Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures 0415101263

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Worlds of sense

Exploring the senses in history and across cultures

Constance Classen

London and New York

Worlds of sense

Different cultures have different ways of 'making sense' of the world. Worlds o/ Sense is an historical and cross-cultural study which explores sorne of these differences. Wbat modes of consciousness are created by treating smell or touch as a fundamental way of knowing? How does the sensory order of a culture relate to its social order? Is there a natural order of the senses? How has the Western sensorium changed over time? By asking these and other searching questions, Constance Classen illustrates the striking diversity of sensory values and hierarchies. Worlds o/ Sense firmly establishes that perception is not simply a physical act, but also an historical and cultural process.

Constance Classen is Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University, where she specializes in cross-cultural studies of sensory symbolism. Her previous publications include Inca Cosmology and the Human Body.

First published in 1993 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1993 Constance Classen

Typeset in Times by NWL Editorial Services, Langport, Somerset TAlO 9D0 Printed and bound in Great Britain by T.J. Press (Padstow) Ltd, Padstow, Comwall Ali rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Classen, Constance, 1957Worlds of sense: exploring the senses in history and across cultures/Constance Classen p. cm. Includes biliographical references and index. 1. Senses and sensation - history. 2. Senses and sensation Cross-cultural studies. l. Title. BF233.C57 1993 302' .12 - dc20 ISBN 0-415-09595--6 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-10126-3 (pbk)

93-9901 CIP

© Australian Nacional Gallery, Canberra John Kaufmann 1864- 1942 New Zealand white glory pea, c. 1920- 30 carbon photograph 31 x 22.1 cm

FOR DAVID HOWES

Contents

Acknowledgements lntroduction: through the looking-glass

viii 1

Part I The senses in history 1 The odour of the rose: floral symbolism and the olfactory decline ofthe West

15

2 Natural wits: the sensory skills of 'wild children'

37

3 Words of sense

50

Part Il The senses across cultures 4 The odour of the other: olfactory codes and cultural categories

79

5 Literacy as anti-culture: the Andean experience of the written word

106

6 Worlds of sense

121

Notes Bibliography Name index Subject index

139 159 168 170

Acknowledgements

This book grew out of the work I did as a member of the Concordia University Sensoria Research Group from 1988 to 1990. I would like to thank the members of that group, and in particular David Howes, for their encouragement and suggestions. I would also like to thank Anthony Synnott, Derrick de Kerckhove, Lawrence Sullivan, Roy Porter, and my editors at Routledge, for their support of my work. Special thanks go to my brother George for bis editorial assistance. The research on which this book is based was funded by post-doctoral fellowships from the Fonds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et l 'Aide a la Recherche of Quebec, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as by a grant from the Olfactory Research Fund, New York. Earlier versions of Chapters 2, 4 and 5 have been published as: 'The Sensory Orders of "Wild Children" ', The Varieties o/ Sensory Experience, pp. 82-93, D. Howes, ed., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991; 'The Odor of the Other: Olfactory Symbolism and Cultural Categories', Ethos, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 133-166, 1992; and 'Literacy as Anti-Culture: The Andean Experience of the Written Word', History o/ Religions, vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 404-421, 1991.

lntroduction Through the looking-glass

Different cultures present strikingly different ways of 'making sense' of the world. The Ongee of the Andaman Islands in the South Pacific, for example, live in a world ordered by smell. According to the Ongee, odour is the vital force of the universe and the basis of personal and social identity. Therefore, when an Ongee wishes to refer to 'me', he or she points to bis or her nose, the organ of smell. Likewise, when greeting a friend, an Ongee will ask 'How is your nose?' The primary concem of Ongee culture is to maintain a proper state of olfactory equilibrium within individuals and within the cosmos. 1 An ocean away, the Tzotzil of Mexico hold that heat constitutes the basic force ofthe cosmos. The Tzotzil believe that everything in the world contains a different amount of heat energy. The ultimate source of heatforce is the sun, called 'Our Father Heat'. The social order of the Tzotzil community is structured according to the thermal order of the cosmos, with the most important members associated with the hot rising sun, and the least important with the cold setting sun. According to the Tzotzil, their major task is maintaining themselves and their world at a proper temperature level. 2 What different modes of consciousness are created by treating olfaction or touch as a fundamental way of knowing? How does the sensory order of a culture relate to its social order? Is there a natural order of the senses? How is sensory experience expressed and ordered by language? What altematives are there to our own ways of sensing the world? These are among the questions we shall be addressing in the following chapters, which explore the interaction between culture and perception. In the West we are accustomed to thinking of perception as a physical rather than cultural act. The five senses simply gather data about the world. Yet even our time-honoured notion of there being five senses is

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itself a cultural construction. Sorne cultures recognize more senses, and other cultures fewer. In Buddhist cultures the mind is classified as a sixth sense. The Hausa ofNigeria divide the senses into two, with one term for sight and one for all the other senses. 3 In the West itself, there has not always been agreement on the number of the senses. Plato, for example, apparently did not distinguish clearly between senses and feelings. In one enumeration of perceptions, he begins with sight, hearing and smell, leaves out taste, instead of touch mentions perceptions of hot and cold, and adds sensations of pleasure, discomfort, desire and fear. Aristotle thought to put an end to argument among philosophers on this matter by declaring that the intrinsic relationship between the senses and the elements - earth, air, fire, water, and the quintessence - required that there be no more than five senses. Sight, hearing, taste and touch constitute the basic four, while smell falls in the middle, linking sight and hearing with taste and touch. 4 Aristotle's authority ensured that five became the established number of senses in Western culture. Nonetheless there was sorne divergence from the norm. In certain cases it would seem that it was more important to divide the senses into a certain desired number than to categorize them according to their nature. Aristotle, as we have seen, wanted the senses to number five in order to correlate them with the elements. For this reason he condensed different sensations of temperature, hardness, and wetness into one sense of touch. However, when Philo, a first-century interpreter of the Old Testament, needed the senses to number seven for his allegorical purposes, he added the genital organs and speech onto the standard five. 5 The thought of speech as a sense seems odd to us moderns. This is partly because we conceive of the senses as passive recipients of data, whereas speech is an active externalization of data. It is also because we think of the senses as natural faculties and speech as a learned acquirement. The ancients, however, had different ideas on the matter. They were apt to think of the senses more as media of communication than as passive recipients of data. The eyes, for example, were believed to perceive by issuing rays which touched and mingled with the objects to which they were directed. Speech itself was once imagined to be a natural ability of humans. So engrained was this notion that in the Middle Ages the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick 11, ordered that a group of babies be kept secluded from all language in order to find out which tongue would come naturally to them: Latin, Greek, Hebrew or the local language. No conclusion was reached on the matter as, unfortunately, the babies died before they could

lntroduction 3 speak.6 In pre-modem Europe, therefore, speech was sometimes considered to be a quasi sixth sense. (Interestingly, certain modem linguists, such as Noam Chomsky, also contend that humans have an innate ability for language similar to our innate sensory faculties.)7 In the third century, the theologian Origen developed the idea of spiritual senses corresponding to the physical ones. According to Origen these senses enabled one to perceive transcendental phenomenona, such as the sweetness of the word of God. The doctrine of the five spiritual senses was very popular among theologians during the Middle Ages and led to the related doctrine ofmemory, estimation (instinct), imagination, fantasy, and common sense (thought to process the information gathered by the five physical senses) constituting inward senses. The latter doctrine persisted up until the Enlightenment, during which period the mental faculties and the sensory faculties carne to be defined as fundamentally different in nature: the conception which dominates today. 8 Just as the enumeration of the senses has not been constant throughout Western history, neither has the ranking of the senses. The standard ranking, with sight occupying the highest position followed by hearing, smell, taste, then touch, was again given its authority by Aristotle. (One argument put forward in support of this order was that it followed from the position of the sensory organs on the body: the eyes on top, the ears next, and so on.) 9 Previous philosophers had apparently differed widely as to the order of the senses, with Diogenes, for example, placing smell in first place followed by hearing. Even Aristotle, who exalts visionas the most highly developed sense, sometimes wavers in bis ranking, declaring hearing to be more conducive to knowledge than sight, and describing touch as the primary sense and the basis of human intelligence. 10 Nor did the ancient Greeks and Romans necessarily suppose that all races had the same sensory order. Divergences in sensory priorities, however, were presumed to be biological in basis rather than cultural. Pliny, in bis Natural History, for example, writes of one race of humans with enormous ears, another with extraordinary sight who have two pupils to each eye, another with no mouths, but with the ability to live on scent alone, and so on. 11 In medieval Europe sight was generally ranked first among the senses, in accordance with Aristotle. Hearing, however, as the sense through which the word of God is perceived, sometimes displaced sight in this position, most notably in the work of Thomas Aquinas. 12 The subject of the ranking ofthe senses was itself a popular literary theme in pre-modem Europe. A number of allegories and plays were written in which the senses were depicted as vying with each other for precedence. In

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Antic/audianus, an allegorical epic written in 1183 by Alain de Lille, the senses are described as five horses pulling a coach carrying Prudence to Heaven. Sight is first in the shafts as the swiftest of the horses, followed by Hearing, Smell (enveloped in the fragrance of flowers), Taste and Touch. The coach is unable to reach Heaven, however, so Prudence, persuaded by Theology, unhamesses Hearing and rides on to Heaven with him alone. 13 The seventeenth-century play Lingua, by Thomas Tomkis, has as its theme the desire of speech, Lingua, to become one of the senses. Common Sense decrees that Lingua' s claim will be decided in bis court of justice. Each sense in tum expounds its values before the court. Common Sense proclaims Sight to be the 'author of invention', Hearing to be 'lord intelligencer to Psyche her majesty', Smell the 'high priest of the Microcosm', and so on. As for Lingua, Common Sense decides that, as the senses must number five in order to correspond with the four elements and 'the pure substance of the heavens', speech cannot be counted as a sense. An exception is made in the case of women, however, who may deem Lingua to be 'the last and feminine sense' (an interesting instance of the engenderment of perception). 14 With the Enlightenment, the senses became more a subject for scientific and philosophical investigation, rather than for theological and allegorical interpretation. Descartes, who regarded sensory experience as deceptive, sought to establish a division between the world of the mind and the world of the senses. 'I think therefore I am', he proclaimed, disdaining any sensory evidence for personal existence and relying solely on intellectual judgement. John Locke, on the other hand, held that all ideas enter the mind through sensory experience. To confirm one's existence through thought, one must first have experienced one' s existence through the senses. 15 Where both Descartes and Locke were agreed was in considering the senses as purely physical mechanisms. Hearing is not the Pegasus which carries us to heaven, smell is not the 'high priest of the microcosm', but they are simply different modalities for conveying information about the physical world to the mind. For Descartes this information was not essential for mental activity, for Locke it was, but in either case sensory perception is regarded as a natural, rather than a spiritual or cultural, function. This •scientific' understanding of sensory perception has remained with us to the present time. In recent years there has been a general heightening of interest in sensory perception. Part of this is stimulated by scientific research on perception. The traditional notion of there being five senses, for example,

lntroduction 5 has been shattered by sensory scientists. Touch has been broken down into a multitude of specialized senses including kinaesthesia - the sense of movement - perception of temperature and perception of pain. Babies have been discovered to be able to orient themselves by sonar, as bats do, emitting sounds which bounce off objects and then reflect back to them. Evidence has even been found of a rudimentary magnetic sense in humans, similar to that which helps homing pigeons orient themselves with regard to the earth' s magnetic field. At the same time, scientific studies have discovered relationships between the senses and the emotions: the colour red is stirnulating, while pink has a calming effect, the smell of peppermint helps us to concentrate, and so on. 16 Most of the popular books which have come out on the senses combine such scientific information with anecdotal material on the senses: for example, the memories associated with the scents of childhood; literary and historical tidbits - Proust' s description of the taste of a madeleine or Cleopatra's use of perfume - and accounts of the skills of sensory specialists such as musicians and perfumers. What such books, among them DianeAckerman'sA Natural History ofthe Senses, 11 do not address is how the senses are ordered by culture and express cultural values. Proust's rich sensory irnagery and Cleopatra's indulgence in perfume are not sirnply bits of sensory exotica which serve to awaken us to the wonder of the senses, but expressions of particular cultural codes of perception, and sensory specialization does not only occur in trained individuals such as musicians, chefs and perfumers, but in whole societies. When almost every other aspect of human bodily existence - from the way we eat to the way we dress - is now recognized as subject to social conditioning, it is surprising that we should still imagine that the senses are left to nature. In fact, there have been a few social scientists and other scholars who have explored the relationship between the sensory order of a culture and its social and cognitive order. Foremost among these is Marshall McLuhan, who attributed historical changes in social organizations and modes of thought to tranformations in the ratio of the senses resulting from the introduction of new media of comrnunication. According to McLuhan the invention of the alphabet marked the beginning of a transformation from a hearing-dominated to a sightdominated culture, for, with writing, vision became the most irnportant means of acquiring knowledge, whereas previously it had been speech. This transformation was intensified by the creation of the printing press and the increase in levels of literacy produced by public schools. 18 McLuhan, along with others, such as Walter Ong, 19 argues that this transformation of the sensory order had a range of profound social and

6 lntroduction intellectual effects. On the cognitive level, the increased visualism produced by writing led to a dominantly objective, linear, analytic and fragmented mode of thought. On a social level, it led to de-personalization, individualism and the division of labour. McLuhan states: 'From the invention of the alphabet there has been a continuous drive in the Western world toward the separation of the senses, of functions, of operations, of states emotional and political, as well as of tasks.' 20 The subject of Western visualism and its cultural causes and effects has been taken up by a number of scholars. Literacy, and particularly print, is generally recognized as the major cause of this visualism; however, other related causes are postulated as well. As early as the 1920s the sociologist Georg Simmel noted the increased visuality which results from the reduction of interpersonal communication in urban life. Whereas in a village one knows and greets everyone one meets, in the city, where all are strangers, one simply looks. 21 Michel Foucault has explored the development of sight as a medium of control in public institutions such as schools and prisons, designed so that their inmates can be kept under constant surveillance. 22 Stuart Ewen and others have examined the dominance of the visual image in modern consumer culture. 23 Surrounded by television and magazine advertisements, billboards, company logos and store window displays, we consume the products and socio-economic values of our society above all through our eyes. At the same time, sight is, of course, the sense of science, championed as such by both Descartes and Locke, rationalists and empiricists, and providing most of our models of the universe, from maps to charts to diagrams. The detachment of sight, distancing spectator from spectacle,~ makes the cherished objectivity of the scientist possible. This 'objectivity', nonetheless, by its very visual basis, is grounded in a particular 'view' of the world, and, bird' s eye though it may be, this view is still limited and conditioned by the characteristics of vision. 24 So accustomed are we to conceptualizing the world through visual models, however, that we are scarcely aware of their sensory roots, and are more apt to think of such models as abstract or neutral than sensory. Thus the idealist philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, could write without any sense of contradiction of bis desire to remove himself from the bonds of the senses and become 'a transparent eye-ball'. 25 Although a good deal has been written on Western visualism, other aspects of the Western sensory order have been ignored. In fact, the very preoccupation with analysing the role of the 'gaze' in Western culture to

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7

the exclusion of all the other senses is an expression of our eye-mindedness. By focusing all our attention on visual symbolism we remain ignorant of the symbolic functions of the other senses. Furthermore we remain closed to the alternatives to the Western sensory order offered by other societies. This book seeks to break out of this visual mould by taking the reader through the looking-glass of Western visualism into the fertile sensory territories of Western and non-Western cultures past and present that lie beyond. The variety of topics examined - from a history of olfactory symbolism in the West to the sensory abilities of 'wild' children, and from the rejection of the scopic regime of writing in the Andes to the thermal cosmology of the Tzotzil - indicates the breadth of the field of the senses in culture and the many different approaches through which it can be studied. By undertaking this sensory joumey through time and space we will come to understand the ways in which the senses are ordered by and underpin cultures, and gain an awareness of the extent to which sensory models shape our lives. The first half of the book, entitled 'The Senses in History', moves the study of the senses out of the realm of 'natural' history into that of social history. Sensory orders are not static entities, they change over time just as cultures themselves do. Indeed, according to Marx, 'the forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present. ' 26 We have seen how the notion of there being five senses is an historical construction: the same applies to values and uses given to the different senses. The first chapter, 'The odour of the rose: floral symbolism and the olfactory decline of the West', explores how the decline in the importance of odour and the rise in visualism in the West, from the ancient world to the present, can be traced in cultural attitudes towards the rose: the symbol of olfactory and visual perfection. Smell is such a neglected sense in the modern West that we can scarcely conceive of it as being an important subject of cultural elaboration. In the pre-modern West, however, smell was associated with essence and spiritual truth, while sight was often deemed a 'superficial' sense, revealing only exteriors. At the same time, odours were believed to play an important role in health and illness, both causing and curing disease. The scent of the rose, therefore, was prized not only for its aesthetic value, but for its symbolic associations and its curative powers. With the rise of sight and science at the time of the Enlightenment, however, the importance of smell declined, and florists began to cultivate roses for their visual beauty rather than their scent. Thus a modern version

