out how context alters perception.
3 Materiality. The understanding of materiality that has emerged out of
studies in material culture has brought to light the social agency of objects,
infrastructures, and environments. This probe argues that the focus on
materiality needs to be augmented by attention to the sensoriality of things
to arrive at a full-bodied understanding of living in the material world.
4 Memory. Memory emerged as a prime topic for sociological, and not just
psychological, investigation with the publication of How Societies Re-
member (Connerton 1989). In addition to foregrounding the sociality of
Prologue 17
memory, this subsection pries open the materiality of memory. Probing

the sociality and materiality of memory explodes the supposition that
memory is basically a cognitive faculty. It should rather be regarded as
embedded in the distribution of the sensible.
5 Alterity. Othering by means of the senses (i.e., sensory discrimination) is at
the core of processes of social inclusion and exclusion. It therefore calls out
for sociological investigation. This probe brings out the role of perception –
socially conditioned perception, that is – in the constatation of alterity.
6 Mediation. McLuhan sent communication studies off in some highly pro-
ductive directions by suggesting that media be regarded as “extensions of the
senses.” But there are difficulties with the technological determinism and es-
sentialism of his position. This probe will seek to expose and resolve them.
7 Affect. The affective turn crystalized at roughly the same time as the sensory
turn. There is both overlap and antagonism to the way these two paradigms –
namely, affect studies and sensory studies – approach diverse phenomena.
This subsection probes how the two schools can be reconciled.
8 Movement. There is an overwhelming stillness to the way in which the
perceiving subject has been pictured in the largely spectatorial tradition of
Western philosophy. This stillness, and the focus on the individuation of
the senses, has been shattered by an emergent focus on the motility of the
body and senses, and the idea of perception as enaction (not representa-
tion), which constitutes the focus of discussion in this subsection.14
9 Representation. An intense focus on representational practices and issues
of “authority” erupted in the 1980s, and a “crisis of representation” ensued.
It is not so well recognized how this crisis also precipitated a crisis in sen-
sation, as documented in this subsection. The subsequent rise of “non-
representational theory,” as treated in this probe, may be read as an effort
to bring the senses back in.
10 Gustation. The emergence of taste culture studies together with the science
of “gastrophysics” as theorized by Charles Spence has exploded the idea of
taste as a singular sense. The experience of flavour has been shown to be
a product of the conjunction of tasting with the tastebuds and retronasal
olfaction and is also modulated by sound, visual presentation, and mouth
feel. Further, taste is a social sense. Taste, then, turns out to be the in-
tersensorial sense par excellence, and therefore a fitting focus for reflecting
on the varieties of sensory/social interaction. It has its own epistemology,
which can be called “gustemology” (Sutton 2010).
11 Synaesthesia. The phenomenon of synaesthesia – “secondary sensation
caused by stimulation of another part of the body, such as accompanying
sensations of colour with given sounds [i.e., coloured hearing]” (Rodaway
1994, 6) – has attracted a flurry of attention in recent years. The idea of the
“union of the senses” has also generated a lot of confusion. Some scholars
18 Prologue
maintain that it is congenital, others that it is cultural. This probe will ex-
amine both sides of the debate, and advance an intermediate position.
This assortment of probes is far from exhaustive of the range of current debates
in the human sciences, though it is reasonably representative. At the same time,
there is much that remains to be done and that needs to be done within sensory
studies, including delving into the senses of non-human animals and, more gen-
erally, the “more-than-human sensorium.”15 It is also imperative to undertake
a sense-based approach to the greatest crisis of our times – namely, the climate
emergency. I humbly submit that this assortment of probes can provide a spring-
board for further reflection and directions for research into these and other areas.
Concluding Notes
Writing this Manifesto has proved to be tremendously rewarding. Practising

what the anthropologist Paul Stoller (1989) calls “sensuous scholarship” is for-
midably illuminating and exhilarating, particularly when it simultaneously
involves attending to what fellow scholars in related disciplines (history, geog-
raphy, sociology, etc.) have accomplished in their own sensorial investigations.
In my experience, disciplinary specialization always stands to be enriched when
paired with a commitment to engaging in conversation across disciplines, since
this in turn leads to the “enlargement of mind” that the philosopher Hannah
Arendt extolls in her critique of judgment:
Judgment, according to Hannah Arendt, is genuinely subjective … But judgment is

