Constance Classen’s Sweet Colors & Fragrant Songs
An essay & discussion questions I proposed for my Anthropology of Sound class when I was a Master’s Candidate.
Summary
Classen’s mission is to make a case for sensory anthropology and sensory ways of knowing. She wants to convince her audience that every culture has a sensory model based on its own sensory hierarchy, with some sense modalities playing more dominant roles in cultural construction. Sensory anthropology, she hopes to demonstrate, allows us to “explore and compare indigenous theories of perception and the role these play in symbolic social systems”. Classen is critical of the traditional Geertzian interpretative method, with a quote from her cohort Howe claiming it reduces “the multi-sensory dimensions of a culture to a flat visual surface, and reduces dynamic interactive events into static, passive texts.”
The source of her own information for the article comes from ethnographic texts authored by “sensually aware” ethnographers working in the Amazon, modern Andean material, and a “richly detailed corpus” of Inca traditions recorded after the Spanish conquest in the 16th century. Classen augments her modern Inca textual sources with these older accounts because she believes the older accounts represent a more “authentically Andean” sensory model.
Staying true to her and Howe’s “culturalist/representational” framework, Classen examines several categories of culture using a five-sense Western lens. She interprets her collection of cultural evidence as demonstrating the sight-hearing dominance of the Inca, the visual dominance of the Desana (although very multi-sensually aware), the smell dominance of the Boraro, the sound dominance of the Suyu, and the taste dominance of the Mehinaku. She suggests that variations in sense dominance are influenced by the natural environments these cultures have adapted to. The Andean Inca, for example, live in a mountainous environment with limited opportunity for smell and touch, where the Amazonians live in a dense jungle environment that limits sight, but offers an otherwise rich sensory experience. The Desana’s sight dominance in this region, she claims, is actually due to their use of a hallucinogenic substance that stimulates the visual cortex.
Referring to Ong’s work which classified cultures as either oral/aural or literate, Classen makes the case that sensory orders are broader than those two categories. Furthermore, the way each sensory modality is experienced by a culture may also differ.
Perception, she argues, is both a cultural and physical act, both “a shaper and a bearer of culture.” According to Classen, since sensory perception is socially regulated, it should be governed by the same principles that govern society and the cosmos. To understand this cultural order, she encourages researchers to focus on the sensory model of a given society. By mapping out a comparative sensory model, she believes we can ultimately better understand our own social conditioning through the senses.
Assessment
As “culturalist-representational”-ists, Classen (and Howes) employ a structuralist approach in search of a systemic model of culture through the mapping out of sensory models. Criticism of this approach to sensory anthropology suggests it is problematic when it shifts attention away from the immediate sensory experience and abstracts it into representations. For example, Classen distills the very rich sensory experience of ear piercing down to a questionable interpretation of isolated meaning. Furthermore the representations Classen imposes through her sensory models are based in the Western five-senses experience, despite Classen recognizing the possibility for deviation both in this article and in her other work.
Tim Ingold is an anthropologist who spearheads the alternative “non-representational” approach to sensory anthropology. Ingold suggests that instead of attempting to abstract a representation of the sensory model we instead focus on the creative interweaving how people actively construct and are constructed by the world around them. The part of Classen’s article that would likely interest Ingold is how modern Andean people have been incorporating sensory changes (eg, soundscape/environmental) through their mythology as industrialization increases in the region.
Classen’s analysis of all the different Andean and Amazonian peoples is summarized in the framework of determining a dominant sensory mode for each. Recent work on sensory perception indicates our senses are not experienced as distinct but as highly interdependent. Sarah Pink’s ethnographic field research on the sensory home indicated even in Western society no single sensory modality actually dominates our sensory experience. Furthermore, Tom Rice, an auditory anthropologist, has questioned the usefulness of emphasizing the dominance of the visual because it only serves to re-establish the auditory/visual dichotomy Classen seeks to challenge. While the notion of a sense hierarchy is not particularly useful, what’s valuable in what Classen presents is the ways all sorts of people use different sense categories to conceptualize our lives and identities.
According to Sarah Pink, current practices in sensory ethnography, rather than making the senses the focus of study, are instead incorporating the sensory experience as part of ethnographic methodology. Classen investigates the sense experiences of other cultures through traditional twentieth century anthropological practice, which includes drawing from ethnographic texts and making up representational taxonomies and maps such as kinship diagrams. While this effort has been important for bringing attention to the senses in academic discourse, Pink suggests that current approaches go beyond this kind of cross-comparative cataloguing. Sharing experiences with research participants in a more project-specific context situates our understanding both culturally and biographically.
The culturalist approach of Classen seeks to create a representative sensory model for each culture. Her emphasis on how highly individualized sensory experiences are, particularly in acknowledging the diversity of sensory dispositions in her own culture, contradicts the validity of representational sensory models. Ingold’s non-representational approach, on the other hand, insists that sensory experience is too individualized to represent. As an anthropologist, however, his own work contradicts this by demonstrating that some shared understanding is possible.
Sarah Pink proposes a middle ground drawing from both schools of thought. She suggests using our individual sensory experience, or sensory bias, as a focal point for understanding what we share with others through how we differ. That is, by seeking to share experiences with our participants that seem foreign to us, we mutually co-create new understanding. To put this into practice, we must refocus the purpose of our work into transitive models that serve a specific purpose, rather than prescribing any sort of truth about us or anyone else. While Classen and Ingold seek to serve the researcher by producing knowledge for the sake of accumulating a body of academic work, Pink’s approach requires us to shift the purpose of our research to one that serves those we research.
Classen’s proposed sensory models are not what is interesting about this work. The overarching model she has produced and the bias of the categories she has constructed actually serve to illustrate the challenges anyone would face when presenting a new research paradigm. How can we demonstrate our proposed new ways of knowing if we haven’t fully embodied them ourselves through our own practice? By creating a place for discussing the sensorium in ethnographic work, Classen has most certainly achieved what she set out to do — to convince us to pay more attention to the senses in our efforts to produce new knowledge.
Topics
Why is a sensory model important to Classen? What greater purpose does she see sensory anthropology serving?
According to Classen, what constitutes an “authentic” sensory model? (eg, https://illustratinganthropology.com/dimitrios-theodossopoulos/)
How has Classen embodied a shared understanding of Andean and Amazonian sensory models? How has she informed her own experience of these people’s experiences?
What modes of knowledge and knowing does Classen rely upon as an academic, to make sense of the world? Applying Classen’s Andean and Amazonian sensory model framework to her own culture, what sense modalities might appear to be dominant for non-academics? Do you agree with Classen’s claim that the West is visual-dominant?
In Doing Sensory Anthropology, Classen and Howe highlight the importance of overcoming sensory bias. They share an exercise for determining one’s own sensory bias, which suggests three dispositions, verbalizer, visualizer, and kinesthete. How does Classen account for her own sensory bias? How does Classen account for the variations of sensory disposition among the Andes and Amazonian people she analyzes?
Additional Reading
Pink, Sarah. Doing sensory ethnography. Sage, 2015.