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of Shakespeare' s 'A rose by any other name would smell as sweet', would have toread, 'would look as beautiful', as modem roses are quite likely to be all show and no scent. This sensory shift from olfaction to vision, which the history of the rose illustrates, points to a certain cognitive and cultural shift as well, with visual rationalism coming to dominate and discredit the earlier olfactory spirituality. While 'The odour of the rose' explores how the senses are ordered by culture, 'Natural wits' looks at how sensory perception is ordered outside culture. The chapter presents three historical cases of 'wild children': the Wild Boy of Aveyron, who grew up alone in the woods; the Wolf Girl of India, who was brought up by wolves; and Kaspar Hauser, who spent his childhood secluded in a dark cell. These cases are examined to see what they can tell us about the sensory abilities and preferences of feral children. All three children are found to have keen senses ofhearing, good night vision, and extraordinary olfactory abilities. When introduced into society, all three have their senses reconditioned acccording to the sensory norms of the culture in which they find themselves (Europe in the case of Kaspar and the Wild Boy, India in the case of the Wolf Girl). This sensory reconditioning is particularly evident with the sense of taste. The W olf Girl, accustomed to eating meat, is weaned to a vegetarian diet in accordance with the gastronomic customs of India, while Kaspar, who finds the taste of meat repugnant and desires only bland food, is slowly taught to eat meat, in accordance with European gustatory norms. The care taken in conditioning the children's senses to conform to the cultural norm illustrates the degree to which society directs what and how we perceive. 'Words of sense', the third chapter in Part 1, delves into the etymology of English sensory terms in order to explore how we express sensory experience through language. lnterestingly, many of our terms of sensory description and operation are derived from words of different sensory meaning. Taste, for example, once meant 'to touch', while scent originally meant 'to feel', and hear, 'to look'. Such shifts in sensory meaning point to a certain fluidity of sensory perception which allows for an experience pertaining to one sense to be described by a term pertaining to another. At the same time, many of the terms we use in English to refer to the emotions and the intellect have a sensory basis. Sad, for example, once meant sated, while glad originally meant shining. Sagacious, in tum, comes from the Latin for keen-scented, while sage comes from the Latin for taste. Even Descartes' pronouncement of intellectual exclusivity, 'Cogito ergo sum', literally means 'I put in motion together (coagitare) therefore I am'. Insofar as thought depends on language, therefore, the

lntroduction 9 sensory foundations of many of the words we think with demonstrate that we not only think about our senses, we think through them. The second half of this book has as its theme 'The senses across cultures'. Our own society 's sensory order can seem so natural to us that we have difficulty in conceiving of it as a product of culture. When we examine the different sensory models of other cultures, however, the cultural construction of perception becomes more evident. For instance, the association of knowledge with sight, which we take for granted in the West, is hardly universal. In many cultures hearing is more closely associated with knowledge than sight. This is the case among the Suya of the Brazilian Mato Grosso, who deem keen hearing to be the mark of the fully socialized individual. The Suya term 'to hear' (ku-mba) also means to understand, while the expression 'it is in my ear' is used by the Suya to indicate that they have leamed something, even something visual such as a weaving pattem. Sight, in fact, is considered by the Suya to be an anti-social sense, cultivated only by witches. 27 This denigration of vision by the Suya is all the more interesting when one considers that the visual cortex is the largest of the sensory centres of the brain - a fact which suggests that sight would naturally tend to be the dominant sense in human experience. The Suya subordination of apparently natural sensory inclinations to social norms should come as no surprise to post-Freudian minds, however, well aware of the many ways in which culture subverts human biology. Just as the repression of sight among the Suya represents one instance of culture subverting biology, the repression of smell in the West represents another. 'The odour of the rose' deals with the history of this repression in the West. The first chapter in Part 11, 'The odour of the other', presents a study of how olfactory symbolism is used to express concepts of 'oneness' and 'othemess' across cultures. As Westemers usually approach the study of other cultures through their own odourdenying sensory model, our knowledge of the extensive olfactory symbolism of other societies remains slight. 'The odour of the other' puts this symbolism 'under our noses' by detailing sorne of the elaborate classificatory schemes used by different societies to categorize spirits, humans, animals and plants by scent. Even in the deodorized West, olfactory codes are seen to play an important classificatory role. In 'The odour of the rose', for example, women are shown to be associated with the 'homy' senses of smell, taste and touch, while men are associated with the 'conquering' sense of sight. In 'The odour of the other' women are found to be divided into three different olfactory and symbolic types in Western tradition: fragrant for

10 lntroduction exemplars of ideal womanhood, foul for socially unacceptable women such as prostitutes and witches, and spicy for alluring but dangerous femmes fatales. Similar schemes of olfactory symbolism are applied to other groups, such as foreigners. Unwanted foreigners, for example, are typed as foul-smelling to reinforce their undesirable status. Thus, although an explicit olfactory vocabulary is lacking in the West, olfactory codes are nonetheless in place. The political dimension of perception underlined in 'The odour of the other' is brought out even more forcefully in the second chapter in Part 11, 'Literacy as anti-culture: the Andean experience of the written word'. This chapter provides a counterpart to 'Natural wits' in Part l. Whereas in the latter chapter it is the sensory orders of feral children which the 'civilized' West characterizes as anti-cultural, in the former it is the sensory order of the civilized West itself, and in particular, one of the most important elements of that order - writing - that is perceived as anti-cultural by the inhabitants of the Andes. Andean culture was exclusively oral until its encounter with European civilization in the sixteenth century. The Inca empire itself, with a population of approximately ten million, was organized without the aid of writing. The abrupt introduction of writing which occurred with the Spanish Conquest disrupted the continuity of the oral traditions of the Andes and presented an alien system of ordering the world. The deeply traumatic experience of the Conquest for the Andeans inflected the local conception of writing. Thus, while in the West writing has tended to be viewed as the sine qua non of civilization, the inhabitants of the Andes perceive it as a sorcerous too} of conquest, employed by the Spanish to silence the collaborative oral dynamics of the Andean world and impose an exploitative sight-based order onto it. In 'Literacy as anti-culture', Western visualism is contrasted with Andean aurality. The last chapter in the book, 'Worlds of sense', explores three cultures - the Tzotzil of Mexico, the Ongee ofthe Andaman Islands, and the Desana of Colombia - with sensory orders which display neither the visualism characteristic of the West, nor the orality/aurality which Westerners are apt to attribute to all non-literate societies. The Tzotzil order their world by temperature, the Ongee by smell and the Desana by synaesthetic colours. These different sensory emphases shape each society's conception of itself and the world. The element of fire, for example, basic to ali three communities, is culturally appropriated in a different way by each one according to its particular sensory model. Thus the Tzotzil emphasize the heat of fire, the Ongee its smoke, and the Desana its colours.

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11

The diverse sensory symbolism of these three societies demonstrates the inadequacy of Westem perceptual models for understanding non-Western cosmologies. At first 'sight', these other sensory orders with their privileging of smell or colour may seem like mere cultural curiosities, remarkable but inconsequential. By entering into them, however, we are able to break through the mould of our own sensory biases and experience radically different ways of making sense of the world. Such explorations of other 'worlds of sense' may have implications for scientific as well as humanistic endeavours, in that, while the Westem sensory model has made possible much of our scientific knowledge, it is no longer adequate for many of the new directions science is moving in. Thus the synaesthesia of the Desana provides a better model for understanding the interrelationships of the senses than our traditional model of five separate senses. Physicians, in tum, could leam from different cultural techniques of healing through the senses, such as acupuncture. The philosopher of science Milic Capek has suggested that soundbased concepts may provide physicists with a better understanding of the structure of the universe than their present visual models. The atom, for instance, would be more appropriately conceived of as a harmony of elements than as consisting of picturable particles. 28 (Thus we move away from our silent, visual cosmos back to the ancient notion of the music of the spheres.) The dynamic aural cosmologies of the Andeans or the Suya offer paradigms through which one can conceptualize such a sound-based universe. Perhaps even more suited to the theories of modem physics is the vibrational model through which the Hopi of Arizona understand the world. Benjamin Whorf writes that the manner of expressing the world conveyed by Hopi language is so harmonious with actual physics that ... an extension could be made with great appropriateness to a multiplicity of phenomena belonging entirely to the modem scientific and technical world - movements of machinery and mechanism, wave processes and vibrations, electrical and chemical phenomena ... The Hopi actually have a language better equipped to deal with such vibratile phenomena than is our latest scientific terminology. 29 The possibilities for investigations into the field of the senses in culture are as endless as the ways in which the senses are combined and structured by different cultures. The following chapters are dedicated to the exploration of sorne of these altemative sensory worlds, in all their diversity.

Part 1

The senses in history

Chapter 1

The odour of the rose Floral symbolism and the olfactory decline of the West

The decline in importance of the sense of smell in Western culture since the beginning of the modern period has been argued by a number of scholars. In bis social history of olfaction in France, Alain Corbin writes that 'the sense of smell has suffered from an unremitting process of discrediting since the [eighteenth century]. ' 1 Emphasizing the olfactory poverty of the modern West, E.T. Hall states that: 'The extensive use of deodorants and the suppression of odour in public places results in a land of olfactory blandness and sameness that would be difficult to duplicate anywhere else in the world. ' 2 lt is not only smells as such which are diminished in modern Western culture, but also olfactory symbolism. For example, formerly potent religious concepts such as the odour of sanctity and the stench of sin are now regarded simply as quaint expressions of a more credulous age, and once established theories of the role of odours in producing health and disease have been abandoned as scientifically unfounded. This olfactory decline would seem to have been accompanied by a rise in the importance of sight. 3 The increasing value accorded to sight and visual imagery from the time of the Enlightenment on has been discussed at length in the works of Michel Foucault, Walter Ong, and Donald Lowe, among others. Lowe, for example, in bis History ofBourgeois Perception writes that in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 'a new perceptual field, constituted by typographic culture, the primacy of sight, and the order of representation-in-space, was super- imposed over the previous ones [in which the non-visual senses were emphasized]. ' 4 It is not only the sense of smell that has lost ground against sight, of course, but all of the non-visual senses. The diminished importance of hearing since the invention of print is undoubtedly the instance of such sensory decline most elaborated by scholars. Still, it would seem that no sense has suffered such a reversal of cultural fortune as smell, from being

16 The senses in history

a sense of heady spiritual and medicinal power in premodern Europe, to being a non-sense, a sensory black sheep, in the modero West. Toe aim of this chapter is to explore how this sensory shift can be traced in changing attitudes towards one element of W estero culture, the flower, and specifically the rose, the flower par exce/lence. The flower is an especially apt focus for such an investigation since, not only has it been a standard element of Westero life through the ages and the subject of extensive symbolic elaboration, but its primary characteristics are precisely its scent and its visual appearance. The relative importance given to these two characteristics at any given period in Western history, consequently, could provide an indication ofthe extent to which the sense of smell was valued in relation to that of sight at that time. The significance of this examination of shifts in the balance of the senses lies in the fact that the sensory priorities thus revealed may point to deeper conceptual or cultural priorities, for the senses both convey different impressions of reality and have different cultural values attached to them. 5 According to Walter Ong, for instance, many characteristics of the modero West-the emphasis on analysis over synthesis, detachment over involvement, appearance over substance, among others - are related in part toan emphasis on sight, which manifests similar characteristics (at least according to Western sensory values) in its mode of apprehending the world. 6 Ong writes: Sight reveals only surfaces. It can never get toan interior asan interior, but must always treat it as somehow an exterior. If understanding is conceived of by analogy with sight alone ... rather than by analogy also with hearing ... as well as with smell and taste, understanding is ipso facto condemned to dealing with surfaces which have a 'beyond' it can never attain to. 7 Smell, on the other hand, is by nature concerned with essences, with the life-giving breath which unites interiors and exteriors in a dynamic interchange, and thus provides the basis for a very different conceptual model than sight. If a decline in the importance of smell and a rise in that of sight can be said to have occurred in Western society, it follows that it would express not only a shift in sensory preferences, but also a shift in corresponding cultural and conceptual paradigms. Such a paradigm shift would not have occurred without leaving its traces in attitudes towards the classic Western symbol of ideal visual and olfactory beauty: the rose.

The odour of the rose

17

THE PREMODERN WEST A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. (Romeo and Juliet Act 2 Scene 2) The heyday of the rose in the West was in the ancient world, where it was not only exalted in literature and mythology, but also used for a multitude of profane and sacred purposes. Roses were strewn on floors and tables, planted on graves, plaited into crowns, and used to flavour foods and wines. 'What could be done without the rose?' asked an anonymous writer of late Antiquity. 8 Although the ancients undoubtedly appreciated all aspects of the rose, its perfume was considered its most notable quality .9 For example, Pliny, in bis Natural History, discourses at length on the scent of the rose: the lands and climates which produce the best-scented roses, the best season, time of day and weather for picking a rose in order to preserve its scent; the point in a rose's life when it smells strongest; the perfume of a freshly gathered rose as compared to a faded rose; the use of rose perfume, and so on. 10 This appreciation of the scent of the rose was symptomatic of the high value accorded to perfumes in general in the ancient world. lndeed, perfumes were so extensively employed during this period that the modem use of perfumes pales by comparison. Toe Greeks, for instance, were such avid connoisseurs of fragrance that they sometimes applied different scents to different parts of the body. Toe poet Antiphanes writes of the toilet of a wealthy man: He bathes in a large guilded tub, and steeps bis feet And legs in rich Egyptian unguent. His jaws and breasts he rubs with thick palm oil And both bis arms with extract sweet of mint; His eyebrows and bis hair with marjoram, His knees and neck with essence of ground thyme. (Cited in Genders 1972: 69) The ancients considered perfume to serve not only for personal use, but also for public enjoyment. Thus, at fashionable dinners, guests would be adomed with wreaths of roses and sprinkled with scent. This last was sometimes accomplished by very ingenious means. At one Greek entertainment, for example, doves drenched in different scents were let fly about the room, showering the guests with fragrance. Toe Roman emperor Nero, in tum, had the ceiling of bis dining hall designed to rain down roses and scented water on bis guests. According to tradition,

18 The senses in history

another Roman emperor, Heliogabulus, once suffocated bis guests by showering them with an overabundance of roses. 11 Perfumes also played a part in large-scale gatherings. During sorne games held at Daphne by King Antiochus Epiphanes of Syria, everyone who entered the stadium was anointed with one of fifteen perfumes, including saffron, cinnamon and spikenard. After the entertainment, the thousands of guests were sent away with crowns of myrrh and frankincense (surely a more attractive souvenir than a pennant with the Olympics logo). 12 The striking contrast between this large-scale use of fragrance and the modem limitation of perfumes to personal use suggests a different understanding of odour among the ancients as a collective rather than solely individual affair. Perfumes were not only used on special occasions by well-to-do ancients, but were a basic part of everyday life. The Romans, for example, had the custom of scenting their food, homes, and even domestic animals with perfumes. In Nero's palace, every room was reportedly carpeted with rose petals. lndeed, the use of perfumes was so extensive in the Roman Empire that even the hardened soldiers of the Roman army made use of them, prompting Julius Caesar, who feared that such indulgence would result in a loss of military asceticism, to declare that he preferred bis soldiers to smell of garlic! 13 Caesar's sentiments aside, the Roman olfactory ideal was described by the poet Martial as follows: Breath of a young maid as she bites an apple; effluence that comes from Corycian saffron; perfume such as when the blossoming vine blooms with early clusters; the scent of grass which a sheep has just cropped; the odour of myrtle, of the Arab spice-gatherer, of rubbed amber; of a fire made pallid with Eastem frankincense; of the earth when lightly sprinkled with summer rain, of a chaplet that has felt locks dewy with nard. 14 Martial was equally explicit about the reverse of this ideal: 'Thais smells worse than ... a he-goat fresh from bis amours; than the breath of a lion; than a hide dragged from a dog beyond Tiber; than a chicken when it rots in an abortive egg .... ' 15 Little wonder that, in order to escape such censure, the Romans annointed themselves with scent, used underarm deodorants, and sweetened their breaths with perfumed tablets. Perfumes, of course, were used for practica!, as well as aesthetic reasons in the ancient world. The unsanitary living conditions of ancient cities generated many foul odours thought to be unhealthy, and perfumes and incense were employed to counteract them. Storerooms and chests

The odour of the rose

19

were made of fragrant wood, such as cedar and cypress, not only in order to perfume clothes, but to keep off mice and moths. Even the rose garlands the Romans were so fond of adorning themselves with, were worn in the belief that they relieved headaches caused by drinking. Perfumes, therefore, were not considered simply as a pleasant luxury, but as essential to health and well-being. 16 The most important role played by odour in the ancient world was in religious rituals. Incense, travelling through the air, was believed to attract and unite humans and gods, while the absence of odour, or unpleasant odours, had the opposite effect. Different deities were associated with different fragrances. Aphrodite, for example, was associated with the scent of roses; thus, in Homer, she annoints Hector' s body with rose perfume. In man y ancient mythologies, such as that of the Greeks, the soul was itself considered a kind of perfume, as it was associated with the breath and therefore with fragrance. 17 Toe early Church Fathers banned perfumes and roses because of their associations with Roman 'idolatry', and their assumed tendency to lead to sensualism. Clement of Alexandria, for example, states that: 'As oxeo are pulled by rings and ropes, so is the voluptuary by fumigations and unguents, and the sweet scents of crowns.' 18 This Christian repression of smell was accompanied by a repression of the other senses, for the Christian way of life was characterized by simplicity and self-denial. Gibbon writes of the early Christians in

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: The unfeeling candidate for heaven was instructed, not only to resist the grosser allurements of the taste or smell, but even to shut bis ears against the profane harmony of sounds, and to view with indifference the most finished productions of human art. 19 However, while they denounced and renounced the use of perfumes and incense, these early Christians remained very much within the contemporary structures of olfactory symbolism. Origen, for example, declares that offering incense does harm rather than good, since demons feed on the smoke! Athenagoras, on the other hand, states that God does not need 'the odour of burnt offerings nor the fragrance of flowers and incense, [for] He is Himself perfect fragrance. ' 20 Associated with such potent imagery, incense and roses could not stay suppressed forever, and by the mid-fifth century they carne to forman important part of Christian lore and ritual, in which they were assigned new spiritual values to counter or sublimate their associations with paganism and sensuality. 21 In early Christian tradition, for example, all

20 The senses In history

priests were thought to emit a sweet odour in literal accordance with St Paul •s statement that 'we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved' (2 Cor. 2: 15). This belief was probably reinforced by the incense with which priests were often enveloped and the fragrance of the rose garlands they wore on feast days. Also, the first rosaries were probably made of dried rose petals, giving them an olfactory, as well as tactile and visual, dimension. 22 The floral codes employed in Christian tradition relied heavily on sensory symbolism. The lily, for example, was said to stand for virginity both because of its whiteness, and because of its sweet scent, which, to quote a ninth-century monk, 'spreads further than the rival roses, but once bruised or crushed tums ali to rankness. ' 23 According to legend, the lily miraculously acquired its scent in the fourth century as a meaos of accomplishing the conversion of the Emperor Costis of Alexandria - an example of conversion by smell. 24 The importance of olfactory symbolism in classical religion and culture had been offset by a stress on visual metaphors in classical philosophy. With the decline of philosophy and literature after the fall of Rome, however, vision lost sorne of its former value. The Dark Ages, in which agriculture was emphasized over letters, were thus in a sense literally dark, for the importance of sight as a meaos of appropriating knowledge diminished. As an example of the sensory priorities of the time, in the eighth century the venerable Bede distributed incense, pepper and linen napkins - something to smell, something to taste and something to touch - among bis brother monks before he died as bis most precious possessions.25 With the Crusades the peoples of the West were brought into contact on a large scale with the spices and perfumes of the East which had so entranced the Romans, and this led to a veritable medieval passion for pungent flavours and odours. Many of the geographical discoveries which were made during this period were motivated in large part by the heavy demand for these exotic savours. The high status of spices at this time was no doubt enhanced by the general belief that they carne directly from Paradise, making smell and taste the channels through which to experience Edenic beatitude. 26 The Bible constituted a primary source for Christian olfactory symbolism. Eleanour Sinclair Rohde writes: 'It is remarkable how much value is attached throughout the Bible to fragrance, and it is noteworthy that the nearest approach to our generic word "flower" is the Hebrew bosem, which meaos "scented plants" •.27 The Song of Songs is particularly noteworthy for its olfactory imagery- rose, apple, spikenard,

The odour of the rose

21

myrrh, frankincense, and cinnamon are among the scents named in it which served to inspire mystics such as John of the Cross and Francis of Sales.28 In the pseudo-apocryphal Book of the Secrets of Enoch, written by a hellenized Jew, the Tree of Life itself is characterized by the 'ineffable goodness of its sweet smell' (8:2, also Enoch 24:4).29 An important olfactory and religious concept of the pre-modero period was that of the odour of sanctity, based on the belief that the bodies of the holy emitted a sweet odour signifying the presence of the Holy Spirit. Conversely, it was also popularly believed that great sinners could be recognized by their stench. Virtues and flaws wbich were invisible to the eye could thus be detected by the sense of smell. The medieval Jewish theologian Ibn Ezra, for example, notes in bis work that smell is a more reliable sense than sight. 30 Complementing the spiritual associations of scent was its presumed healing power. In pre-modero Europe, the odours of roses and other plants were believed to have an important therapeutic value. The Greeks held that 'the best remedy for health is to apply sweet scents unto the brain. ' 31 Likewise, a sixteenth-century herbal states that 'drye roses put to the nose to smell do comforte the brain and the harte. ' 32 The sixteenthcentury pbilosopher Montaigne thought that even greater use could be made of odoors in this regard: 'The doctors might, I believe, derive more use from odours than they do, for I have often noticed that they make a change in me and work upon my spirits according to their properties. ' 33 In general, the stronger the odour of a plant, the greater its presumed medicinal power. In the pre-modem age, particularly during plagues, people often carried pomanders, a mixture of perfumes enclosed in a perforated box or bag, as protection against infection. In lieu of a pomander, any sufficiently bracing odour was thought to do, as illustrated by the following verse: One with a peece of tasseld well tarr 'd Rope Doth with that nose-gay keepe himselfe in hope; Another doth a wispe of worme-wood pull And with great Judgement crams bis nostrils full; A third takes offhis socks from's sweating feete; And makes them bis perfume alongst the street. 34 This was done in the belief that strong scents would counteract the contaminating odours of illness and decay, as well as the hope that inhaling the odours would fortify one physically. Sight at this time could offer nothing to compare with these transformative and protective properties of smell.