not therefore merely arbitrary or simply a matter of preference. Judgments, prop-
erly understood, are valid for the judging community … What makes it possible for
us to genuinely judge, to move beyond our private idiosyncrasies and preferences,
is our capacity to achieve an “enlargement of mind.” We do this by taking different
perspectives into account. This is the path out of the blindness of our subjective
private conditions … we imagine trying to persuade others. (Nedelsky 1997, 107)
Exploring the senses across disciplines and cultures involves just such an “en-
largement of mind” – to accommodate other ways of making sense.
In this Manifesto, I have aspired to be judicious to the senses, to sense-based
research across the human sciences, and to the recent surge in sensory experi-
mentation in the studio and the museum. When the life of the senses is exam-
ined from all these different angles, the sensible is rendered that much more
intelligible, but without losing any of its sensuousness.
This Manifesto, then, is at once a call for more correspondence among the
disciplines concerning the senses and an inquiry into the correspondences of
the senses themselves. It follows in the footsteps of the poet Baudelaire who,
Prologue 19
when he walked “the forest of symbols,” discovered that “sounds, fragrances

and colours correspond.” Indeed, it would be “really surprising,” the author of
“Correspondences” proclaimed elsewhere, “if sound could not suggest color,
if colors could not suggest a melody … things being always expressed by a re-
ciprocal analogy.” Nonetheless, “modern professors of aesthetics,” according to
Baudelaire (1978, 30), had “forgotten the color of the sky, the form of plants,
the movement and odor of animals,” and their “rigid fingers, frozen to their
pens” were unable “to play over the immense keyboard of correspondences.” It
is important to be mindful of Baudelaire’s rebuke to the professors – and to take
up his challenge of becoming sensors – as we embark on this inquiry into the
genealogy of sensory studies.
Sensory studies is not just a branch of aesthetics in the rarefied sense, how-
ever. It encompasses the full range of social practices and sites. Furthermore,
sensations do not always correspond; oftentimes they clash and conflict. This
contestation is analysed and described in the recent article “What does pov-
erty feel like? Urban inequality and the politics of sensation” (Jaffe et al. 2020),
which is all about “sense disruption,” and transgressing “established hierarchies
of socio-spatial value.”
The social life of the senses is complex and diverse, and it requires a kaleido-
scope of approaches to match the kaleidoscope of its modes of expression. The
present work aims to bring out the correspondences and the congeries of this
dynamic heterarchy of approaches and expressions, while presenting crucial
guidelines for ensuring that the “sensorial revolution” achieves its full potential
within both the human sciences and the creative arts.
PART ONE
The Sensorial Revolution in the Human

Sciences
Collideroscope series (2022) © Erik Adigard, M-A-D

CHAPTER ONE
On the Geography and Anthropology

of the Senses
The first two disciplines to be considered in this genealogical survey of the

sensory revolution in the human sciences are geography and anthropology.
The geography of the senses is concerned with mapping sensory diversity in
space, while the anthropology of the senses traces the varieties of sensory expe-
rience across cultures. In the former, the focus is on how different environments
shape perception, and how space becomes place through sensory interaction
with differing surroundings, both natural and built. In the latter, the emphasis
is on the enculturation of the senses, and how the differing ways in which the
senses are constructed and lived generate distinct sensory worlds.
In section 1, the focus will be on identifying the foundational texts that
framed the senses as both object of study and means of inquiry from the early
1990s on. However, it would be remiss to overlook what could be called the
“overtures” to the senses in the geographical and anthropological literature of
earlier decades. As we shall see, an interest in the senses and sense perception
dates back to the very origins of the two disciplines, only to be discarded and
then revived on an altogether different, more cultural footing in the 1990s.
In section 2, a series of eleven probes is offered. The discussion in these sub-
sections is keyed to such concepts as ontology and affect and such topics as
alterity and food or gustation as framed in the human sciences with a view to
disclosing what sensory ethnography and sensuous geography bring to their
critique, or better, their sensualization. This move contrasts with the abiding
interest in “visualizing theory” in contemporary scholarship (e.g., Taylor 1994),
which only compounds the visual bias inherent in “theory” (from theoria, look-
ing at, gazing at) itself. We are familiar with the nexus between seeing, knowl-
edge, and power or voir, savoir, pouvoir in French (after Foucault 1973, 1979).
Digging deeper etymologically, we are able to unlock the connection between
saveur and savoir in French, or sapore and sapere in Italian (Calvino 2005),
which is actually integral to the archaic, more flavourful definition of humanity
as Homo sapiens (Onians 1951, 61–3). Our collective theorizing stands to be
24 The Sensorial Revolution in the Human Sciences
enriched significantly by extending the practice of theorization to other senses

