Research Note: Ways of Sensing (2014)

Classen & Howes — The Senses, Culture, and Society

I. The Cultural Construction of Perception

Classen and Howes open with the foundational premise that perception is never neutral or purely biological. "The ways we use our senses, and the ways we create and understand the sensory world, are shaped by culture. Perception is informed not only by the personal meaning a particular sensation has for us, but also by the social values it carries" (1). This framing positions the senses not as passive biological receptors but as historically and socially produced faculties.

A key concept introduced is intersensoriality — the manifold relations among the different senses (5). The authors resist a "sense-by-sense" approach and instead analyze how senses operate together within specific social domains: art, medicine, politics, law, and consumer culture (12). The term "ways of sensing" underscores both the plurality of sensory practices across cultures and the processual, dynamic nature of perception (5).

The senses are also mutually reinforcing and irreducible to individual channels: "touches and smells and savours are experienced together with sights and sounds. Sensations reinforce each other, play off each other and, at times, contradict each other" (5).

II. The Hierarchy of the Senses in the West

In the Western tradition, sight and hearing have historically been privileged as the "higher" senses, while touch, taste, and smell were ranked below them. This hierarchy is not natural but cultural, evidenced by the sheer volume of academic and scientific work devoted to sight and hearing compared to the other senses (3). The lower classes were routinely associated with the "lower" senses — touch, taste, smell — and often referred to simply as "hands," a reduction of their social being to a single sense (67–68). Women, similarly, were culturally allied with the proximity senses of smell, taste, and touch, which positioned them as bodily rather than rational beings (68).

The development of Kantian aesthetics formalized this hierarchy philosophically. Baumgarten had originally conceived aesthetics as the study of the "plenitude and complexity of sensations," but Kant revised it into a "disinterested" contemplation that valorized sight as the "noblest" of the senses. According to Kant, "the less we are aware of our bodies when we perceive... the freer we are to think and form aesthetic judgements" (20). This "pure" visual contemplation became the dominant model of Western art appreciation.

The Protestant Reformation deepened the suspicion of touch specifically: reformers considered kissing and touching religious images dangerously close to idolatry, and their broader critique of sensuality curtailed the tactile appreciation of art that had flourished in earlier periods (19).

III. Non-Western Aesthetics and Multi-Sensory Art

Classen and Howes challenge Western visual-centrism by surveying aesthetic practices from cultures where non-visual senses are central. Among the Desana of the Colombian rainforest, the aesthetics of basketry involves the distinctive odours of the different vines, reeds, and leaves used in its creation (21). The Dan of West Africa value the sounds produced by the accoutrements of their Tanké Ge masks (21). Japanese tea bowls are prized not only for visual appearance but for rich tactile qualities — their weight, texture, and form in the palm (21).

The Navajo sand painting offers perhaps the most striking contrast with Western art values. The songs sung during the creation of the painting are essential to its meaning; the patient sits on the painting to absorb its cosmic energy; and the sand is destroyed at the ceremony's end. The Navajo word for sand painting, ükaah, means "the place where the gods come and go," and has nothing to do with drawing pictures (22). This confounds Western notions of art as a permanent visual object to be conserved.

IV. The Senses in Medicine

The relationship between the senses and healing has a long and layered history. Premodern humoral medicine understood the body through four primary tactile properties — hot, cold, wet, and dry — and illness as an imbalance among them. Diet, color, perfume, and music all carried medical significance, with flavour taken as a sign of a remedy's medicinal properties (40–41). Colors had diagnostic meaning: a red complexion indicated excess blood, yellow indicated choler (41). The Arab physician Avicenna assigned thermal and chromatic effects to colors — red moved the blood, blue and white had cooling effects, yellow reduced swelling (41).

The shift away from this sensory medicine began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, influenced by Protestant asceticism and new empirical medicine. Pleasurable sensations became suspect, and the idea took hold that medicine "must make us sick that doth us any good" (46). By the eighteenth century, the medical gaze became paramount — anatomy privileged visual observation over patients' reported sensations — and odours and tactile qualities were demoted to "secondary sensations" (46–47).

Modern hospitals are the fullest expression of this aesthetic impoverishment. They are "decidedly unaesthetic" places: drab and uniform rooms, antiseptic or musty odours, mechanical noise, perfunctory touch, shapeless clothing, and little access to nature (58). Patients frequently feel dehumanized, perceived as a body part rather than a person (58). Yet even within this framework, sensory responses persist: patients judge medications by pill color, music after surgery reduces pain, and a room with a view of nature speeds recovery (61–62).

V. The Politics of Perception

The social control of perceptibility — who is seen, heard, or acknowledged — is a fundamental instrument of power. Classen and Howes trace how sensory classification systems uphold social hierarchies. In the Renaissance, sumptuary laws dictated which colors and fabrics were reserved for the elite (66). Women were "traditionally adjured to keep their eyes downcast, their hearing guarded, their movements restricted" (6), as the containment of women's sensoriality simultaneously removed temptation from men, "protected" women from their own desires, and prevented challenges to male dominance (6).