22 The senses in history

A particularly good source of infonnation conceming the relative valuations of smell and sight during this time is gardening literature and practice. In Roman times, fields would be planted with roses rather than edible crops to the hardship of the peasants. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the practice of gardening was carried on at first principally by monasteries. If in Christian tradition the olfactory aspect of flowers was sometimes emphasized over the visual, in early monastery gardens this emphasis was even more pronounced. The primary reason for this was practica!. The fact that roses and other scented flowers were grown largely for medicinal and culinary purposes made their odour and taste of more importance than their visual aspect. 35 Flowers, in fact, were grown together with garlic, onions and other herbs and vegetables used in cooking. 36 The walls surrounding the medieval garden intensified the scents of the plants within by confining them to an enclosed space. This concentration of fragrance was further increased by the custom of planting sweet-smelling herbs on the bank of earth piled up around the inside of the walls. The characteristics of the medieval garden in general display the influence of the gardens of the East which had as their primary requisites scent, shade and water. 37 From the sixteenth century visual design became an increasingly important element of gardens. Topiary, the trimming oftrees and shrubs into fanciful shapes, was a popular garden practice of the day, as was the planting of flowers in geometrical designs called knots. Fragrance, however, was still an essential feature of the garden. The garden at Hampton Court in England, for example, which was reportedly 'so enknotted it cannot be expressed, ' 38 is still described as having arbours & alleys so pleasant & so dulse the pestilent airs with flavours to repulse. 39 Significantly, as well, the flowers used in creating knots were usually scented flowers, so that the odour of the garden was not diminished by the attention to visual design. 40 The sixteenth century's increased sensitivity to visual beauty, in fact, was accompanied by an increased sensitivity to olfactory beauty. Floral fragrances continued to be valued for their physical virtues, as the quotations cited from this period attest. The English gardening author John Gerard writes in bis Herbal of 1597: 'If odours may worke satisfaction, they are so soveraigne in plants and so comfortable that no confection of the apothecaries can equal their excellent vertue. ' 41 However, more consideration was now given to the aesthetic function of

The odour of the rose 23 fragrance. Whereas previously flowers were mixed indiscriminately with herbs grown for cooking, flower gardens were now placed in front of the house, and kitchen gardens to the side 'for the many different sents that arise from the herbes, as cabbages, onions, &c., are scarce well pleasing to perfume the lodgings of any house. ' 42 Francis Bacon, in bis chapter on gardens written in 1625, provides detailed advice on how to maxirnize the olfactory pleasure derived from the garden. lt is worthwhile to quote from this classic gardening chapter at length. And because, the Breath of Flowers, is farre Sweeter in the Aire, (where it comes and Goes, like the Warbling of Musick) than in the hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that delight, than to know, what be the Flowers, and Plants, that doe best perfume the Aire ... That, which above ali Others, yeelds the Sweetest Smell in the Aire, is the Violet; . . . Next to that is, the Muske-Rose. Toen the Strawberry Leaves dying, which is a most Excellent Cordiall Smell ... But those which Perfume the Aire most delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but being Troden upon and Crushed, are Tbree: That is Bumet, Wilde-Time, and Water-Mints. Therefore, you are to set whole Allies of them, to have the Pleasure, when you walke or tread. 43 Bacon's olfactory acuteness is evidenced in other gardening works ofthe day. John Parkinson's Paradisi insole: Paradisus terrestris, one of the most popular gardening books of this period, pays careful attention to floral fragrances, with the 'most excellent sweet pleasant sent' of the damask rose receiving the greatest praise.44 Thomas Hill, in The Gardener' s Labyrinth, describes how new floral fragrances may be created by binding clove and other 'sweet drugges' to the flower's root, while St Francis of Sales in Flore Mystique writes that the odour of roses can be improved by planting garlic bulbs nearby! 45 In 1661, John Evelyn suggested that the odour of London could be sweetened by growing a ring of fragrant gardens around the city: 'the Aer and Winds perpetually fann'd from so many circling encompassing Hedges, fragrant Shrubs, Trees and Flowers ... the whole City would be sensible of the sweet and ravishing varieties of perfumes ... ' 46 This delightful plan was unfortunately never carried out. The use of sweet-scented flowers indoors increased during the sixteenth century. Fragrant flowers were commonly grown in windowboxes and kept in vases, and also strewn on the floor in order to perfume the house. This practice was especially marked in England. A Dutch visitor to England in 1560 wrote of bis stay in English homes: Their chambers and parlours strawed over with sweete herbes

24 The senses in history

refreshed me; - their nosegays finely intermingled with sundry sorts of fragraunte floures, in their bed chambers and privi rooms with comfortable smell cheered me up and delyghted all my senses. 47 Although one is aware that this wide use of floral scents was in no small part based on their effectiveness in masking the abundant foul odours of the day, such a description surely arouses in us a nostalgia for more redolent times. As in the days of Greece and Rome, the odour of flowers, and particularly roses, was a pervasive element of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury life. Classical literature on flowers and gardening, in fact, exerted a strong influence on Western practices in this regard, as classical writers were taken as a guide and an authority on the subject. Rose perfume was employed to flavour a variety of foods and drinks, and used to scent rooms, bathwater, notepaper, lineo, and clothes. In this largesse of fragrance, gloves, shoes and jewellery (aromatic beads were used in bracelets and rings were designed to squirt perfume) also received their share. An olfactory dimension was even added to light, as scented lamps, called 'perfumed lights', were very popular during this period. 48 As among the ancients, scents played an irnportant role in sixteenthcentury social entertainments. At elaborate dinners, for example, perfumes would be sprayed between courses to provide an olfactory interval between the scents of the different dishes served. Hollow eggshells filled with rosewater would sometirnes be provided so that the guests could amuse themselves by throwing them at each other. On one occasion, Queen Elizabeth went so far as to have perfumed cannons fired in honour of the Duke of Anjou. 49 The olfactory emphasis evidenced by the extensive use offloral scents during the sixteenth century is expressed in the literature of the day, in which, for instance, odes to the odour of the beloved abound. A classic example ofthis is provided by Edmund Spenser's Sonnet LXI/JI: Comming to kiss her lyps, (such grace I found) Me seemed I smelt a gardin of sweet flowres: that dainty odours from them threw around for damzels fit to decke their lovers bowres. Her lips did smell lyke unto Gillyflowers, her ruddy cheeks lyke unto Roses red: her snowy browes like budded Bellamoures, her lovely eyes lyke Pincks but newly spred. Her goodly bosome lyke a Strawberry bed,

The odour of the rose

25

her neck lyke to a bounch of Cullambynes: her brest lyke lyllyes, ere theyre leaves be shed, her nipples lyke yang blossom'd Iessemynes. Such fragrant flowres doe give most odorous smell, but her sweet odour did them all excell. so Here the olfactory is given such prominence that even the beloved's eyes are described in terms of their odour. In fact, the visual appearance of the eyes is apparently so unimportant that the flowers they are compared to are pink! lf the visual could be thought of in olfactory terms, so could the auditory. An example of this is George Herbert's poem 'The Odour. 2 Cor. 2.15' which begins: How sweetly doth My Master sound! My Master! As Amber-grease leaves a rich sent Unto the taster: So do these words a sweet content, An orientall fragrancie, My Master. With these all day I do perfume my minde My minde ev'n thrust into them both; That I might finde What cordials make this curious broth, This broth of smells, that feeds and fats my minde. 51 Whereas smell and sound were conceived of as similar in nature (so that the scents of flowers were sometimes spoken of as their 'voices'),52 the same was not true of smell and sight. These two senses were often placed in symbolic opposition, with the former not infrequently taking priority over the latter. Such favouring of the olfactory over the visual 53 can be found in Shakespeare, who proclaims that 'a rose by any other name would sme/1 as sweet', not that it would look as fine. The moral philosophy behind this privileging of smell is revealed in the following verse from Shakespeare's Sonnet LIV in which scented roses are compared to unscented roses, called cankers: O how much more doth beautie beauteous seeme, By that sweet ornament which truth doth give; The Rose looks faire, but fairer we it deeme For that sweet odor which doth in it live: The Canker bloomes have full as deepe a die As the perfumed tincture of the Roses, Hang on such thornes, and play as wantonly

26 The senses in history

When sommer's breath their masked buds discloses: But for their virtue, only is their show, They live unwooed, and unrespected fade, Die to themselves. Sweet Roses do not so, Oftheir sweet deathes are sweetest odors made. 54 The odour of the scented rose here symbolizes abiding virtue, as opposed to the ephemeral visual show of the unscented rose. A similar sentiment is expressed in religious terms by St Francis of Sales when he writes that 'a true widow is, in the Church, as a little March violet shedding around an exquisite perfume by the fragrance ofher devotion, and always hidden under the ample leaves of her lowliness. ' 55 Toe contrast of the essentiality of the odorous and the superficiality of the visual is neatly expressed in a line of Spenser's describing how the flowers of an arbour 'breathe out bounteous smells and painted colour shew. ' 56 Odour is associated here with breath and therefore with the life force, and colour with paint, or surface decoration. Smell thus manifests itself as having access toan essential reality invisible to sight. This quasimystical quality of smell is what enables St Francis of Sales to proclaim that 'if our sense of smell is a little refined our sorrows will smell all musky and perfumed with a thousand good odours. ' 57

THE MODERN WEST There are no damask roses now like there used to be ... There are many grand roses, but no fragrance - the fragrance is gone out of life. (Richard Jeffries, 1908)58 Toe primary role allotted to the garden in the eighteenth century was to divert the eye and thereby divert the mind. 59 A first step in achieving this end was the replacement of the wall which traditionally surrounded gardens with a sunken fence which bounded property without bounding sight. This kind of fence was known as a Ha Ha because it 'surprizes the Eye upon coming near it. ' 60 Impeded no longer by walls, 'Sight wanders up and down without Confinement, and is fed with an infinite variety of Images.' 61 Toe visualism of the gardening style of the eighteenth century is manifest in its concern for perspective and scenes, light and shade, line and form. The landscape painting, in fact, formed the ideal for this new style which began in England and then spread to the Continent. In the landscape garden, odour was clearly secondary. Certain gardeners appeared to ignore the odorous aspect of plants and flowers altogether in

The odour of the rose

27

their enthusiasm for the visual. In 1779 Vicesimus Knox writes in On the

Pleasures of a Garden: lt is obvious, on intuition, that nature often intended solely to please the eye. She decorates the flowret, that springs beneath our feet, in all the perfection of externa! beauty. She has clothed the garden with a constant succession of various bues .. ,62 To judge by the laodscape gardeners, the eye would seem to be a person all on its own with lilces and dislikes. Even taste, that great arbiter of eighteenth-century culture, had become visual, so that we read that 'Nature must be conquered by Art, aod it is only the ostentation of her triumph, aod not her victory, that ought never to offend the correct Eye of Taste. ' 63 This visual emphasis was influenced in part by Chinese gardening practices as they were portrayed in travellers' accounts aod illustrations. Toe Chinese garden was praised for its presentation of a variety of scenes to divert the strolling spectator. An English gardener of the day writes: 'The perfection of their gardens consists in the number, beauty aod diversity of these scenes. ' 64 For the proponents of laodscape gardening, a walk through a garden, far from being ao olfactory joumey such as that outlined by Bacon, would seem to be equivalent to a walk through an art gallery in which one peruses a sequence of pictures. Toe principal influence on the visual trend in eighteenth-century gardening was the eye-minded philosophy of the Enlightenment. Previously sight had constituted an importaot meaos of leading the soul to God, for example, through gazing upon the spires of a cathedral or the glowing colours of a stained-glass window. In this, however, it was not unique, as all the senses were considered able to perform the same function, to a greater or lesser degree, in their own ways. When sight becamed allied with the growing field of science, however, it begao to be emphasized as the meaos of attaining knowledge of the world. Thus if the Dark Ages were in a sense literally dark because of the decline in importaoce of sight, the Enlightenment was in a sense a literal enlightenment as vision carne to provide the basic models for understaoding the world. This shift to the visual began in the second half of the seventeenth century. John Locke' s Essay on Human Understanding, with its emphasis on the visual basis of mental activity, was particularly influential in this regard,65 as was Descartes' work, with its endorsement of sight as the most importaot sense for science aod technology. 66 Toe visual bias of Enlightenment philosophy in turn increased the importaoce of sight in

28 The senses in history

other spheres of life as well, such as religion or the garden. William Sanderson, who translated bis views on the religious value of sight into bis plans for landscaped gardens, for instance, writes that sight 'is the form and perfection of man: by it we draw near to the divine Nature, seeming that we are born only to see. ' 67 The ocular obsession of Enlightenment thought68 did not completely oust smell from the cultural arena, however, for perfumes continued to be extensively used during this period. Strong scents, such as musk, were particularly popular with both men and women at this time. The use of perfume was so prevalent among the French nobility that etiquette demanded that a different scent be worn on each day of the week at the court of Versailles, which was known as 'la Cour parfumée'. 69 The visualism extolled by philosophers and landcape gardeners represented the new order, the olfactory indulgence of the wealthy, the old. In sorne cases this juxtaposition between old and new orders was particularly striking, as when perfume bottles would be packaged in boxes designed to look like books,70 or woodruff would be placed in the back of pocket watches so as to release a sweet scent when the watch was opened.71 However, although the perfume industry prospered, odour was losing its force as a metaphor for truth and an indicator of the sacred reality behind the false world of appearances. It was now sight that was increasingly regarded as the revealer of truth, while fragrance was on its way to becoming purely cosmetic. Contributing to the downfall of smell was the Protestant Reformation, which led to the discrediting of miraculous proofs of holiness such as the odour of sanctity, the prohibition of incense in Protestant churches, and to a disapprobation of olfactory (and other) sensuality. Radical Protestants were particularly vehement in their condemnation of perfumes. In The Anatomy of Abuses, for example, the Puritan Phillip Stubbes warns women that the day will come when 'instead of their pomanders, musks, civets, balmes, sweet odours and perfumes, they shall have stench and horrour in the nethermost bel. ' 72 Far from accepting the beneficia! properties of perfumes, Stubbes argued that by 'ascending to the braine [odours] do rather denigrate, darken and obscure the spirit and senses' in the same way that mists darken the sun. 73 Here we see a definite privileging of sight over smell, with the dark mists of odour set up in opposition to the light of the sun. While such doctrines were hardly immediately effective in suppressing the olfactory enthusiasm of the masses, they did have a share in the long-term decline of olfaction, by typing scent as frivolous and misleading. The visualism introduced by the Enlightenment increased in the

The odour of the rose

29

nineteenth century at the same time as the decline in the importance of smell continued. Not only was smell no longer regarded as a means of attaining access to a superior, spiritual reality, odours tended to be associated, when pleasant (i.e. light and floral), with trifling artistic and social activities, and when unpleasant (i.e. heavy and animal), with crude animality. Plants, submitted to the scientific gaze of the horticulturalist, were dissected, classified, and divested of their folkloric associations, many of which had to do with odour. Odour was certainly not a concem in the intensive plant breeding which was conducted in the nineteenth century. Odour was bred right out of certain new breeds of roses, but this hardly troubled the breeders, as the size and colour of the rose had by now become much more important than its odour. Alicia Amherst writes in her History ofGardening of 1896: A rosery of to-day would astonish the possessors of gardens in the Middle Ages, and the varied forms and colors would bewilder them, yet in sorne of our finest-looking roses they would miss, what to them was the essential characteristic of a rose, its sweet scent! 74 Whereas St Francis and others of the pre-modem age had proposed methods for improving the odour of the rose, the emphasis now was all on improving its visual appearance. The visualism which in the eighteenth century led to the landscape garden, produced in the nineteenth century the gardening style known as carpet bedding, in which flowers were planted in bright masses of colour for maximum visual impact. The flowers often used for these beds were showy annuals with little orno odour. 75 The decrease in the importance attached to the odour of plants was accompanied by a decrease of belief in the medicinal value of odour. With the diffusion of Pasteur's theories regarding germs in the late nineteenth century, odour was no longer held either to transmit disease or prevent it. At the same time, the increased emphasis on hygiene led to a deodorization of the enviroment - for example, through the creation of sewers - and a deodorization of the person - through the promotion of personal cleanliness. Foul odours were now no longer so much the consequence of human productions as of industrial production. 76 Thus odour, to a certain extent, was dehumanized and divested of its symbolic associations, and converted into a mere by-product - unwanted at worst, unneccesary at best. This olfactory decline was perhaps most pronounced in England, where man y of the developments we have been tracing were centred, and

30 The senses in history

least pronounced in Spain, which had been strongly influenced by the olfactory emphasis of Muslim culture, and which experienced the effects of the Enlightenment to a lesser extent than northern European countries. The discrediting of scent did not go completely unchallenged, however. For example, a strong reaction against the deodorization of the garden which had been taking place since the late seventeenth century occurred among a large group of Victorian writers and gardeners. Laments, such as that of the novelist Richard Jeffries cited above, about the loss of fragrance in life, and laudations of the country cottages where the traditional odours could still be found abound in the literature of the day. Michael Waters writes in The Garden in Victorian Literature: One of the qualities most conspicuously and persistently privileged in Victorian irnaginative literature is the quality of odorousness. Throughout the poetry and fiction of the age, fragrance - or the lack of it- serves asan extraordinarily reliable index of general merit. 77 Victorian writers associated floral odours with virtue and traditional values, and ascribed to them the therapeutic powers of the unspoiled countryside.78 Their ideal was the Elizabethan garden, which they praised for its use of scented plants and its 'restraint in visual display. ' 79 Elizabethan literature was very popular during this period, and its pronounced use of olfactory irnagery undoubtedly influenced the Victorian olfactory reviva!. The fact that Queen Elizabeth herself was reputed to have superior olfactory powers80 perhaps contributed to the association made by sorne Victorians of a refined sense of smell with social refinement. The Victorian artist and writer William Morris, who yearned for earlier, pre-industrial days, was particularly vocal in his condemnation of the loss of fragrance in modern gardens. He decried the lack of scent in flowers 'improved' by florists and the replacement of traditional scented perennials with 'garish' non-scented exotic annuals, and dismissed the practice of carpet bedding as 'an aberration of the human mind'. 81 Explicit in Morris, and implicit in many other writers with similar concerns, is a criticism of the industrial revolution and of capitalism. 82 In this critique the traditional scented perennials symbolize the traditional cultural order with its abiding human values, and the new, showy inodorate annuals, the modern capitalist order with its ephemeral market values. In the world of flowers mass production and industrial progress are represented by carpet bedding, in which flowers are massed together without regard for their individual worth, and by the endeavours of horticulturalists to create bigger, brighter roses which bloom more often,