besides sight.
I. Laying the Foundations
Geographical Overtures
The first scholar to explicitly theorize the senses in geography was Paul Roda-
way in Sensuous Geographies (1994), though he himself points to the “percep-
tion geography” of the 1960s and 1970s as antecedents.1 Actually, the history of
geography’s entanglement with the senses extends much further back than that.
Indeed, the distinguished Irish geographer Anne Buttimer (2010, 12) has sug-
gested that “multi-sensory attunement to the environment itself ” can be seen
to have informed the work of the discipline’s two most illustrious founders:
Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and, a century later, Johannes Gabriel
Granö (1882–1956). These two geographers were not regarded as founders at
the time, of course, but only in retrospect.
Coincidentally, both Humboldt and Granö started out in botany, and both
traversed Siberia (Granö repeatedly). However, it was the sensuousness of their
approaches that truly distinguished the geography they practised. Buttimer
quotes the following passages from Humboldt’s Ansichten der Natur (1808) by
way of illustration:
The goals for which I strove were to depict nature in its prime traits, to find proof
of the interworking of (natural) forces, and to achieve a sense of enjoyment which
the immediate view gives to sensitive man … descriptions of nature impress us
more or less according to the degree to which they agree with the needs of our
feelings; for the physical world is mirrored vividly and truly in the inner feelings.
Whatever is essential for the character of a landscape – the outlines of the moun-
tains which limit the horizon in bluish, fragrant distance, the darkness of the fir
forests, the forest-streams which rush between overhanging cliffs – all that is in
old mysterious contact with the inner life of man. (quoted in Buttimer 2010, 22;
emphasis added)
The Finnish scholar J.G. Granö’s Reine Geographie (Pure Geography), published
in 1929, was even more explicit (if rather less feelingful or Romantic) in its
focus on the sensory as the medium of geography. In “The Background to Pure
Geography” (1997), Olavi Granö (the son) and Anssi Paasi bring out well how,
for J.G. Granö, the “real object” of geographical research is the environment
that a human being perceives with the senses. Granö distinguished between
the “proximity” or close-up environment, which is perceived and to be charted
or described through multisensory modes (visual, auditory, olfactory, kinetic),
On the Geography and Anthropology of the Senses 25
and the distant environment or “landscape,” which is perceived primarily

through the visual sense. “If smells belong to a geographical complex, be it a
landscape or a proximity, they must be studied and their value assessed” J.G.
Granö insisted ([1929] 1997, 128). The same with sounds, textures, sights, and
so on, he maintained, for only in this way could a geographical complex or
“region” be delimited.
It is important to note that the one doing the sensing was not just any ordi-
nary person, nor Humboldt’s “sensitive man,” but the “pure geographer” with
scientifically disciplined senses, which Granö assumed would guarantee the
objectivity of the observations. Alas, or perhaps fortunately, he was not always
successful at upholding his own first principles, as Olavi Granö and Paasi note,
and there are places in his writings where he waxed as eloquent as Humboldt.
Also of note: Granö took his understanding of how the senses function directly
from the psychophysics of his day. He did not question the account of percep-
tion that comes out of psychophysics, and so missed the opportunity to explore
either how context alters perceptions, or all that the discipline of geography
could have brought to psychology as regards the understanding of the spatial
formation of the sensorium.
Granö’s work, most notably his Atlas of Finland (1925), contributed sub-
stantially to the establishment of geography as a discipline in Finland and the
German-speaking world. However, his insistence on the primacy of the sensate
(i.e., the perceived environment as the basis for geographical study) was not
well received, and even rebuffed. His sensorially grounded approach accord-
ingly lay fallow for many decades, until the senses came back into focus in
the 1990s, with the publication of Rodaway’s Sensuous Geographies. Even then,
the recovery of the senses within geography owed more to the influence of
thinkers from other disciplines, such as the composer and “acoustic ecologist”
R. Murray Schafer (1977), than to Granö himself. This is apparent in a seminal
article by Douglas Pocock, “The Senses in Focus” (1993), that took many of its
cues from Schafer’s work. In an expansive move, Pocock also suggested that
geographers should explore the wonderment of the child, the sensibilities of
non-Western peoples, and the alternative sensoria of the blind and the deaf.
Granö, with his idea of the “pure geographer,” would probably have been per-
plexed at this suggestion, but as we shall see presently, sensory and cultural
pluralism has become the touchstone of geography going forward.
Disciplining the Senses in Geography
Other factors that contributed to the (re)discovery of the senses in geography,

