Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting and Touching in History (review)

How do the senses shape human experience, and how does history shape sensorial experience? According to Smith, historians, anthropologists, art historians, and sociologists have answered this question principally by studying vision: Ever since Marshall McLuhan’s “great divide” theory, which linked the modem era with the visual era, and posited a lost aural/oral moment that faded with the invention of the printing press, the visual has taken a central role in sensory history. Scholars have written volumes on how and what people see, the power of sight and the ability to control it, and the ubiquity of surveillance. But others have begun to challenge this periodization of the “rise” of the visual. Noting that the visual cannot be understood in isolation from the audible, the tactile, the olfactory, and the gustatory, they have worked to integrate these senses into explorations of the experiential past. The point is that “premodern” societies depended on the visual and that “modern” societies felt, heard, tasted, and smelled the world as much as they saw it. As Smith puts it in this masterly extended reflection on these matters, the key to more nuance is “a habit of thinking about the past, an engrained way of exploring not just the role of sight but the other senses too” (4).

This book is a survey of the field of sensory history. Smith draws from a growing and unruly collection of work that includes histories of medicine and of music, anthropologies of commodities and of religion, and sociologies of smell and of taste. The volume emphasizes work that diminishes the centrality of visual culture by taking an intersensorial approach. Although his intention is never to dismiss the importance of vision altogether, Smith successfully demonstrates the limitations of a purely visual approach with compelling examples. A sensory history of the supermarket, for example, suggests that although changes in lighting and presentation altered the visual experience of shopping, equally transformative diminutions of sound and invitations to touch and smell produce accompanied them. Disturbing but telling studies situated in the American South have demonstrated the prevalence of theories of “racial smells” in racist ideologies. In another example, the act of touching assumes a historical dimension with shifts in theories of child rearing—from warnings during the 1890s against too much touching to the later re-evaluation of parental caresses as essential to a child’s well-being.

To his credit, Smith points out some shortcomings of the field, which are necessarily replicated in the book. The heavy emphasis on North America and Europe, for instance, is a call to scholars of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean to contribute. But this supposed lack of studies in languages other than English may be overdrawn; Spanish-language scholarship on sound, listening and technology, for instance, is burgeoning. Nonetheless, many of the paradigms drawn from Europe or North America continue to dominate the study of the senses. The hope is that books like this one will spur work that not only contributes to the geographical scope of the field but also tackles the tough epistemological and methodological issues. This book is important for scholars interested in sensory history and anyone interested in acquiring the habit of sensing the past.