The odour of the rose 31 without regard for their traditional characteristics, and in particular, their odorous essence. In general one could say that, for these writers, the triumph of sight over smell represented a triumph of surface over essence, of quantity over quality. In this respect it is enlightening toread the statement made by Abel Rey with regard to the history of science that 'the passage from the qualitative to the quantitative is essentially linked to advances in the predominance of visual perception. ' 83 The association of sight with quantity and of smell with quality had already been made in earlier periods. For instance, in a dedication in which he compares bis work to an odorous offering, the Elizabethan playwright Ben Jonson wrote: In the age of sacrifices, the truth of religion was not in the greatness and fat of the offerings, but in the devotion and zeal of the sacrificers; else what could a handful of gums [incense] have done in the sight of a hecatomb [large-scale sacrifice]?84 As well as standing for the opposition between materialism and spirituality, and between the new age of science and industry and the old age of religion and domestic manufacture, the opposition of sight and smell symbolized certain social divisions. In view ofthe fact that science and industry were dominated by men, for instance, it is possible to interpret the emphasis on vision associated with these fields as reflecting a particularly male sensory order. In The Gentlewoman' s Book of Gardening, published in 1892, Edith Chamberlain and Fanny Douglas imply just this as they denounce 'the undiscriminating male gardener' who prefers visual display to fragrance in plants, and enjoin women to 'plead the use ... of sweet-smelling flowers' in the garden. 85 On the one hand Chamberlain and Douglas can be seen as reflecting a traditional view of the sexes according to which men 'see', i.e. reason, and women •sniff things out', i.e. intuit. Sight is the particular domain of the male explorer who goes out to confront and conquer the world, while smell, taste and touch belong to the female homemaker who, her vision bounded by the walls of her house, remains behind to take care of the children and dinner. On the other hand, however, Chamberlain and Douglas' critique can be seen as an implicit protest against the male tendency to fail to appreciate the value oftraditional woman's work and to judge women according to their appearance rather than their virtues. Chamberlain and Douglas' opposition of scented flowers/showy flowers is also very definitely an opposition of English/foreign. Speaking

32 The senses in history

of the influx of exotic flowers they write: Against this terrible invasion offoreigners we would protest. A certain proportion of them may be admitted as ambassadors, and their brilliant uniforms will give state and distinction to the floral court, but they should not be allowed to oust wholly our sweet-scented, old-fashioned English natives. 86 Here the new visual values of the modem age are presented as foreign, while the old-fashioned olfactory values represent traditional English life. The opposition of the visual as outer display and the odorous as inner worth set up by Victorian writers is nicely illustrated by a passage from Charles Reade's novel Jt is Never Too Late to Mend, in which a woman presents her sweetheart with a marigold (a new, showy annual) and a pink (a traditional scented perennial). The man, properly interpreting the preference he is being asked to express, responds: I see flowers that are pretty, but have no smell, and I see women that have good looks, but no great wisdom or goodness when you come nearer to them. Now the marigold is like those lasses, but the pink is good as well as pretty, so then it will stand for you. 87 This is an expression of the same sentiment that we find in Shakespeare and St Francis of Sales, or, for that matter, in contemporary Catholic devotional works such as the 1854 Les Fleurs, which calls the Church 'a true garden ... where the beautiful flowers of virtue exhale the odour of a divine perfume. •88 The communication through a floral code which takes place between the lovers in Reade's novel is a manifestation of the flower language which was popular in Victorian society. Flower language consisted ofthe ascription of certain meanings to different flowers; a red rose, for instance, was commonly held to signify 'l love you'. This provided a coy method of communication between members of the opposite sex. Floral fragrances, employed, primarily by women, in pot-pourris, sachets, stationery, gloves and handkerchiefs, also allowed for a discreet but intimate romantic discourse. In a society in which there were so many things which one was not allowed to see or say or touch, perfumes were heavily charged with hidden meaning. At the same time as flowers and perfumes were being employed in romantic discourse, there was a great deal of discussion in literary circles on how they might afford a more natural and evocative means of communication than language proper. Speculation on this subject was particularly pronounced in France. Floral fragrances were compared to

The odour of the rose

33

voices or music, revealing messages to those in tune with nature. When in 1836 Theophile Thoré confidently proclaimed that 'one can express all of creation with perfumes as well as one can with line and colour', 89 he was merely expanding on a concept that was common in literary circles ofthe day. The most noteworthy exponents of floral and olfactory imagery in literature at this time were French authors such as Baudelaire, Zola, and Huysmans. In Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire uses odours as symbols for moral values, in Nana Zola provides catalogues of smells which almost equal those of Martial, while Huysmans, in Against Nature, details a search for the ideal perfume: He frantically scattered exotic perfumes around him ... with the result that the suffocating room was suddenly filled with an insanely sublimated vegetation, emitting powerful exhalations, impregnating an artificial breeze with raging alcoholates - an unnatural yet charming vegetation, paradoxically uniting tropical spices such as the pungent odours of Chinese sandalwood and Jamaican hediosmia with French scents such as jasmine, hawthom, and vervain. 90 The effects of this literary search for meaning through olfaction can also be seen in the later work of Marcel Proust, who, in Remembrance of Things Past, conveyed bis nostalgia for the past through the minutely described scents of bis childhood. 91 It was partly through the influence of the work of the French writers of this period that odour symbolism became popular in English literary circles. Nonetheless, influential and evocative as it was, the self-conscious olfactory imagery of Baudelaire and others was a far cry from the cosmic network of smell which united heaven and earth in the days of Nero or Wyclif. The nineteenth-century authors' use of olfactory symbolism was a deliberate attempt to exploit the imaginative potential of smell, in opposition to the current sensory trends of society at large, whereas the olfactory symbolism of earlier periods was a natural expression of the accepted sensory and cosmic order. In fact, the artistic emphasis on odour at this time would ap;,ear to have done little to impede the rise of visualism in society at large, any more than the nostalgia for the pre-modem economic order impeded the rise of capitalism. In the realm of the garden, while the praises lavished by a large group of Victorian writers and gardeners on scented plants undoubtedly had sorne influence on gardening practices, the trend towards the visual still continued. Fragrance was bred back into sorne new breeds of roses, but the principal characteristic ofthe rose was no longer its odour. A gardener

34 The senses in history writes in 1913: Nowadays, most of us, to judge from the varieties that are sold most largely, choose a Rose chiefly for its perfection of form ... If too, there is a sweet scent tant mieux, but it is nota first consideration. 92 The emphasis on the visual aspect of flowers was promoted by the flower competitions which began at this time and in which flowers were judged by their visual appearance. Compare the exhibition in ancient Rome of the rare bak.am wood, which was highly valued for its incense,93 with the exhibition in modern flower shows of blooms which are much prized for their visual perfections. Or, for that matter, compare the artificial roses of the ancient Egyptians, which were crudely fashioned but annointed with real rose oil, 94 with the artificial roses of today, which are scarcely distinguishable from real roses in appearance, but have no scent. Even the common country folle, so extolled by Victorian writers for keeping the old scented flowers alive, did not fail to be affected by the prevailing visualism as flower competitions spread throughout the villages of England. It seemed probable that flower shows would soon be held in every village in the kingdom (as the proponents of these competitions hoped) until, shortly befare World War I, attendance at flower shows dropped sharply in favour of an even more visual form of entertainment, the cinema. 95 The harsh realities of World War I dealt a death blow to Victorian sentimentalism with its flower languages and its pot-pourris. People who had been through the horrors of war were no longer content with catching a whiff of the mysteries of life through sorne quasi-mystical olfactory discourse. The emphasis in the roaring twenties was on intense visual expression, and the vivid bues of the art of the day were mirrored by the vivid bues of the new strains of roses that were being created.96 Roses could now be used for carpet bedding: they were functional, they were modern! Although the Victorian love affair with fragrance retained sorne influence up until the thirties, it had begun to appear absurdly quaint and even indicative of the decadence of a corrupt society and an unhealthy emotional repression. Even before the war, associations between floral fragrances and moral corruption could be found in the work of sorne writers, particularly those inspired by Symbolism. In Osear Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), for example, a heavy odour of roses is associated with the moral and physical decay of the protagonist. In Hermann Sudermann' s play of the same period, Streaks oflight, the scent of roses is not only symbolic of corruption, it actually produces physical malaise. A character tells a woman with 'traces of a bourgeois desire to

The odour of the rose 35 be "romantic" ', who keeps a room full of roses: 'Your headaches, I want to tell you, come from the roses. Ugh ! - this nasty smell from the withered ones - sour - like stale tobacco smoke - why, it burns the brains out of one's head! ' 97 This certainly indicates a change in attitude from the days when the odour of the rose was believed to 'comforte the brain and the harte'. The associations between odour and morbidity were confirmed by science. 'Olfactory hallucinations' were deemed frequently to afflict persons suffering from 'sexual and religious insanity', with St Francis of Assisi given as one historical example of a victim of such hallucinations.98 A heightened olfactory consciousness, rather than expressing a refinement of perception, in fact carne to be considered a fairly good indicator of a psychological disorder. In Studies in the Pyschology o/ Sex Havelock Ellis wrote: 'lt is certain also that a great many neurasthenic people . . . are peculiarly susceptible to olfactory influences. A number of eminent poets and novelists - especially, it would appear, in France - seem to be in this case. ' 99 If odours were no longer believed to cause disease, an acute awareness of odour was now thought to be the product of a diseased mind. Even the odour of sanctity, far from being evidence of a spiritual exaltation, was claimed by scientists to be nothing more than a sweet smell produced in the body by hysterical excitement, disease or death. 100 With this final discrediting of odour, visualism could reign unchallenged in both art and science, and in the home. Compare, for instance, a room filled with omate, plush Victorian fumiture, with one sparely furnished with the modero functional style of fumiture which emerged in the early twentieth century and stressed the use of steel and glass. lt is easy to imagine the first being impregnated with fragrance, while in the second it is next to impossible. At present we are experiencing a muted version of the olfactory reviva} of the nineteenth century, as can be witnessed by the growing practice of aromatherapy, the proliferation of books on scented gardens, and the reappearance of pot-pourris and fragrant old strains of roses. (However, the post-industrial-revolution concept of roses still stands. One recent rose manual, for example, describes modem hybrid tea roses as 'high powered, flower making machines. ') 1º1 As odours, like roses, have long-standing associations with both spirituality and sensuality, one wonders if this post-modero interest in smell is evidence of a quest for spiritual and/or sensual fulfilment. In part, no doubt, it is motivated by a nostalgia for the 'bourgeois romanticism' of the Victorian era, just as the olfactory revival of the Victorians was

36 The senses in history

motivated by nostalgia for the pre-industrial era. In any case, this renewed appreciation of odour would seem to represent more of a fashion than a genuine olfactory consciousness. A properly socialized modero nose vaguely enjoys pleasant scents and shuns foul 'unhygenic' ones, but goes no further than that. To gauge the sensory priorities of an age is a difficult task. At the same time as the Renaissance revelled in scents, developments - such as the Reformation, the diffusion of printed texts, and the growth of scientific rationalism - were occuring which would lead to the decline of smell and the rise of sight in the following centuries. Conversely, at the same time as visualism was on the rise in the nineteenth century, and was spread throughout all classes by the growing system of public schools, a movement emphasizing the value of odour arose. The intention of this chapter is not to suggest that smell has ever been generally dominant over sight as a medium of, or model for, beauty or knowledge in Western history. lt is, rather, to show that smell once occupied a much larger part of our sensory and symbolic consciousness, and, in certain significant cases, was even believed to be superior to sight. lf one contrasts the cultural role of smell in the pre-modero West with its present role, that an olfactory decline in fact occurred appears an inescapable conclusion. The cultural shift which seems to have been linked with the sensory shift from smell to sight was bound up with a decline of myth, community, and domes tic manufacture, and a rise in empiricism, individualism and industrialism. The present examination of floral symbolism and practice in different periods of Western history reveals this social and perceptual permutation by bringing out how the values accorded to the different sensory characteristics of flowers have changed over time as the general sensory order changed. Perhaps one could even determine the moment when olfaction definitively made way for vision by tracing when the word 'nosegay' ceased to be used as a term for a bunch of cut flowers, 102 and when 'sweet' ceased to be the adjective most commonly applied to flowers.

Chapter 2

Natural wits The sensory skills of 'wild children'

'Wild' or 'feral' children is the term used for children who have developed in isolation from human society. 1 It refers particularly to those who have grown up in the wild, but includes those who have been kept in seclusion within society. In the late nineteenth century and first half of this century the subject of feral children drew the attention of many anthropologists, including E.B. Tyler and Claude Lévi-Strauss. 2 These anthropologists vigorously debated whether such children were actually normal children whose extraordinary behaviour was the result of their experience in the wild, or mentally disabled children who would have manifested certain abnormalities regardless of their environment. Toe principal argument against the former thesis was the lack of unquestionably authentic accounts of children having grown up outside culture, while the principal argument against the latter was that mentally disabled children would be unable to survive on their own in the wild. In 1959 Bruno Bettelheim argued that what had been called feral children were actually children suffering from autism, whose strange, often animal-like behaviour had led observers to concoct fanciful accounts of their upbringing in the wild. He concluded that 'feral children seem to be produced not when wolves behave like mothers but when mothers behave like wolves'. 3 Later, academic interest in the subject of 'wild children' quieted down. lt is not my intention in this chapter to reopen the debate over whether there are any true cases of normal children who have been forced to fend for themselves for an extended period in the wild. Certainly there are known cases of children who have grown up severely secluded from human society, a recent one being that of Genie, a California girl who was kept isolated in a room by her father, with only the barest of care, until the age of fourteen. 4 It is sadly true that Genie's case is but an extreme example of the state of abandorunent in which man y children live.

38 The senses in history

The objective of this chapter is to examine three classic cases of 'wild children' - the Wild Boy of Aveyron, the Wolf Children of India, and Kaspar Hauser- to see what each one reveals about the sensory order, or modes of perceiving, of the child in question. lt is unfortunate that the debate over authenticity has deflected attention from the man y interesting perceptual and epistemological questions that the case of the 'wild child' raises. For example: what effects does the environment have on sensory perception? How are the senses conditioned by culture? How might the senses develop outside culture? The early anthropologists who examined cases of feral children were concemed with what they could tell us about the state of the human being in nature. Is there a natural state of the senses? Do feral children have any perceptual traits in common orare their sensory orders completely idiosyncratic? Ali three cases examined here are well documented, if not conclusively so. If these cases actually deal with feral children, such a sensory analysis offers insights into how the senses may be ordered by an individual outside of human society. However, even if they are not true cases of feral children, they still provide a fascinating look at extraordinary sensory orders, and at what happens to such orders when they come into contact with the sensory model of the dominant culture. In other words, these cases can enable us to step outside the sensory model of our society and speculate on the ways and means by which perception is constructed within and without culture. Feral children, of course, are not the only persons with extraordinary sensory orders. There are many people within society with perceptual models which differ widely from the norm, for example the deaf and the blind. The perceptual experiences of such persons can provide an interesting comparison to the sensory characteristics of the 'wild children', and I will therefore make reference to these data at various points in my narrative.

THECASES The Wild Boy of Aveyron was observed in the woods of Aveyron, France by local villagers for sorne three years, and had actually been briefly captured twice before he was definitively re-introduced into society in the year 1800. He was estimated to be about twelve years old and to have been living in the woods for about six years. The boy was taken to Paris where he was studied by a number of scientists and then given into the care of the physician Jean Itard, who named him Víctor. The interest at the time in sensory perception, inspired by the sensory

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39

philosophies of Locke and Condillac, resulted in a great deal of attention being paid to Victor's sensory functioning. One of the scientists who originally examined him, Pierre-Joseph Bonnaterre, in fact ranked the order of Victor's senses as follows in bis report: 'The sense of smell is first and most perfected; taste is second, or rather these senses are but one; vision occupies the position of third importance, hearing the fourth, and touch the last'.5 Bonnaterre contrasts this order with that of the man of intelligence, in whom 'the sense of touch is of first importance, because it is this sense which is most closely related to thought and knowledge' .6 Phillipe Pinel, an authority on mental disorders who also examined the boy, used a similar contrast of sensory orders to argue that Víctor lacked intelligence: 'lt has justifiably been said that the sense of touch is the sense of intellect, and it is easy to see how imperfect this sense is in the so-called wild boy of Aveyron.' 7 (The association made by Bonnaterre and Pinel between touch and intelligence had its origin in Aristotle.)8 Thus, because the boy's own sensory hierarchy differed from the culturally accepted one, he was deemed to be mentally deficient. ltard did not agree with Bonaterre or Pinel; he believed that Víctor was not intellectually deficient, but rather displayed the consequences of bis years of isolation. He therefore sought to enculturate the boy and awaken his intellectual faculties by systematically educating his senses. Itard was able to socialize Víctor to a large extent, but he was not able to develop the boy's intellectual faculties beyond an elementary level, and he discontinued the training after five years. Víctor then went to live in the home of a governess, where he stayed until bis death in 1828.9 The 'wolf children' of India were two girls, one aged approximately eight years and the other a year and a half, who were discovered in 1920 by the director of a local orphanage, Reverend J.A.L. Singh, allegedly living in a wolf den with a mother wolf and her cubs. 'The two cubs and the other two hideous beings [the girls] were there in one comer, all four clutching together in a monkey-ball.' 10 The girls were taken by Singh to his orphanage, where he kept a diary of their behaviour, including their sensory inclinations, and bis attempts to socialize them. The younger of the girls, named Amala, died after a year, but the elder, named Kamala, lived for nine years after her capture. Kamala was gradually socialized out of her wolf-like habits and had attained the intellectual level of a normal child of about two at the time of her death in 1929. This case created a great deal of controversy in the academic world when it was brought to its attention in 1941. 11 Most of the controversy centred on whether the discovery of the girls in the wolf den could be