according to Rodaway (1994, 6–9), included the rise of human or humanis-
tic geography (the brainchild of Yi-Fu Tuan); the adoption of cultural, phe-
nomenological, and ecological models of perception – all of which pointed to
26 The Sensorial Revolution in the Human Sciences
perception being “more qualitatively variable and creative than mechanistic

stimulus-response models might suggest”; and the debates about postmodern-
ism that convulsed academia in the 1980s, such as the controversy over “the
redefinition of the ‘real’ and the position of the ‘sign’” that was sparked by the
writings of French postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard.
The key insight of the geography of the senses is that the senses mediate the
apprehension of space and in so doing contribute to our sense of place. Yi-Fu
Tuan (1974) was the first to call attention to the spatiality of the senses and their
role in shaping the affective relation of people to their habitat. “What begins as
undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better [through our
senses] and endow it with value” (Tuan 1977, 6).
Primed by Tuan’s work, some geographers started questioning the (pre-
sumed) transparency of concepts like that of landscape, and techniques of data
gathering, like that of remote sensing (i.e., satellite-generated imagery). As re-
gards the latter, J. Douglas Porteous (1990, 201) ventured that “Remote sensing
is clean, cold, detached, easy. Intimate sensing … is complex, difficult, and often
filthy. The world is found to be untidy rather than neat. But intimate sensing is
rich, warm, involved.” For Porteous there was no question as to which method-
ology – remote sensing or intimate sensing – is more grounded in geographic
reality and therefore to be trusted.
The concept of landscape was also interrogated. As the work of Denis Cos-
grove ([1984] 1998), among others, had shown, the idea of landscape is rooted
in a particular Western painterly and literary tradition – namely, the pictur-
esque, with its reliance on the Claude glass and other technologies of vision
(Maillet 2004; see further Broglio 2008). This ostensibly visualist bias led to the
concept of landscape being bracketed and replaced by the more neutral term
“sensescape.” The latter concept was in turn broken down into “soundscape,”
“smellscape,” “bodyscape,” and so forth (Porteous 1990). This refinement
stemmed from the recognition that “Each sense contributes [in its own way]
to people’s orientation in space; to their awareness of spatial relationships; and
to the appreciation of the qualities of particular micro- and macro-spatial envi-
ronments” (Urry [2003] 2011, 388). As a corollary to this, following Rodaway’s
lead in Sensuous Geographies, a number of geographers started taking note of
the distinct ways in which different senses are “interconnected” with each other
to produce a sensed environment. These ways include
cooperation between the senses; a hierarchy between different senses, as with the
visual sense during much of the recent history of the West; a sequencing of one
sense which has to follow on from another sense; a threshold of effect of a particu-
lar sense which has to be met before another sense is operative; and reciprocal rela-
tions of a certain sense with the object which appears to “afford” it an appropriate
response. (Urry 2011, 388, summarizing Rodaway)
On the Geography and Anthropology of the Senses 27
These reflections concerning the multiple modes of sensory interconnection