Societies have employed three broad methods for managing threatening social groups: containment (placing them in bounded spaces, e.g., women in the home, ethnic groups in ghettos), elimination (exile or annihilation), and assimilation (requiring marginalized groups to conform to dominant sensory norms) (78). A vivid example is Richard Henry Pratt's nineteenth-century campaign to assimilate Native Americans by stripping them of clothing, language, and traditional lifestyles — to ensure "they looked and sounded, felt and thought like Anglo-Americans" (78).

The "melting pot" metaphor, popularized in the early twentieth century, worked as a thermal image of racial and cultural amalgamation: "America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming!" (80). Classen and Howes show how such sensory metaphors naturalize political processes by grounding them in bodily experience.

VI. Law, Justice, and Tactile Ritual

In predominantly oral medieval societies, tactile rites carried significant legal weight. Handclasps and kisses established contractual relationships more powerfully than written contracts, involving direct bodily commitment (102). A breach of a tactile contract could be punished by cutting off the offending hand (102). Property transfer was signified by grasping a festuca — a stick — as a physical embodiment of a legal decision (102–103). The trial by ordeal made the body itself "speak" guilt or innocence through interaction with fire or water when oral evidence was insufficient (103).

Judicial punishments were often matched directly to crimes — a thief's hand cut off, a slanderer's tongue removed — to mark the crime on the offending body for all to see (103). As writing became more central to legal proceedings from the late Middle Ages onward, the importance of tactile ritual diminished and a social and sensory divide widened between the literate upper classes and the mostly non-literate working classes (102).

VII. Sensory Conflict, Noise, and Odour as Social Power

Classen and Howes examine how the control of sonic and olfactory environments reflects power. The clash between Christian bell-ringing and the Islamic call to prayer illustrates how each tradition considered its own summoning sound sacred and found the other's troubling (111). In 997, a Muslim army famously brought the bells of Santiago de Compostela back to Córdoba to be turned into lamps — transforming Christian sound into Islamic light (111). When Christians reconquered Córdoba in 1236, returning those bells to ring again was among their most symbolically potent acts (111).

The modern era has seen increasing legal regulation of both noise and odour, driven by the greater role of the state, a scientific discourse of pollution, and the growth of middle-class sensory "refinement" (114). Yet the authors caution that suppressing a sensory nuisance can mask deeper injustices: the question of whether wives should be beaten was more fundamental than the regulation of the sounds of beating after 9 p.m. (114).

VIII. Consumer Culture and the Senses

Department stores of the nineteenth century constructed elaborate sensory environments — plush carpets, fragrant air, soft lighting — to cultivate new consumer desires and to distinguish elite from working-class shoppers (133). Variety stores like Woolworths democratized sensory pleasure for working-class consumers, compensating for lack of refinement with "the brightest colours, the sweetest flavours, the headiest perfumes" (134).

Contemporary marketing has taken this further. Apple Stores are designed with glass and steel to evoke futurism and clarity, while training staff to be warm and encouraging customers to touch products, thus investing high-technology with "hands-on ease-of-use and playfulness" (138, 147). Marketing campaigns exploit synaesthetic crossovers — "You've never seen a taste like this before" (Crystal Pepsi), "The loudest taste on earth" (Doritos) — to fuse sensory associations with brand identity (174).

Cultural identity and sensory memory are also intertwined in consumption. East Germans' nostalgia for Communist-era products (Ostalgie) demonstrates that it is not sensory superiority alone that drives consumer choice, but the capacity of a product's sensory qualities "to provide a feeling of cultural identity" (150).

IX. Synaesthesia: From Ritual to Neuroscience

The authors trace the career of synaesthesia — the crossing of sensory registers — across cultures and history. In ancient Chinese cosmology, each of the Five Elements corresponded to a colour, taste, odour, musical tone, season, and direction; this elaborate system governed imperial ritual and traditional medicine (162–163). The medieval Western sensorium, too, was more integrated than its modern counterpart: the concept of sensus communis (common sense) held the senses together until the seventeenth century (171).

Modernity progressively individuated both society and the senses. By the twentieth century, synaesthesia was dismissed as "soft, fuzzy thinking"; the Nazi-aligned psychologist E.R. Jaensch even pathologized the "synaesthetic personality" as weak, effeminate, and likely the product of "mixed-race heredity" (173). Only recently has neuroscience rehabilitated synaesthesia as a legitimate object of study and arguably a common, rather than rare, condition (173–174).

The authors conclude that the contemporary revival of interest in synaesthesia corresponds to broader cultural shifts toward boundary-crossing social integrations — global migration, digital culture, mixed-media art — suggesting that how societies conceptualize the senses mirrors how they imagine social life itself (174).

Works Cited:

Classen, Constance, and David Howes. Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society. Routledge, 2014.