40 The senses in history

accepted as authentic on the basis of only one eyewitness, Reverend Singh, no matter how reliable. Singh's account of the girls' capture was investigated in the 1950s by William Ogburn and Nirmal Bose ( 1959) and thrown into serious doubt. Charles Maclean, however, in bis examination of the case, has shown that Ogburn and Bose were not thorough or careful in their investigation. Maclean records that he was able to find villagers who distinctly recalled being present with Reverend Singh at the discovery of the girls in the wolf den. 12 While this does not prove that the girls were actually raised by a wolf, it does lend greater credence to the story. Kaspar Hauser, the third case examined here, was found at the age of sixteen in Nuremburg in 1828. He was dazed and virtually without speech and bis only identification was a note he carried that gave bis name and date of birth. Kaspar was taken to live with a physician, Dr Daumer, who patiently educated him and taught him to speak. A prominent jurist, Anselm von Feuerbach, spent sorne time with the boy and wrote a welldocumented account of the case. 13 On leaming to speak, Kaspar was able to relate how he had spent bis childhood in a small dark room, with virtually nothing to occupy him, given bread and water daily by someone he never saw and whom he knew only as 'Man'. In 1829 Kaspar was attacked by an unknown assailant and seriously injured. When found, he could only repeat the word 'Man' over and over again. In 1833, while he was staying with Feuerbach, Kaspar was attacked for a second time and killed. Subsequent investigations have shown that Kaspar was quite possibly an heir to the throne of Baden and was the victim, first in bis confinement and then in bis murder, of political intrigue. 14

SENSORY SKILLS Kas par Hauser is, in a way, the most interesting case for our present study, for bis senses were kept in a state of dormancy in the cell to which he was confined, while the other children had the whole of nature to excite their sensoria. Kaspar's senses, far from being dulled by the lack of stimuli in bis environment, were so sensitive as to be a source of almost constant pain to him after he was released into the sensorially overwhelming larger world. In this, and also in the fact that he did have sorne human care during bis years of isolation, Kaspar's sensory order provides a valuable contrast to those ofthe other 'wild children' looked at here. Kaspar was able to speak when he was found; however, bis vocabulary consisted only of a few set words and phrases. Kamala and Víctor were

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41

both unable to speak. Prolonged efforts were made to teach all three to speak normally, but only Kaspar learned to speak well. Kamala, at the time of her death, had acquired a vocabulary of about fifty words, while Victor never learned to speak and could only communicate through simple signs and a few written words. lt is tempting to suggest that Kaspar's success and Kamala's partial success at learning to speak were partly due to the social contact they had enjoyed during their years of isolation: Kas par with bis keeper and Kamala with the wolves. Victor had never interacted with other beings, bis habits were all of solitude, and thus he could not learn to communicate through speech. However, there are too many other possible factors to permit such an interpretation. All three children had very keen senses of hearing. Kamala was attentive to the least sounds. 15 Víctor was attentive only to those sounds which had direct bearing on bis needs: the sound of a walnut being cracked, however gently, alerted bis attention, wbile after the initial surprise, a pisto} shot close to bis car was a matter of indifference to him. 16 Kaspar's hearing was so acute that he could distinguish people at a distance by the sound of their footsteps, and the noise of a drum would throw him into convulsions. 17 When Víctor was found bis gaze was very erratic, but at the same time he would spend long periods looking at water or a country landscape. 18 Kamala could see extraordinarily well at night, but only poorly in the light, which hurt her eyes. 19 Kaspar also saw very well in the dark and found light painful at first. 20 His vision was so sharp that he was able to distinguish barely perceptible stars; however, a summer landscape appeared a repulsive blur of colours to him and he preferred to look at a plain white wall. 21 Kaspar, like Kamala, was nonetheless extremely fond of the colour red. Kamala al ways preferred red clothes22 and, if the choice had been given Kaspar, 'he would have clothed himself and all for whom he hada regard from head to foot in scarlet or purple' .23 Both Victor 24 and Kaspar25 had to be taught to distinguish between objects in relief and flat paintings (no data on Kamala). For Kaspar, 'the meo and horses represented on sheets of pictures, appeared to him precisely as the meo and horses that were carved in wood, the first as round as the latter, or these as flat as those'. 26 It is interesting to note that an inability to distinguish paintings from the objects they represent is often manifested by blind people who have recently recovered their sight. In the l 720s, William Cheselden conducted the first scientific study of a blind individual, a thirteen-year-old boy, who had had bis sight restored. The boy could not at first distinguish flat objects from round ones by sight alone and, indeed, was very surprised to find that those things which were

42 The senses in history

most pleasing to bis touch and taste were not necessarily most pleasing to bis sight. Interestingly, like Kaspar and Kamala, the boy also preferred scarlet to all other colours,27 leading one to wonder if there might not exist a natural preference for this colour. In Space and Sight: The Perception of Space and Shape in the Congenitally Blind Before and After Operation, M. von Senden28 gives instances of similar cases. One young man who had recently recovered bis sight mistook a painting of a table for a table. For a long while after this experience he expressed fear on approaching a real table 'for he always suspected that he was deceived, that it was a painting he saw before him, and that he was in danger of thrusting a hole in it with the involuntary groping of bis hands' .29 Again, like Kaspar, the newly-sighted often perceive landscapes as a painful blur of colours and forms. This data raises the question (one which fascinated the philosophers of the Enlightenment)3º of to what extent visual perception is a learned ability. Kaspar, for all bis acuteness of eyesight, was notable to make the discriminations ofform and shape which we, with our generally mediocre powers of sight, take for granted. All three 'wild children' had extraordinary olfactory abilities. Victor carefully, and with apparent enjoyment, smelled everything that he carne across, even objects, such as pebbles, that appeared odourless to others. 31 Kamala could smell meat and other things at a great distance. 32 Kaspar' s sense of smell was so fine that he could distinguish different fruit trees at a distance by the smell of their leaves alone. In this olfactory acuity Kaspar resembled certain blind individuals who have developed their sense of smell to a high degree. Heleo Keller, the blind-deaf writer, for instance, could also distinguish fruit trees by their odours. (Like Kaspar, she could recognize people by their footsteps as well, but in her case it was vibrations, not sounds, which guided her.) 33 However, whereas Heleo Keller derived a great deal of pleasure from her sense of smell, Kaspar found bis hypersensitivity to odour a constant source of discomfort. All smells were more or less repugnant to him, except for those he had been accustomed to in bis cell. 34 In fact, it was bis sense of smell which occasioned Kas par the most pain. E ven ata distance, smells imperceptible to others would make him ill. 35 This profound negative reaction to odours can occur with individuals who have lost their sense of smell for a period and then had it restored. A biochemist who lost and then regained bis sense of smell, for instance, reported that odours which he had formerly experienced as pleasant, such as those of tobacco and coffee, now caused him intense displeasure. 36 A similar negative reaction may occur with regard to sounds in the case of

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deaf people who recover their hearing,37 and sights in the case of blind people who regain sight. 38 Thus the recovery of a lost sense is not necessarily the thoroughly pleasurable experience that one might imagine it to be. Victor, Kamala and Kaspar showed different taste preferences, always preferring the foods they had been accustomed to, no matter how bland or monotonous. Victor was fond of nuts and vegetables and drank water as though it were an exquisite wine. In an attempt to stimulate Victor's sense of taste, Itard offered him strong liquors and richly seasoned foods, but, even when extremely hungry and thirsty, the hoy refused them. 39 Kamala avidly devoured raw meat and was fond of milk but rarely drank water. She quickly leamed to like sweets, but could not abide salt. 40 (After she became socialized, Kamala refused to eat her food without salt.)41 Kaspar's delicate system could tolerate only bread and water. After being forced to eat meat he became very ill. Likewise, 'the least drop of wine, of coffee, or the like, mixed clandestinely with bis water, occasioned him cold sweats, or caused him to be seized with vomiting or violent headaches'. 42 Ali of the children eventually had their tastes at least somewhat reconditioned by their caretakers until they were able to eat, and even like, most of the ordinary foods of the cultures in which they lived. Victor and Kamala were indifferent to heat and cold. Victor was able to pick up and eat boiling potatoes43 and Kamala went naked in the chill of winter with no ill effects. 44 They had to be conditioned into feeling differences in temperature. 45 Kaspar, having lived in an environment of uniform temperature, had no prior experience of extremes of heat or cold and was extremely sensitive to both. The first time he touched snow, in fact, he howled with pain.46 Víctor, on the other hand, rolled himself half-dressed in the snow with delight.47 Although she was indifferent to temperature, Kamala was sensitive to the least touch. 48 Víctor was indifferent to being touched and could not distinguish different shapes by touch alone. He had to be taught, in fact, to differentiate between an acom and a chestnut, a coin and a key, and other objects, by their feel. 49 Kaspar had an almost supematural sense of touch. The touch of humans and animals gave him a sensation of heat or cold, at times so strong that he felt as if he had received a blow. He was able to distinguish certain metals by their touch alone, and once had to rush out of a hardware shop because the metals there made him feel as though bis body were being pulled in all directions. 50 Indeed Feuerbach relates that Kaspar was

44 The senses in history

able to tell in repeated experiments whether the north or south pole of a magnet was being pointed at him because in the former case he felt a current of air proceeding from bis body, and in the latter, a current of air blowing on bis body. 51

CONCLUSION Sorne interesting conclusions can be drawn from these data, although these must remain tentative given the uniqueness of the cases and the uncertainties involved. To begin with, all three children had grown up in apparent isolation from human society and their sensoria would seem to have been strongly conditioned by their respective experiences. lf the story of her having been raised by wolves is true, then Kamala was the only one of the three to have had a sensory model, that of the wolves, to pattern her own after. In fact, she was able to order her sensory perceptions quite well and displayed few of the erratic responses to sensory stimuli characteristic of the two boys. Victor and Kaspar had no guide for structuring their sensory perceptions. Victor's senses were acute, but not discrirninating. Overwhelmed by sensations in the forest, he discriminated only between those which had direct bearing on bis physical needs and those which did not. Thus, after being captured, he was attentive to the sound of a nut being cracked, but not that of a pistol being fired, and was interested in the smell of food, but unmoved by stench or perfume.52 Kaspar had been exposed to few sensory stimuli in bis dark cell and so did not have the chance to become accustomed to varied sensations, but had rather to make the most of the few sensations which were available to him. (One suspects that Kaspar was by nature a sensitive person and that this natural sensitivity was greatly intensified by bis confinement.) Most sensations of the outside world struck him as new and painfully strong. His new sensory order was in part an extension and flooding of bis previous, limited one, and, in part, a response to the social order which accompanied bis first experiences of sensory richness. That is, he was gradually, but relentlessly taught to regulate bis new and overwhelming sensory experiences according to the accepted cultural sensory model. The different effects of sensory abundance and sensory deprivation on Victor and Kaspar are illustrated by Victor's pleasure or indifference at most powerful sensory experiences, and Kaspar's repugnance. Victor often stopped to look through the window at the view of the countryside, whereas Kaspar would turn away from a similar view as a disgusting confusion of forms and colours. Victor was able to pick up boiling

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potatoes and roll in the snow, and he carefully smelled everything in bis path. Strong sensations of heat and cold made Kaspar cry with pain and he avoided most odours as nauseating. The fact that all three children, despite their different backgrounds, hadan extraordinarily keen sense of smell suggests that this sense may be by nature of great importance to humans and that it loses its importance only when suppressed by culture.53 More than any other sense, smell seems to function as an indicator of presence and identity. Kamala smelled for traces of Amala after the younger girl' s death and burial. 54 When Victor was lost and found by bis governess, it was only after sniffing her hands and arms repeatedly that he decided to go home with her and allowed himself to express joy at seeing her again. 55 For Kaspar, it was the odour of a thing, above all, which affected him. 56 The data also show how completely taste preferences and aversions are determined by custom. Kamala, accustomed to eating meat, prefers it to all other food. The taste of meat makes Kaspar, accustomed to bread and water, extremely ill. (Of course, not only the taste of the food is involved, but also its digestion.) The children slowly have their tastes reconditioned by the foods of their new environment. Kamala acquires a mostly vegetarian diet in accordance with the gastronomic customs of India57 and Kaspar learns to eat meat (except pork), in accordance with those ofEurope. 58 This was notan easy process, however. According to Feuerbach: One of the most difficult undertakings was to accustom [Kaspar] to the use of ordinary food ... The first that he was willing to take was water gruel, which he leamed to relish daily more and more, and on this account he imagined that it was every day made better and better. 59 Although the children at first long for their former homes, they are eventually socialized and adopt the sensory codes of their new social environments. One characteristic they share after they are socialized is a strong sense of order. 60 Kamala likes everything to be done in its 'proper' way and becomes annoyed at changes in routine. 61 At first Victor ate food which was dirty without minding, later he would throw away bis food if any speck of dirt fell upon it. 62 Feuerbach notes that Kaspar 'observed almost every grain of dust upon our clothes; and when he once saw a few grains of snuff on my frill, he showed them to me, briskly indicating that he wished me to wipe those nasty things away' .63 This may indicate the children's need for a strong order to replace their previous customs, and their inability, after adapting themselves to a new system of life, to further adapt themselves to any variations within the system.

46 The senses in history

Social conditioning seems, in sorne ways, to bave had the result of lessening the importance of sensory data for the cbildren. This is perhaps because a high value was not usually placed on keen sensory ability in the cultures into which the children were incorporated, and the cbildren had to direct their attention instead to leaming the social skills necessary for survival in their new environments. This process is most evident with Kaspar, who had the sharpest senses of all the children and who was socialized to the greatest extent. As Kaspar's intellect developed and bis interests extended beyond the material world, bis exquisite sensitivity declined. Feuerbach writes of him as a young man: 'The extraordinary, almost preternatural elevation of bis senses ... has sunk almost to the common level ... Of the gigantic powers of bis memory ... not a trace remains. ' 64 Whereas we tend to think that the senses become keen through extensive training and use, Kaspar's senses were apparently keen from not being trained or used, or, at least, having had to make the most of a scarcity of sensations. As the constant repetition of experience dulled tbis keenness and bis mind became distracted with other things, Kaspar's sensorium adjusted itself to its new role and processed only that information wbich was required by the cultural order. If culture dulled the childrens' senses in sorne respects, in other respect~ it educated them. Víctor and Kaspar, and perhaps Kamala as well, had to be trained to distinguish three-dimensional objects from their two-dimensional representations. Víctor and Kamala had to leam to be sensitive to changes in temperature, and Víctor to distinguish objects by touch alone. A fundamental part of this sensory education consisted of teaching the children to restrain their sensuality in various ways: from Kaspar's learning that he could not always indulge in bis predilection for scarlet, to Victor's leaming to suppress bis sexual impulses. 65 The fact that the children's senses could be so well educated, under the circumstances, demonstrates how amenable the senses are to cultural influence. The care taken in conditioning the cbildren's senses to conform to the cultural norm, even where their deviations from it appeared slight - for example, Victor's and Kamala's indifference to heat and cold and Kaspar's aversion to the smell and taste ofmeat-illustrates the degree to which society directs what and how we perceive. In order to function as a member of a culture, one must be able to adopt its sensory order. Kaspar was able to achieve this to a large extent, Víctor and Kamala, less so. Víctor, for example, may have been manifesting the socially appropriate emotion by expressing joy on being reunited with bis govemess after an

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absence; however, so long as he recognized her primarily through smell, rather than sight, he remained a cultural outsider.66 lndeed, the accounts of these three cases reveal as much about the perceptual preoccupations of the cultures in which the children were discovered, as about the sensory functioning of the children themselves. This is particularly noticeable in the case of Victor, who, appearing in Enlightenrnent France, stepped not only into the ready-made cultural niche of the 'savage', noble or otherwise, but also became a living experirnent in sensationalist philosophy. The question which had absorbed Locke, Condillac and other sensationalists was the extent to which thought was based on sensory experience. So eager were sorne of these philosphers to test their theories on human subjects, that one of them proposed that a group of orphans be kept in complete darkness until they reached the age of reason, so that their virgin visual experiences could be recorded. 67 Little wonder then that Itard, strongly influenced as he was by sensationalism, would attempt to structure Victor's mind by structuring his senses and see in the results of this experiment 'material proof of the most important truths, of those truths for the discovery of which Locke and Condillac were indebted merely to the force oftheir genius'. 68 In his approach to Victor' s sensory education, Itard displayed many of the sensory prejudices of his culture. The sense which appeared the most developed in Victor, and therefore the one which might provide the best access to his mind, was smell. Itard, however, in accordance with the sensory order ofhis (and our own) culture, dismissed smell as having only a biological role: 'linked as [smell] is more to the digestive functions than to the development of the intellectual faculties, it lay somewhat outside the scope of my study' .69 This in spite of the fact that, by Itard's own evidence, Victor used his sense of smell not only in relation to food, but as a fundamental and pleasurable means of gaining knowledge of the world (for example, in his habit of carefully smelling everything in his path). Taste, on the other hand, which for Victor was purely related to food, was viewed by ltard in a quite different regard: It would seem perhaps that the sense of taste, being related to the same [digestive] functions [as smell], would be equally foreign to my purpose. I did not consider the matter in this light, however, believing that taste plays a greater role than the limited function assigned to it by nature in that it relates to pleasures as varied as they are numerous - a gift of civilization - and it seemed to me advantageous to develop, or , 70 rather pervert 1t.

48 The senses in history

Itard here is evidently associating the biological sense of taste with the metaphorical meaning of tas te as 'aesthetic discernment', a concept so important to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture. By developing Victor's biological taste, Itard therefore hoped to develop the boy's intellectual taste. Hence, the satisfaction with which he declared that he had 'succeeded in awakening the taste of our young man for a whole quantity of dishes he had hitherto always disdained'. 71 The social programme which lay behind this elaboration of Victor's taste is revealed by Itard in the following statement: There exists equally with the savage the most insulated, as with the citizen raised to the highest point of civilization, a uniform proportion between their ideas and their wants; that their continually increasing multiplicity, in a state of polished society, ought to be regarded as one of the grand instruments for producing the development of the human mind; so that we may be allowed to lay it down as a general proposition, that all the causes, whether accidental, local, or political, which tend to augment or diminish the number of our wants, contribute of necessity to extend or contract the sphere of our knowledge, and the empire of the sciences, of the fine arts, and of social industry. 72 On being introduced to society, Victor' s tas tes were limited and bis wants few; consequently, according to Itard's logic, bis thoughts were also limited and bis social uses few. Teaching Victor to acquire ataste for the dainties of French cuisine was thus quite clearly the first step in teaching him to become a consumer (and producer) of the dainties of French civilization. The platitude 'there is no accounting for taste', would certainly seem to be belied by the foregoing. Not only can taste and other sensory traits be accounted for, their elaboration within society is rarely simply a matter of chance or of personal preference. As our habits of eating, dress, language and so on are determined by our culture, so are our habits of perception, andas the former express cultural codes, so do the latter. The myth of perceptual transparency would, indeed, be hard to sustain given the cultural imprint which so many other functions of the human body undeniably manifest. It is, in part, the very multiplicity of codes and discourses in our culture which distracts our attention from the ways in which perception itself is culturally constructed and coded. The 'wild child', who appears among us with apparently no cultural baggage and no language, without a world-view, but with a very different way of perceiving the world,

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compels us to come to our senses. In considering the sensory orders of 'wild children', and how these orders are restructured according to the norms ofthe societies in which they are discovered, we grow aware ofthe extent to which our own sensory consciousness is structured by our culture.