are noteworthy for the way they highlight the relations among the senses, above
and beyond their informational content.
The sensory turn in geography, signalled by Pocock and Rodaway and antic-
ipated by Tuan, in turn precipitated a shift within the discipline from a focus on
“spatial organization” (which mainly meant visualization) to one on “activity.”
Hayden Lorimer (2005) holds up Lisa Law’s account of the sensory practices
of migrant Filipino women in Hong Kong’s domestic labour economy by way
of example. Every Sunday the off-work domestic workers flock to Hong Kong
Central (the vacated banking district) and literally occupy that space with their
pop-up food stands, hair salons, etc. Hong Kong Central becomes “Little Ma-
nilla,” if only for a day (Law 2005). As Lorimer observes, “it is [the activity of]
sharing in the taste, smell and texture of food that offers comforting reminders
of home and bonds of friendship. However, the practice of food preparation, its
odours and eventual consumption in public spaces also offer grounds for ethnic
discrimination and a contested urban geography” (H. Lorimer 2005, 87). In-
deed, the Chinese citizens of Hong Kong look askance and turn up their noses
at the weekly occupation of the banking district by their household servants.
The point here is that the space remains the same, but it is reconstituted by the
sensory activity that goes on within it.
Another emergent area is the “geography of rhythm” or “rhythmanalysis,”
which augments the conventional focus on the spatial within geography by
attending to the interpellation of the temporal (e.g., the seasonal, or more
broadly, the repetitional): “every rhythm implies the relation of a time with
space, a localized time, or if you wish, a temporalized place” (Lefebvre cited
in Edensor 2012, 57; Edensor 2010). A third especially salient overture in geo-
graphical study is the burgeoning interest in the idea of “atmosphere” (McCor-
mack 2018). The term “atmosphere” foregrounds the multisensory character
and experience of lived space (elemental envelopment) while downplaying the
more formal aspects of environments.
This attentional shift has spilled over into cognate disciplines, such as archi-
tecture and urbanism (Palasmaa 1996; Zardini 2005). Designing buildings and
planning cities has accordingly morphed from a visual-technocratic art into
a sensuous science of creating atmospheres or (to use another current term)
“ambiances.”2 Geographers have followed suit by devising ever more sensitive
methods for registering sensescapes and also of critiquing the political and
commercial interests that drive schemes of “urban renewal,” gentrification, and
the like (Degen 2008, 2014). The methods in question are typically of a pop-
ulist, participatory nature and centre on walking (e.g., the soundwalk, smell-
walk, touch tour, etc.) as opposed to the God’s-eye view of the city planning
bureaucrat (Paterson 2009; Degen and Rose 2012; Henshaw 2013; Polli 2017;
Springgay and Truman 2019).
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The Sensory Studies Manifesto

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

ISBN 978-1-4875-2861-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-2864-5 (EPUB)

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

We wish to acknowledge the land on which the University of Toronto Press

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of

Prologue: Coming to Our Senses 3

Part One: The Sensorial Revolution in the Human Sciences

1 On the Geography and Anthropology of the Senses 23

Part Two: Case Studies

4 The Modern Sensorium: A Case Study in Sensory

Part Three: Multisensory Aesthetics

6 “A New Age of Aesthetics”: Sensory Art and Design 143

Figure 1 How many senses are there? 83

The opening section of chapter 6 was first published as the introduction to a

*For full-colour reproductions of the medallions designed by Erik Adigard used

If a revolt is to come, it will have to come from the five senses!

we find a cornucopia of potent sensory symbolism. Sight may be linked to reason or

Tracing the genealogy of the sense-specific subfields of sensory studies

At least three principles in particular seem to unite [sound studies practitioners]

Postmodernity … in no way allows for a full range of olfactory expression. Odours

Aroma opened the way for numerous subsequent sociohistorical studies

is commonly seen as most closely connected to smell (i.e., a fellow chemical

Manifesto for Sensory Studies

To pursue this notion of the senses as theoreticians, I would like to propose a

Origin of This Work

Outline of the Book

Part 1 of this Manifesto consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 documents the

Probing the Senses, the Senses as Probes

sections “Probes” with a tip of the hat to Marshal McLuhan. In my estimation,

1 Ontology. The “ontological turn” in the human sciences, particularly

memory, this subsection pries open the materiality of memory. Probing

Writing this Manifesto has proved to be tremendously rewarding. Practising

Judgment, according to Hannah Arendt, is genuinely subjective … But judgment is

when he walked “the forest of symbols,” discovered that “sounds, fragrances

The Sensorial Revolution in the Human

Collideroscope series (2022) © Erik Adigard, M-A-D

On the Geography and Anthropology

The first two disciplines to be considered in this genealogical survey of the

enriched significantly by extending the practice of theorization to other senses

I. Laying the Foundations

and the distant environment or “landscape,” which is perceived primarily

Disciplining the Senses in Geography

Other factors that contributed to the (re)discovery of the senses in geography,

perception being “more qualitatively variable and creative than mechanistic

These reflections concerning the multiple modes of sensory interconnection

Prologue: Coming to Our Senses 3

1 On the Geography and Anthropology of the Senses 23

6 “A New Age of Aesthetics”: Sensory Art and Design 143