Chapter 3

Words of sense

We are accustomed to thinking of language, in its spoken and written forms, as an auditory and visual phenomenon. However, language, in fact, can be said to involve all the senses. Writing is tactile as well as visual, requiring the touch of one 's hand. Speech is not only auditory, but also kinaesthetic, olfactory (speech is carried on the breath), and even gustatory, as we shall see in the linguistic theories of Jacob Boehme. At the same time, language expresses sensory phenomena. Toe word 'blue' expresses a colour category, 'sweet', a flavour category, and so on. In the ancient world it was believed that there was an intrinsic relationship between words and their referents, even to the extent of the former giving rise to the latter. Thus, in the Bible, for example, the word for light precedes and creates light itself. For the ancients, in an essential fashion, words were what they represented. The idea that language, or at least sorne hypothetical ideal language, has a direct relationship with the world it describes was popular in the West up until the time of the Enlightenment. The seventeenth-century mystic and philosopher Jacob Boehme, for example, held that words express their meaning through the kinaesthesis and 'gustation' of speech. He explains the German word barmhertzig, warm-hearted, for instance as consisting of a combination of sour and sweet attributes: When thou pronouncest BARM- then thou shuttest thy mouth, and snarlest in the hinder part of the mouth; and this is the astringent quality ... But when a man saith BARM-HER1Z, he fetcheth or presseth the second syllable out from the deep of the body, out from the heart ... Toe spirit in the word -HER1Z - (heart) goeth forth suddenly, [producing a sweet 1uality] and giveth the distinction and understanding of the word .... Written words could also be thought to contain the significance of their

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referents within themselves. Thus in the medieval cabalistic text The Zohar, for instance, we read that humans were created by the written word as well as the spoken word. 'The word vayizer (and he formed) implies that God brought [humans] under the aegis of bis own name [YHVH] by shaping the two eyes like the letter Yod and the nose between like the letter Vau.' 2 In the modem West we no longer believe there to be any intrinsic connection between words and their referents. There is no particular 'tree-ness' to the word 'tree', or 'blueness' to the word 'blue'. Language is an abstract conceptual system, closed in within itself. This removal of language from the world to the mind, has led us to develop a rather de-sensualized understanding of language and to be inattentive to the sensory content of the words we speak and think with. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to bring to light sorne of the sensory bases and biases of English through an etymological exploration of a selection of words with sensory connotations. We shall look at how the meanings of different sensory terms have shifted with time, how relationships among the senses are expressed through language, how sensory metaphors are used to stand for non-sensory qualities, and how many of our terms for thought processes have sensory etymological roots. 3 Boehme's idea ofwords as embodying the essence ofwhat they stand for may seem rather far-fetched to us modems. Nonetheless sorne words are imitative of the phenomena they represent. This is especially true of onomatopoeic words, such as 'thud' and 'bang', but also of words dealing with tactile and kinaesthetic sensations. 'Mushy', and 'slip', for example, convey, through the sound and kinaesthesis of speech, the tactile sensation of mushiness and the kinaesthetic sensation of slipping. Such associations possibly extend to words dealing with other sensory phenomena as well. For instance, cross-cultural studies have shown that different vowel sounds are associated with different degrees of size and brightness. Thus in one study of English and Chinese speakers, in which the made-up words 'mal' and 'mil' were said to mean 'table', both groups agreed that 'mal' suggested a larger table than 'mil' .4 In certain cases, what started off as an echoic word had its meaning transferred from the auditory to another sensory modality. Crack, for instance, meaning a breaking noise, carne to signify the action and result of breaking as well. Bound, from the Latin bombire, to resound, apparently went from meaning an echo to meaning a leap. Touch is based on the Latin toccare, to knock, derived from tok, echoic of a light blow. Flash, meaning a burst of light, is based on plash, imitative of a splash of

52 The senses in history

water. Raven, originally imitative of a raven's call (making it similar to crow, another echoic word) now is used rather as a colour term. Likewise blatant, once meaning babbling, noisy, is now more likely to be applied to visual showiness. Sorne words which now have predominantly auditory meanings, on the other hand, once referred to one of the other senses. Noise, for example, appears to be based on the Latín nausea, sea-sickness. Mellifluous once meant honeyed in taste, but is now used to mean honeyed in sound. Tone, meaning a sound, is derived from the Greek verb tenein, to stretch. Boisterous originally meant rough, but has had its sensory balance tipped in favour of loud. Similarly, quiet has gone from meaning primarily still to meaning primarily soundless. The word hear, interestingly. is itself a sensory transposition, as it developed from the lndo-European base qeu-, meaning to look at, perceive. It is remarkable, indeed, how many words dealing with the senses have undergone sensory shifts. This is particularly true of gustatory terms, most of which are tactile in origin. Bitter, tangy, piquant, pungent, tart, acid, and acrid are all based on words meaning sharp. Cloying, meaning overly sweet, originally meant to lame a horse with a nail. The word taste itself originally meant touch. Toe fact that these gustatory terms have their origin in the sense of touch illustrates the importance of the tactile component of gustation, and also suggests that touch serves as a model for taste in Western thought. Other gustatory terms which have shifted their sensory meaning include flavour, which once meant an odour, and spicy, which has a visual basis, being derived from the Latín species, meaning appearance. Gustatory terms, such as sour, sweet, or pungent, usually double for olfactory terms. Olfactory terms themselves often derive from words referring to fire or smoke. Smell, reek, perfume and incense, for example, all have bases meaning to burn or smoke. Breath originally meant the smell of anything cooking or buming, and is derived from an IndoEuropean base meaning to boíl. This suggests that odours produced through buming were the archetypical smell for our linguistic ancestors who, of course, attached far more practical and symbolic significance to fire than we do. In fact, conditions of smokiness and dustiness apparently made quite an impression on our forbears, as many of our present sensory terms are developed from roots meaning smoky or dusty. The lndo-European base, dheu-, to fly about like dust, to smoke, is at the root of words such as dizzy, dim, dull, dun, dust, dusk, fume, and tumble. Deaf, dumb, and dead are derived from dheu- as well, evoking the deadening of the senses that

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occurs in a dust storm. Blind, apparently from another lndo-European base, blendh-, to mix, also suggests the sensory confusion of blurred boundaries. Indeed, the Greek word for blind, typhlos, is derived from the same dheu- base as our deaf and dumb. The tactile dimension of dheucan be seen in another of its offspring, 'down', meaning soft feathers, and its olfactory dimension in the Sanskrit dhup, to bum incense. The Indo-European word for breath, dhewes, in tum, is based on dheu- as well, perhaps dueto the smoke-like nature of breath. Finally, the word 'stink' is derived from the lndo-European steu-, like dheu-, meaning to rise up like dust. Thus the experience of blowing dust and smoke has given rise to a whole multi-sensory complex of words. Retuming now to olfaction, scent is an interesting word in that it is based on the Latin sentire, meaning to feel, to perceive in general. Our English word scent comes by way of the French sentir, which carries the double meaning of to feel and to smell. This association between smell and perception in general might have occurred because of a certain primacy accorded to the role of smell in sense experience, or equally, because smell was such a difficult sense to pin down that it ended up being expressed simply as 'feeling'. There are relatively few olfactory terms in English and of these many more refer to bad smells - fetor, foulness, fustiness, malodour, rankness, reek, stench, stink- than to good smells - aroma, fragrance, perfume, redolence. In fact, there is a tendency for smell words to acquire negative connotations in English. To stink, for example, once meant to emit any odour, bad or good, and now means only to emita bad odour. To smell, in the sense of giving off an odour, seems to be going the same route. 'lt smells' means 'it smells bad'. Why should this be so? Why should the connotation of 'smelly' be negative, while that of 'tasty' is positive? The answer may be in part that we are confronted with foul smells more often than we are confronted by foul tastes. We can choose our food, but we cannot as readily close our noses to bad smells. Moving on to touch, tactile terms with non-tactile roots usually have echoic bases, such as slap, imitative of the sound produced by a slap. As regards sight, relatively few visual terms have non-visual roots. Exceptions include see, derived from an lndo-European root meaning both to see and say, and sean, derived from the Latín to climb. A tactile word may develop into an auditory, gustatory or olfactory term, for instance, but it is unlikely to develop into a visual term. Nor do visual terms develop into non-visual terms. Just as 'sharp' does not come to mean 'bright', 'bright' does not come to mean 'sweet'. This suggests a certain cordoning off of sight from the other senses, an assertion of the distinctness of the visual experience.

54 The senses in history

While non-visual words usually do not develop into visual words, they are, however, widely used to qualify visual experience. For instance, one can speale of a sweet, rough, or loud appearance. Tactile tenns are especially likely to be used to characterize visual and other sensory experience. Tactile adjectives such as sharp, smooth, harsh and heavy, for instance, can be used with all the senses. However, tactile tenns cannot themselves usually be qualified by adjectives from any of the other senses. 5 Gustatory adjectives can also be applied across the senses, with the exclusion of touch. One can speale of a sour appearance, smell or sound, for example, but nota sour touch. Similarly, it is not difficult to conceive ofa 'spicy' piece ofmusic, but what would a 'spicy' texture be like? An exception to this rule is sweet, which can, in certain cases, be applied to touch; for example, a 'sweet caress'. Suave is also interesting in this regard in that it went from meaning sweet to meaning, albeit in a predominantly figurative sense, smooth. Taste itself can usually only be qualified by sensory adjectives that are tactile, for example, hot and sharp. In general, olfactory tenns cannot be figuratively applied to taste tenns. Exceptions are 'foul' which can be used with taste, and flavour, which was originally a smell word. Thus, while to speale of a 'bitter' smell malees sense, to speale of a 'stinking' taste does not. Visual adjectives can often be applied to auditory tenns, but not usually to other sensory tenns. One can refer to a bright sound, for instance, but not a bright touch, taste or smell; to tone colour, but not touch, taste or smell colour. To a much lesser extent auditory adjectives can be applied to visual tenns (and not to other sensory words), for example, screaming pink. Visual tenns can be characterized by adjectives derived from any of the senses but smell. A colour can be sweet, sharp or loud, but not fragrant. Auditory tenns, on the other hand, come close to being able to be qualified by olfactory adjectives, as well as by adjectives from the other senses. A 'fragrant' melody, for example, malees sense in a poetic sort of way. Smell, indeed, is curious in that it is so resistant to cross-sensory application. Basic olfactory tenns such as 'stinking' and 'aromatic' simply cannot be applied to any other sensory experience. Few of them as there are, smell tenns are apparently too strongly olfactory in nature to lend themselves to other sensory usages. (Although they can have figurative meanings - 'foul', for example, can be used to mean 'evil' .) A certain rule of sensory interaction seems to be at work here. Touch

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appears to be the most basic and diffuse sense in English, providing terms applicable to all the senses. This may be because all the senses are experienced as being quasi-tactile in nature. This primacy of touch, bowever, generally makes it unable to be qualified by terms from the more specialized senses. Taste is the next most basic sense. Its ability to characterize a variety of other sensory terms may be due to the strongly tactile component of gustation. It is perhaps the case that sensations of taste and touch - the sweetness of honey, the stab of a knife - are experienced so intensely that they tend to 'colour' other sensations. In tum, taste, like touch, resists being qualified by the more specialized visual, auditory and olfactory terms. Sight provides adjectives that can qualify auditory terms but, in general, not those of any of the other senses (i.e. bright, dim, blurred, blue). The perceived likeness of sound to light is perhaps due in part to both sight and hearing being experienced as distance senses. Touch, taste and smell are perceived as too interna! to the body to be qualified by visual terms. They are metaphorically 'dark' senses. Sound is more likely to be conceived of as taking place outside the body and, therefore, as figuratively accessible to sight. Whereas visual terms can qualify auditory terms, the reverse is less true. This may be because hearing is considered to be a more specialized or complex sense than sight. The general rule at work here would be that a particular sense can be qualified by terms from senses deemed more basic, but can itself only be used to qualify senses deemed more specialized. Therefore, as a more specialized sense than sight, taste or touch, hearing can be qualified by adjectives belonging to these senses but cannot itself provide many adjectives that will qualify them in retum. Hearing, of course, is unique among the senses in that its medium is also the medium of language. Thus it may be that most auditory terms are too echoic or suggestive of the sounds they represent to be used to characterize other sensory phenomena. An exception to this is the use of echoic words to represent actions that accompany particular sounds. Por example, the verb to crack is based on the echoic term 'crack'. Smell is the one sense to elude inclusion under the rule postulated above. Theoretically, it should fall in between taste and sight. Olfactory terms can be qualified by tactile and gustatory terms but usually not by visual or auditory terms. They should therefore, according to the rule, be able to qualify the latter terms and unable to qualify the former. Instead, they are unable to do either. One can no more speak of a fragrant or fetid colour than one can of a fragrant or fetid texture. Hearing indeed, as was

56

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noted, is the only sense that can be somewhat characterized by smell. Smell, in turn, can be somewhat characterized by auditory terms. Perfumers, for example, speak of different scents as 'notes'. This perceived similarity of sound and scent probably has to do with the fact that both are experienced as carried on the air. Why smell, which, in fact, constitutes a large part of taste, should produce fewer linguistic terms than taste, and why those terms it does produce should be unable to qualify other sensory experiences, are open questions. lt would be informative to see if the linguistic expression of smell has similar characteristics in other cultures, particularly nonWestern cultures. If so it might point toan essential resistance of olfaction to verbalization. Such a resistance has been suggested by the results of experiments in which subjects who are asked to classify odours by language have difficulty in recalling the names of even familiar smells. One possible reason for it is that the location of smell - in the most primitive, 'reptilian' part of the brain - renders it inaccessible to the much later-developing language centres of the brain.6 The case of smell apart, it is evident from what we have seen that the senses are closely interrelated in language, so closely, indeed, that a term expressive of one sense can, in time, tranfer its meaning to another sense. Prime examples of this are the verbs for the senses themselves: hear is based on a root meaning to look; see is based on a root that means both to see and say, touch is based on the echoic representation of a knock, and taste originally meant to touch. This interchangeability of sensory meaning suggests that sensory perception was once conceived of in a more fluid fashion than nowadays, with less rigid distinctions between senses. Interestingly, such sensory mingling appears to be the natural sensory state of newborn humans. Studies with newborns have shown, for instance, that babies will both turn to look at and try to grab a sound in a dark room. Even blind babies turn their eyes towards the source of a sound at the same time as they try to grab it. It is only after a few months of growth and experience that babies learn to differentiate between senses. Such data have been interpreted to mean that there is a basic unity of sensory experience in newborns. 7 Perhaps something of these early experiences of sensory integration finds expression in the shifting of meaning in sensory terms from one sense to another. Sensory terms, of course, are used to characterize not only sensory experience, but also more abstract states. Blue can mean sad, and green, envious; hard can mean difficult, and soft, easy, and so on. Such

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figurative uses of sensory tenns are revealing of the values we assign to different sensations. In the case of taste, for example, it is evident from the figurative ways in which sweet and bitter are used that the fonner is deemed to be a very pleasant sensation and the latter very unpleasant. On a more abstract level, taste tenns are often used to mean risqué or daring. Examples of this are piquant, racy, salty, saucy (from the Latin sal, salt), and spicy. In the case of racy, this secondary meaning has completely overshadowed the original meaning of flavourful. The inference in these cases is that risqué material affects one in a way similar to a stimulating flavour. Taste itself figuratively means 'judgement of what is beautiful'. Tas te is therefore characterized as a sense of discrimination, and specifically, aesthetic discrimination. Good taste decrees what is aesthetically right and proper. Something is in bad taste when it violates this decree, causing disgust - distaste. AH of the senses, except for hearing, have metaphorical meanings similar to that of taste. Flair literally means a keen sense of smell, and, metaphorically, talent or style. Tact- touch- is the sense of knowing how to 'handle' people in order to avoid giving offence. To have vision is to see beyond what is irnmediately apparent to what could be. These metaphors point to the extent to which our understanding of character traits is shaped by our understanding of sensory perception. This is further revealed by the number of non-sensory tenns with sensory bases. Examples are absurd, originally meaning inharmonious; splendid, originally meaning shining; and austere, originally meaning dry. Such sensory bases are especially found in words dealing with emotions. Thus to be exasperated is to be roughened, to be angry is to be constricted, to be glad is to be shining, to be eager is to be sharp, to be rancorous is to be rancid, and so on. The expression of emotional feeling in tenns corresponding to physical feeling brings out the experiential intermingling of sense and emotion. Sometimes a similar sensation can give rise to words with very different meanings. Both sad and content, for example, arise from tenns meaning to be satisfied. While to besad, however, in its original sense, is to be sated to the point of being fed up, to be content is to be contained and therefore fulfilled. Similarly both sage and sap, wise person and fool, are derived from a base meaning to taste. A sage is someone who discerns wisely as through the sense of tas te. A sap is someone who is full of tas te or juice, and therefore 'wet'. Even black and white, that classic pair of opposites, are based on a similar sensation, as both are derived from roots meaning to gleam. In the case of white, it is the paleness of light which is

58 Tha sansas in history

emphasized; in the case of black, the soot of the flame. These divergences show the different paths of meaning that terms originating in similar physical sensations can take. Of particular interest is the sensory terminology used to convey mental processes. In the West we rely heavily on visual terms far this purpose, a tendency which has been noted and analysed by a number of scholars.8 Common examples of such terms are: point of view, overview, observation, enlighten, and facus. lndeed, we say 'I see' to mean 'I understand.' Sorne of our terms far thought - far example, consider, speculate, idea, theory, and wit - are also based on visual roots. Many more, however are tactile or kinaesthetic in basis.9 These include apprehend, brood, cogitate, comprehend, conceive, grasp, mull, perceive, ponder, ruminate and understand. The predominance of tactile imagery in words dealing with intellectual functions indicates that thought is, or was, experienced primarily in terms of touch. Thinking was therefare less like looking than like weighing or grinding, and knowing was less like seeing than like holding. The use of tactile and kinaesthetic terms far thought expresses a more active involvement with the subject matter than visual terms do. To understand is to stand under or among, to be part of the picture, whereas to see is to view the picture from without. In light of this it seems possible that an emphasis on visual metaphors far intellectual functions, such as one finds in scholarly writing, far example, has to do in part with a desire to have or convey a certain detachment from the subject under consideration: to be objective. At the same time, visual metaphors far thought convey an accessibility of meaning, which tactile metaphors do not. There is a great deal more tension involved in grasping or weighing a subject than in looking it over. Thus, by using visual metaphors far thought, one can mask the tensions that touch-based terms - such as comprehend and pender - indicate are involved in intellectual processes, and present knowledge as readily and easily apparent. With terms of intelligence, we again find touch-based words such as acumen, acute, keen, sharp, smart, clever, and penetrating, outnumbering sight-based words such as wise, bright, brilliant, and lucid. It was only in the Enlightenment period, indeed, that these last three words began being used to mean intelligent, perhaps in consequence of the general rise of visualism at that time. Knowledge, therefare, was conceived of not so muchas sight or light, but as sharpness. A knowledgeable person does not simply illuminate a subject, but cuts into it. Likewise, difficult subject matter is characterized as 'hard' or 'complicated' (twisted together), resisting being cut or penetrated. Intelligence itself, along with intellect, is a tactile-visual metaphor, as its basic meaning is 'to pick between' . 10

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Taste and smell fumish two basic terms of intelligence: sapience and sagacious. In Latin, taste did not merely stand for a sense of aesthetic discrimination, as in English, but for the faculty of intelligence. Toe verb to taste, sapere, also meant to know, giving us our sapience - wisdom and sage - wise person. Thus homo sapiens is not only 'knowing man', but also 'tasting man'. Sagacious, on the other hand, comes from the Latin sagacis, meaning keen-scented and therefore perceptive and wise. Similarly, nose-wise, a now obsolete word, could mean either clever or keen-scented. Thus, even the supposedly lower senses of tas te and smell can stand for intellectual processes. Significantly, auditory terms rarely serve as metaphors for thought or intelligence in English. An exception is logical, derived from the Greek logos, word (although even this term has more to do with speaking than with hearing). This is perhaps because hearing is conceived of as a passive sense, receiving information but not probing it. Therefore, rather than being associated with intelligence, hearing is associated with obedience. The word obedience, indeed, is derived from the Latinaudire, to hear. So if to hear is to obey, to obey is also to hear. There are, of course, non-sensory terms of thought and intelligence, such as know, think, mind, and memory (although even these we cannot be sure did not once have a sensory base unknown to us now). What is notable, however, is the extent to which sensory terms are used to stand for processes of thought, so that, far from standing apart from sensory experience, thought is conceptualized in terms of sensory experience. This is not to say that thought is limited to language or that all sensory experience is well expressed by language. Toe fact that there are few words dealing with smell, for example, does not necessarily mean that smell is a relatively unimportant sense, but rather that, for one reason or another, it has eluded linguistic expression. lndeed, as we shall see in Chapter 4, olfaction does fonn the basis for important symbolic codes in the West and elsewhere. Nonetheless, the way we feel and think is obviously deeply influenced by the language we speak and vice versa. To the extent that words express sensory experience and condition thought, consequently, the sensory basis of much of our vocabulary, and particularly of our intellectual vocabulary, indicates that we think through our senses. The exploration of how we grope to express sensory experience through language, and to convey non-sensory experiences through sensory metaphors, is revealing not only of how we process and organize sensory data, but also of the sensory underpinnings of our culture. In the days when Latín was widely known, and words less divorced

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from their original sense, the sensory basis of many of our words would have been much more evident than today. It is in order to help recover this sensual dimension of language and thought, and raise questions about the cultural and physical norms operating through it, that the following vocabulary of 'words of sense' has been compiled.

Acerbity From the Latin acerb, meaning harsh to the taste. First used to refer to bitter, unripe tastes, and then extended to mean harsh and bitter character or words. Acid From the Latin acidus, sour, based on the root ac-, sharp. Acid means sour to the taste, and, when applied to speech or manner, sharp and unpleasant.

Acrid From the Latin acris, meaning sharp, pungent and related to acus, needle. Acrid means bitter and stinging to the taste, as does acrimony. By extension both these words are used to mean bittemess of manner.

Acumen From the Latin acumen, meaning anything sharp, which, in tum, is derived from acuere, to sharpen, and acus, needle. Acumen conveys the meaning of sharp wits, as does acute, also derived from acuere. Aesthetic From the Greek aisthetikos, meaning what is perceived by the senses, that is, things material as opposed to things thinkable or irnmaterial. Toe term was applied in German by the philosopher Baumgarten in the 1750s to refer to the philosophy of 'taste' or beauty. It was adopted into English with this meaning in 1830.

Apprehend From the Latin adprehendere, to seize. Apprehend means to lay hold of and, figuratively, to lay hold of with the mind, to leam, understand. Astringent From the Latin astringere, to draw together. Astringent means causing to contract. Figuratively it conveys the meaning of stern. It is used with tastes to mean sour, harsh. Austere From the Latin austerus, meaning dry, harsh, sour; in turn derived from the Greek austeros, meaning to make the tongue dry and rough. In the sense of harsh taste it was used up until the second half of the nineteenth century after which its metaphorical meaning of stern and severe became dominant.

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Bitter From the Old English bíter, meaning biting. Bitter once meant a sharp, biting taste, but in modem usage means the unpleasant taste of substances such as quinine and bitter aloes. By extension, bitter means painful and hard to endure. The first recorded application of bitter to cold occurs in 1600 in Shakespeare' s As You Like I t: 'Freize, freize thou bitter skie.' Black From the Old English blaec, derived from the lndo-European base bhleg-, shine, gleam. The original sense was smoke-black from fire. Black has the figurative meanings of sad and evil. Bland From the Latín hlandus, meaning soft, smooth, and used to mean pleasing of manner orto the senses. Keats, for example, writes in 1820 of 'the sound of merriment and chorus bland' (St Agnes). lt acquired its meaning of mild with regard to food in the nineteenth century. This usage, in tum, led to its present figurative meaning of not stimulating. Blatant This word was apparently coined by Edmund Spenser in bis Faerie Queene of 1596 to mean noisy, clamorous. An example of this usage is the phrase 'patent to the eye and blatant to the ear' from a work of 1867 (J. MacGregor, Voyage Alone). In its present sense it means showy, gaudy, obvious, unashamed. Thus in a letter of 1912, G.B. Shaw writes of the 'blatant picturesqueness' ofthe scenery. Blind Probably derived from the lndo-European base hhlendh-, meaning to be indistinct, to confuse, and thus related to blend. The sense would be that of blurred vision. Blind is used metaphorically from an early period to mean lacking intelligence.

Blue From Middle English hleu, influenced by the Old French h/eu, blue, and the Middle English b/o, livid, said of bruised skin. The first recorded use of blue to mean depressed occurs in the sixteenth century, and to mean indecent, in the nineteenth century.

Blunt Probably related to the Old Norse blunda, meaning to shut the eyes, derived from the Indo-European base bhlendh-, to be indistinct, to confuse. Blunt, meaning dull, insensitive, is originally applied to sight and then extended to the other senses and the intellect. Spenser in the Faerie Queene, for example, describes sightless eyes as being 'blunt and bad'. Toe meaning of not sharp, now the primary sense of blunt, was

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developed in the fourteenth century. In the sixteenth century blunt carne to be applied to speech to mean abrupt, plain-spoken.

Boisterous From the Middle English boistous, meaning rough. The modem sense is loud, turbulent and exuberant.

Breath From the Old English brep, meaning odour, smell, exhalation, as of anything cooking or buming. The lndo-European base is bher-, to boíl. Toe sense passed into English through that of heated air expired from the lungs and manifest to the sense of smell. Breath was originally used to mean an odour but in its modem senses means the air taken into and let out of the lungs. Bright From the Indo-European base bhereg-, to gleam, white. Bright means shining or vivid, and, when applied to sounds, clear or shrill. When applied to a person, bright originally meant cheerful and lively. Shakespeare, for example, writes, 'Be bright and jovial among your guests' (Macbeth). Beginning in the early eighteenth century, bright was used to mean clever.

Brilliant Adopted from the French brillant, shining, taken in tum from the Latín beryllus, beryl, in the seventeenth century. Originally meaning bright and sparkling, brilliant carne to mean splendid, and then in the nineteenth century, the meaning of clever and distinguished was added.

Brood From the Old English brod, derived from the lndo-European base bhre-, to warm. To brood means to sit on and batch eggs, and thus, figuratively, to think deeply about something, usually with anxiety. Calm From the Greek kauma, meaning buming heat of the sun. The likely development in meaning is from heat of the day, to rest during the heat of the day, to stillness.

Clear From the Latín c/arus, originally meaning clear-sounding, and then visually bright, derived from the lndo-European base kel-, to cry out, sound loudly. Clear was first used in English to express an intensity of light and colour. From this the meaning of transparent and unobscured, and figuratively, intelligible, was derived. The first recorded use of clear with sound to mean well-defined occurs in 1300. Clever From the Middle English cliver, meaning nimble-handed and

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possibly related to the Old English clifian, to stick, cling. The current sense of clever as talented, intelligent carne into use in the eighteenth century.

Cloy From the Middle English acloien, meaning to lame a horse with a nail, hence stop up. This meaning became obsolete in the seventeenth century. From the sixteenth century on cloy has been used to mean to satiate with food so as to cause disgust. The term cloying in modem usage conveys the meaning of overly sweet and rich foods. Cogitate From the Latin cogitare, literally meaning to put in motion together. Cogitate means to think seriously. Cold From the Old English cald, meaning cold. Cold is used metaphorically to mean unfriendly, unfeeling, indifferent. With regard to sensory properties, when applied to scent, cold means faint, and when applied to light and colour, it means pale, blue, or lacking red and yellow tints. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cold was used with taste to mean unstimulating.

Colour From the Latin color, meaning colour, outward show, and related to celare, to hide. Among the figurative meanings of colour are: type, specious appearance, shade of meaning and expressiveness. It is used in music from the sixteenth century on to mean timbre and variety of expression. Common sense From the Latin sensus communis. Common sense was a notion developed by Aristotle to mean an intemal sense which served to unite and interpret the impressions ofthe five senses. Burton writes in The Anatomy of Me/ancho/y (1621), for example, that the 'common sense is the judge or moderator of the rest'. The meaning we associate with common sense today, that of practica! judgement, was first recorded in the eighteenth century. Comprehend From the Latin comprehendere, to grasp. From the fourteenth century comprehend has been used in English to mean to grasp with the mind. Conceive From the Latin concipere, meaning to take and hold, and hence to receive and to perceive. Conceive means to become pregnant, to beget, and figuratively to take into or form in the mind, to formulate an idea.

64 The senses in history

Consider From the Latin considerare, literally meaning 'with a star', and figuratively to look at closely. Consider meaos both to look at carefully and to think carefully. Contemplate From the Latin contemplari, meaning literally to mark out an augural temple, and figuratively, to gaze attentively. Contemplate meaos to gaze at, and hence to consider and to look forward to.

Cracked From the Middle English cracken, to make a sharp noise. The Indo-European base is ger-, to cry hoarsely. Toe primary meaning of crack is the noise of something breaking; the secondary meaning, derived from this, is a break, a fissure. From this second sense comes the term cracked, used figuratively to mean unsound in mind. Crazy From the Middle English erasen, to break in pieces. Crazy retained the meaning of full of cracks into the nineteenth century. In a letter of 1844, Dickens, for example, writes that 'the court was full of crazy coaches'. Figuratively, crazy could once mean either physically or mentally impaired. Now only the latter meaning remains.

Deaf From the Old English deaf, cognate with the Old Irish dub, black, and the Greek typh/os, blind. The Indo-European base of deaf is dheubh-, meaning to fly about like dust, to smoke, and thus misty or obscured. Dheubh- was used in pre-Teutonic to mean dull of perception, from which the more specific meaning of unable to hear developed. Deaf once had several figurative meanings. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was used to mean stupid, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to mean indistinctly heard as, for example, in a 'deaf murmur'. Up until the late nineteenth century deaf could mean barren or empty, particularly in connection with fruits and vegetables; for example, a deaf nut, or a deaf ear of com. Toe one figurative meaning of deaf which has survived to the present day is that of inattentive or unwilling to hear. Delicate From the Latín delicatus, meaning luxurious, dainty. Delicate is first applied to foods in the fourteenth century to mean pleasing. In the sixteenth century it is applied to textures to mean fine, not coarse, and in the nineteenth century to colour to mean soft, subdued. From the sixteenth century on delicate is also used to mean very sensitive, very fine in power of perception, e.g. a delicate ear.

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Dim From the Indo-European base dhem-, to be dusty, smoky, misty. Dim meaos not bright, not clear to the sight, and figuratively, not clear to the understanding. The first recorded application of dim to sound occurs in 1386 in Chaucer's 'Knight's Tale': 'He herde a murmurynge ful lowe and dym'. In the eighteenth century the meaning of dull of apprehension was added, for example, in the following sentence taken from a sermon written in 1729: 'The understanding is dim, and cannot by its natural light discover spiritual truth' (J. Rogers, Sermons).

Dry From the Old English dryge, derived from the Indo-European base dher-, to hold fast. Dry meaos free from moisture. With reference to taste, it meaos not sweet, said of wines, a usage introduced in the seventeenth century. Figuratively, dry is used to mean showing no emotion, reserved, ironical.

Dull From the Old English do/, meaning foolish, based on the Indo-European base dhwel-, muddy, dim, derived in turn from dheubh-, to fly about like dust. Beginning in the fourteenth century dull acquired a wide range of figurative meanings: lacking sensibility, slow, indistinctly felt, uninteresting, dismal, and blunt, while retaining its original meaning of foolish. Dull is applied to texture, colour, sound, and taste to mean indistinct, muffled, not sharp. Dumb From the Indo-European base dheubh-, to fly about like dust, to smoke, to darken. In Old English dumb meant only mute, lacking speech. However in related languages, such as Old High German, it carried the sense of stupid as well. Dumb was used in the sense of 'meaningless' in English (e.g. 'dumb traditions') in the sixteenth century. In modem colloquial usage it means stupid, silly.

Eager From the Old French aigre, sharp, keen, sour, derived in turn from the Latín acreus, sharp, pungent. Eager was used to mean sharp, pungent until the eighteenth century. For example, in 1600 Shakespeare writes, 'To make our appetites more keene, with eager compounds we our pallat urge' (Sonnets). During the same period it was used to mean figuratively sharp and biting. Thus in 1386 Chaucer wams us to rather 'flee fro the sweete wordes of flaterynge preiseres [praisers] than fro the egre words of thy freend' (Melibeus'). In the fifteenth century the modem meaning of 'full ofkeen desire' carne into use.

Flair From the Old Frenchflair, odour, derived in turn from the Vulgar

66 The senses in history

Latinflagrare, to emitan odour. Originally used to mean an odour, in the nineteenth century, influenced by the Frenchflairer, to smell, to detect, it carne to mean instinctive discernment.

Flash From the Middle English flasken, to splash, an onomatopoeic word based on plash, a splashing sound. Flash was used to mean a pool ora marsh until the late nineteenth century. Its present meaning of a burst of light carne into use in the sixteenth century. Flat From the Middle English flatte, derived from the lndo-European base plet-, meaning wide and level. In the sixteenth century flat acquired various figurative meanings. It can be used with sound to mean either not clear or relatively low in pitch. Bacon writes in 1626, for exarnple, 'If you stop the Holes of a Hawkes Bell, it will make no Ring, but a flat noise, or Rattle' (Sylva). When said of tas te, flat refers to a liquid that has lost its flavour or effervescence. With reference to colour, flat means uniform in tint or without gloss. Flat also has the figurative meanings of unqualified (e.g. a flat líe), stupid, and wanting in spirit. Flavour From the Old Frenchjlaor, smell, based on the Vulgar Latinflator, that which blows. Originally flavour meant a smell. Dickens, for exarnple, writes in 1870 of a 'city, deriving an earthy flavour throughout from its cathedral crypt' (Edwin Drood). From the seventeenth century on flavour could be used to mean ataste, the meaning that predominates today. Foul From the Middle English/u/, derived from the lndo-European base pu-, to stink, perhaps an exclarnation of disgust. This base is also found in putrid. The primary meaning of foul is stinking, disgusting, from which the figurative meaning of morally corrupt, evil, is derived. Fusty From the Old Frenchfust, cask, derived from the Latinfustis, stick. Fusty was first applied to wine which had taken the odour and taste of the cask in which it was stored. From this definition it acquired the meaning of mouldy or stale-smelling and the figurative meaning of stale and old-fashioned. Grasp From the Old English grespan, to grab. The use of grasp to mean intellectual mastery is first recorded in the seventeenth century. Green From the Old English grene, derived from the Indo-European base ghro-, from which grow and grass are also derived. Green refers to

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the characteristic colour of growing plants. Figuratively, it can mean young, inexperienced, envious.

Hard From the Indo-European base qar-, hard. The basic sense of hard is unyielding to the touch. Figuratively it means callous, severe. In the fourteenth century hard acquired the meaning of difficult to penetrate with the understanding and, hence, difficult in general. Harsh From the Middle English harsk, possibly related to the Old Swedish hiirsk meaning rancid. Harsh means rough to the touch and, figuratively, stem, severe. The use ofharsh with taste to mean astringent is first recorded in 1440, with sound to mean discordant, in 1530, and with visual appearance to mean of rough aspect, glaring, in 1774. Hear From the Old English heran, to hear, derived from the Indo-European base qeu-, to look at, perceive. In Old and Middle English to hear could also mean to o bey. To hear has the figurative meaning of to assent, as, for example, in 'my prayer has been heard'. Refusing to hear, on the other hand has the figurative meaning of refusing to assent, as in 'she would not hear of it'. Heavy From the Old English hefig, meaning of concentrated weight for its size. Heavy can be used with touch, heat, colour, sound, smell and taste to mean forceful, oppressive. High From the Middle English heigh, derived from the lndo-European base qeu-, to curve. High means elevated and is used with physical qualities to mean intense, for example 'high wind'. High is first recorded to mean rich in flavour in 1384. As an example of this usage Bacon writes in 1626 of 'Almonds that are not of so high ataste as Flesh' (Sylva). It is first recorded used with sound to mean acute in pitch in 1390, and was also used into the eighteenth century to mean loud. In the nineteenth century high began to be used with odour to mean smelling tainted or putrid. When applied to light, high means brighter than the surrounding light. High also has the figurative meanings of exalted in rank or quality, important, intoxicated. Hot From the Old English hat, meaning hot, derived from the Indo-European base qai-, heat. Hot is used figuratively to mean excited, passionate. It is first used with taste to mean pungent in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century it begins to be used with scent to mean

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strong. In the nineteenth century hot is applied to colour to mean intense, while in current usage hot is applied to music to mean lively, syncopated.

Idea From the Greek idea, meaning appearance, form, kind, and based on idein, to see. In Platonic philosophy idea was used to mean an archetype and it was in this sense that it was adopted into English. In the seventeenth century the current sense of an idea being a thought, a conception, carne into use. Incense From the Latin incendere, to set on fire. Incense can mean both to inflame with anger and to bum fragrant gums and spices, fumigate.

Intelligent From the Latin intelligere, to see into, perceive, understand, composed of inter-, between, and /egere, to pick, catch with the eye, read. Intelligent is used in English to mean having the faculty of understanding. Keen From the Old English cene, meaning bold, brave, clever, from which the current meaning of sharp-edged was apparently derived. Keen is used from the fourteenth century onwards to mean affecting the senses like a sharp edge: with touch it means smarting; with taste, pungent; with cold or heat, piercing, intense; with sound, shrill; with light, vivid; with scent, strong. From the fourteenth century on keen also means eager and full of desire. Beginning in the eighteenth century, keen is used to mean acute or highly sensitive, with regard to the sensory faculties and to the intellect.

Light From the Old English leoht, meaning luminous, based on the lndo-European /euk-, to shine, to see. The use of light to mean mental enlightenment is first recorded in the fifteenth century. Light From the Old English leoht, meaning of little weight based on the lndo-European legwh-, light in weight or motion. Light can be used with visual appearance, sound, smell, taste or touch to mean soft, slight, not intense. Logical From the Greek logos, signifying reason, word and derived from /egein, to speak. Logical has the meaning of reasonable.

Loud From the Old English hlud, meaning sonorous, based on the Indo-European root k/eu-, to hear. Beginning in the seventeenth century, loud is used with scent to mean strong. In 1641, Milton, for example, speaks of the 'loud stench of avarice• (O/Reformation in England). In the

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nineteenth century loud begins to be applied to colours and pattems to mean gaudy or strong. Low From the Middle English lowe, derived from the Indo-European base /egh-, to lie down. Low means of little height. It is first recorded used with sound to mean of deep pitch in 1422, and to mean not loud in 1440. Low also has the figurative meanings ofhumble in rank, inferior, vulgar, wanting in strength, and emotionally depressed.

Lucid From the Latín lucidus, meaning shining. Lucid was originally used to mean bright or translucent, and figuratively to describe an interval of sanity between attacks of lunacy. In the eighteenth century lucid is first used to mean easily intelligible, and in the nineteenth century to mean rational and sane.

Meditate From the Latin meditari, to meditate, derived from the Indo-European base med-, to measure, consider. Meditate means to plan or think deeply. Mellifluous From the Latin mellif/uus, meaning flowing with honey. From the fifteeenth to the nineteenth centuries, mellifluous was used to mean honeyed, sweet. This meaning is now rare; however, the figurative usage of mellifluous with sound and speech to mean pleasant and smooth, also in use since the fifteenth century, is still current. Mellow From the Middle English melwe, ripe, possibly derived from the Indo-European me/-, to grind. Mellow refers primarily to the softness and juiciness of ripe fruit and secondarily to the flavour, scent and colour of ripe fruit. From this basis, the meaning of mellow is broadened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to convey softness and smoothness in general with regard to sensations of sound ( 1668), taste ( 1700), colour (1706) and texture (1797); and geniality with regard to character. Mild From the Middle English mi/de, possibly derived from the Indo-European me/-, to grind. Mild means of a kind and gentle disposition, not harsh. In the twelfth century it is first applied to looks and language. In the sixteenth century it is applied to weather and temperature to mean calm, moderate, and in the seventeenth century to light to mean soft, and to beer to mean not acid, not strongly flavoured. In the nineteenth century it is applied to soil, wood, and other material to mean soft and easy to work with.

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Mull From the Middle English mullen, to grind, probably derived from the lndo-European mel-, to grind. Mull is used to mean to consider or ponder. Muse From the Old French muser, meaning to gaze at, to ponder. Muse means to think deeply, to contemplate.

Musty Of obscure origin, probably related to moist, musty means mouldy, spoiled with damp and hence, having a mouldy or decayed smell or taste. Noise Probably from the Latin nausea, meaning sea-sickness. Nose-wise Compounded from 'nose' and 'wise', nose-wise was used from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries to mean clever, conceited, or keen-scented.

Pensive From the Latinpensare, meaning to weigh and hence to ponder, consider.

Perceive From the Latin percipere, meaning to seize, and hence to observe, to apprehend. Perfume From the Latin per-, through, and fumare, to smoke. The primary meaning of perfume when it carne into use in the sixteenth century was to fumigate, to cense. From this meaning the sense of imparting a pleasant odour is derived. Piquant From the French piquer, to prick, sting. Piquant originally meant piercing or stinging. In the seventeenth century it developed the meaning of agreeably pungent to the laste. Figuratively, piquant means exciting interest, provocative. Poignant From the Old French poignant, pricking, derived from the Latinpungere, to prick. Poignant once meant sharp to the touch, sharp to the taste or smell, and figuratively sharp to the feelings. Now only the last meaning remains.

Ponder From the Latin ponderare, meaning to weigh. Ponder means to weigh mentally, consider carefully.

Pungent From the Latin punge re, to prick, derived from the Indo-European base peug-, to stab. Pungent was originally used to mean

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sharp. Toe first recorded use of pungent to mean a sharp taste or smell occurs in 1668, and to mean mentally stimulating, in 1850.

Quiet From the Latin quies, rest. Quiet was first used to mean peaceful, from which the meanings of still and noiseless were derived.

Racy A seventeenth-century formation based on 'race ', meaning a particular class or flavour of wine. The primary meaning of racy is having a characteristically excellent taste. From this the metaphorical meaning of lively, risqué is derived. Read From the Middle English reden, to explain, hence to read, developed from the Old English raedan, to counsel, interpret, derived, in tum, from the Indo-European base (a)re-, to join, fit.

Red From the Old English read, derived from the lndo-European base reudh-, red and perhaps bloody. Reek From the Old English rec, meaning smoke or vapour. Reek was originally used to mean smoke or vapour, and therefore also blowing dust or snow. This meaning was retained into the nineteenth century. In 1854, Dickens, for example, writes of 'the reek of her own tread in the thick dust' (Hard Times). Reek is first used to mean a strong smell, the predominant meaning today, in the seventeenth century. Reflect From the Latin reflectere, to bend back. Reflect was fi.rst used to mean to divert, deflect. In the seventeenth century it acquired the meanings of to cast back light and to tum something over in one' s mind.

Rough From the Middle English rugh, derived from the Indo-European reu-, totear. Rough means having an uneven surface and, figuratively, disorderly, violent, crude. The first use of rough applied to sounds to mean discordant is recorded in 1400; of taste to mean astringent, in 1545; and of appearance to mean coarse, in 1595. Ruminate From the Latin ruminare, to chew the cud. Ruminate means to ponder, to turn over in the mind.

Sagacious From the Latin sagire, meaning to smell, to perceive acutely. Sagacious once meant acute in perception, particularly smell. Now only the meaning of acuteness of mental discernment is retained.

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Sage From the Latin sapere, to taste, know, derived from the Indo-European base sap-, to taste, perceive. Sage means wise.

Salty From the Old English sealt, salt. Salty developed the figurative meanings ofwitty and somewhat improper in the nineteenth century. Sappy From the Old English saepig, derived from the Indo-European base sap-, to taste. The primary meaning of sappy is full of sap, juice. The figurative meaning of foolish, first recorded in the seventeenth century, is based on the association of foolishness with wetness. Sapient From the Latin sapiens, wise, derived from sapere, to taste, know. Sapient means wise. Sean From the Latin scandere, to climb. Sean can mean either to look at closely or to glance at quickly. Scent From the Old French sentir, to feel, smell, based on the Latin sentire, to feel, perceive. Scent means both to smell, especially at a distance, and a smell. Scent is used figuratively to mean to find out instinctively, to detect. See From the Old English seon, derived from the Indo-European seqw-, to see, to say. The first recorded use of see to mean to perceive mentally, to understand, occurs in 1200. In 1300 see is first used to mean toread. See also has the figurative meanings of to find out (e.g. to see what can be done), to take care of (e.g. to see to one's affairs), to accompany (e.g. to see a person off), to know by observation (e.g. to see the world), and to allow (e.g. to be willing to see something take place). The expression 'let me see' is used to mean let me think, remember, find out.

Sense From the Latin sensus, meaning sense, feeling, based on the Indo-European root sent-, to go, find out. The primary meaning of sense is 'faculty of perception'. In the sixteenth century, sense also comes to mean instinctive knowledge, sensation, signification, and the mental and moral faculties, often expressed as 'interior senses'. In the seventeenth century sense acquires the meaning of judgement.

Sensible From the Latin sensibilis, derived from sentire, to feel, perceive. The original meaning of sensible was perceptible by the senses and endowed with the faculty of sensation. From the sixteenth into the

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nineteenth centuries sensible was used to mean having an acute power of sensation and in the seventeenth and eighteenth, capable of delicate and tender feelings, sensitive. In Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, for exarnple, sense, meaning good judgement, is contrasted with sensibility, meaning an acute responsiveness to aesthetic and intellectual values. The meaning of sensible predominant today, that of reasonable, judicious, carne into use in the sixteenth century. This meaning was stigmatized by Johnson in 1755 as used only 'in low conversation'.

Sensitive From the Latin sensitivus, derived from sentire, to feel, perceive. Like sensible, sensitive means perceptible by the senses and having the faculty of sensation. Sensitive was often used to refer in general to sentient beings. Swift, for exarnple, writes in Gulliver' s Travels, 'As to those filthy Yahoos ... I confess I never saw any sensitive being so detestable on all accounts'. In the nineteenth century the current meaning of having acute perception, impressionable, very responsive, carne into use. Sharp From the Old English scearp, cutting, based on the lndoEuropean (s)qereb-, to cut. The primary meaning of sharp is having a keen, cutting edge. From this the figurative sense of acute intelligence and sensory powers is derived. Sharp is first recorded used with form to mean tapering to a point in 825, with taste and smell to mean pungent or sour in 1000, with sound to mean shrill, high-pitched in 1390, and with movement to mean quick (e.g. a sharp gallop) in 1440. Sharp can also be used with colour to mean vivid. Smart From the Old English smeortan, to be painful, based on the lndoEuropean mer-, to rub, wear away. In the fourteenth century smart acquires the meaning of vigorous and brisk (e.g. a smart pace), in the seventeenth century, that of quick at learning, and in the eighteenth, that of stylish. Smell From the Middle English smellen, to emit or perceive an odour, derived from the Indo-European base smul-, to give off smoke. The first use of smell to mean to detect is recorded in the fourteenth century. In that century smell is also first used to mean to emit an offensive odour. Figuratively, to smell can mean to suggest something, as in 'to smell of trouble'. In modero slang 'to smell' means to lack worth. Smooth From the Middle English smothe. Smooth means presenting an even surface to the touch or sight and, figuratively, pleasant, affable, or

74 The senses in history

having a show of affability. Smooth is first applied to taste to mean soft and pleasing in the eighteenth century, and to sounds to mean soft, flowing, in the nineteenth. Soft From the Old English softe, meaning meek, mild, quiet, based on the Indo-European sem-, together, and therefore fitting, suited to. Soft is first recorded used with texture, to mean not hard, yielding, in 1200; with sound to mean not loud, melodious, in 1250; with movement to mean gentle, in 1290; with taste and smell to mean not pungent, pleasing, in 1398; and with colour and visual appearance to mean subdued, pleasing, in 1702.

Sour From the Middle English sur, based on the Indo-European suro-s, salty, bitter. The primary meaning of sour is a sharp, acid taste. This meaning was later extended to apply to smell as well. Figuratively sour means disagreeable, bad-tempered.

Speculate From the Latin speculari, to view. Speculate means to ponder, to conjecture, and therefore to take part in a business venture on the chance of making huge profits. Spicy From the Latin species, appearance, kind, derived from specere, to look. In late Latin species carne to mean assorted goods, and particularly spices and drugs. Spicy means having the taste or fragrance of spice. In the nineteenth century it acquired the figurative meanings of smart-looking, full of spirit, and somewhat improper. Stink From the Old English stincan, to emita smell, good or bad, derived from the lndo-European steu-, to rise up like dust, to rise. Stink is first used to mean an offensive smell in the eleventh century. In modem slang to stink means to be no good. Stupid From the Latin stupidus, meaning struck senseless, stunned. Stupid originally meant insensible and then carne to mean slow-witted. Suave From the Latin suavis, sweet, agreeable. Suave was originally used to mean pleasing to the senses or mind, sweet. In 1849, Charlotte Bronte, for exarnple, writes of oat cakes tasting as 'suave as manna' (Shirley). Suave is now used to mean smoothly gracious, urbane.

Sweet From the Old English swete, derived from the lndo-European

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swad-, pleasing to the taste. Meaning primarily tasting of sugar, pleasing to the taste, sweet developed the related meanings of pleasing to the senses of smell and hearing very early on. The use of sweet to mean pleasing to the sight is a later development, occuring in the fourteenth century.

Tact From the Latin tactus, meaning the sense of touch. Tact was originally used to mean the sense of touch. In the eighteenth century the figurative meaning of having a delicate sense of the proper thing to do or say carne into use.

Tang From the Middle English tange, meaning a sharp point, stinging. From this sense the meaning of a penetrating taste developed in the fifteenth century. Tang was first applied to odour to mean sharp, strong, in the nineteenth century.

Tart From the Old English teart, meaning painful, sharp, derived from the lndo-European base der-, to flay, split. Tart means sharp in taste and, figuratively, sharp in meaning. Taste From the Middle English tasten, to feel, derived from the Latin taxare, to feel, touch sharply, judge. Taste could refer to the sense of touch into the fifteenth century, and also had the meaning of a trial, test. The first recorded use of taste to mean savour occurs in the fourteenth century. In the fifteenth century taste acquired the figurative meaning of a preference, a mental sense of discrimination. In the seventeenth century, taste also carne to mean an aesthetic sense capable of discerning the beautiful (i.e. good taste). Theory From the Greek theoria, meaning contemplation, a thing looked at, derived from theorein, to look at, speculate. Theory originally meant a mental viewing, contemplation. From this arose the meaning of a mental plan and hence a formulation of underlying principies.

Tone From the Latín tonus, a sound, derived from the Greek tonos meaning a stretching. Tone is used primarily to mean a modulation of sound. It can also mean normal resiliency, as in muscle tone, and in painting, the effect produced by combined light, shade and colour.

Touch From the Late Latin toccare, meaning to knock, derived from tok, a light blow, of echoic origin. Touch means both to perceive by the sense of feeling and to bring something into contact with something else.

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Figuratively, touch can mean to draw, colour (e.g. to touch a sky with red), to compare with (e.g. my drawings can't touch hers), to concem (e.g. a matter that touches us), to arouse sympathy in (e.g. she was touched by bis plea), and to mention (e.g. to touch on a subject).

Understand From the Middle English understanden. Understand literally meaos to stand under or among, and hence to know thoroughly, to perceive the meaning of something. Warm From the Middle English wearm, derived from the lndo-European base gwher-. hot. From its basic meaning of having a moderate degree of heat, warm can figuratively mean both angry, characterized by disagreement, as in a 'warm argument', and cordial, enthusiastic, as in a 'warm welcome'. In the eighteenth century warm is first applied to scent to mean strong, and to colour to mean having a red or yellow bue. White From the Old English hwit, derived from the lndo-European base kweit-, to gleam, be pale. White has the figurative meaning of innocent (e.g. a white lie). Wise From the Middle English wis, derived from the lndo-European base weid-, to see, know. Wise conveys the meaning of judicious, knowledgeable. Wit From the Middle English witte, derived from the Indo-European base weid-, to see, know. Wit originally meant the mind and the faculty of thought, and then was applied to the senses, called the five wits. Its current meaning is the ability to make clever, ironical remarks. Write From the Old English writan, meaning to scratch, score, hence to write, derived from the lndo-European base wer-, totear off, scratch. Yellow From the Old English geolo, derived from the lndo-European base ghel-, to gleam, to be green or yellow. Yellow has the figurative meanings of cowardly and sensationalistic.

Part 11

The senses across cultures

Chapter 4

The odour of the other Olfactory codes and cultural categories

This chapter looks at a variety of ways in which social categories are constructed and conveyed by olfactory codes in different cultures. The importance of olfactory symbolism in the West and elsewhere has been brought out by a number of recent works 1 which have examined aspects of such symbolism within specific societies. Nonetheless, the subject is still one which remains largely overlooked and uninvestigated by anthropologists and scholars of culture. By exploring the ways in which olfactory symbolism is used to express themes of identity and difference in diverse cultures, including that of the West, I hope to show here the extent to which olfactory codes pervade classificatory thought, not only in 'exotic' highly olfactory-conscious societies, but even in our own, rather 'deodorized' society. To this end I will bring together examples of such symbolism from a wide variety of cultures. At the same time, the examination of how odours are used to categorize 'others' in different societies, provides an important insight, or better, 'inscent', into the construction of concepts of 'oneness' and 'otherness', and their basic similarities and differences across cultures.

THE ODOUR OF THE OTHER Odours and class The ascription of different characteristic odours to different races and different social groups is a universal trait and one which has a certain empirical basis: body odours can differ among ethnic groups, due partly to the different foods consumed and partly to genetic factors. 2 While ali peoples give off odours, however, most people are so accustomed to their own personal and group scents as to not be aware of them and only notice the odours of others. Edmund Carpenter, for instance, reports the

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following interchange from bis anthropological fieldwork among the Inuit: One day when Kowanerk [an Inuit woman] and I were alone, she looked up from the boot she was mending to ask, without preamble, 'Do we smell?' 'Yes.' 'Does the odor offend you?' 'Yes.' She sewed in silence for a while, then said, 'You smell and it's offensive to us. We wondered if we smelled and if it offended you.' 3 The widespread role of odour as a marker of social identity and difference led one early twentieth-century scientist to hypothesize that olfactory affinities and antipathies are an important means of group preservation.4 Whether this is true or not, the odour of the other does in fact often serve as a scapegoat for certain antipathies towards the other. 5 This principie can be found to operate when members of one culture attribute an exaggeratedly offensive odour to members of another culture for whom they feel an animosity for unrelated reasons. In the anti-Semitic Europe of the Middle Ages, for example, it was believed by many that Jews emitted a reek so horrible that they could only rid themselves of it by Christian baptism or by drinking the blood of a Christian child! 6 Blacks have also traditionally been assigned a foul odour by mainstream Western culture, evidenced both in descriptions by early European anthropologists of the 'stench' of Africans, 7 and in white stereotypes of 'repulsive-smelling' blacks in the American South. John Dollard writes in Coste and Class in a Southern Town: Among beliefs which profess to show that Negro and white people cannot intimately participate in the same civilization is the perennial one that Negroes have a smell extremely disagreeable to white people ... White people generally regard this argument as a crushing final proof of the impossibility of close association between the races. 8 White Westemers, in tum, are often, to their surprise, perceived as foul-smelling by members of other cultures and races. 9 It is evident in most such cases that the stench ascribed to the other is far less a response to an actual perception of the odour of the other than a potent metaphor for the social decay it is feared the other, often simply by virtue of its being 'other', will cause in the established order. On a small scale we say that something or someone 'stinks' when it or they disagree with our notion of propriety, on a large scale we apply this

The odour of the other 81

metaphor to whole groups of people. Therefore, while we may feel an antipathy towards something or someone because its or their odour offends us, we may equally ascribe an offensive odour to something because we feel an antipathy for it (or indeed the two elements may operate simultaneously so as to reinforce each other). The use of olfactory symbolism as a means of expressing and regulating cultural identity and difference is found in a great many societies. A particularly well-elaborated example of the olfactory classification of different social groups is provided by the Tukano-speaking tribes of the Colombian Amazon. 10 According to this Amazonian culture, all members of a tribe share the same general body odour which is said to mark the territory of the tribe in the same way that animals mark their territories through odour. This territorial odour is calledmahsá ser{ri, and has the metaphorical meaning of 'sympathy' or 'tribal feeling' . 11 The specific odour of each tribal group is considered to be caused by the different foods it customarily eats. Thus, it is said of the intermarrying Desana, Pira-Tapuya and Tukano tribes that the Desana, who are hunters, smell of meat, the Pira-Tapuya, associated with fishing, smell of fish, and the Tukano, associated with agriculture, of roots. lt is held to be possible to recognize the distinct 'odour trails' laid down by these different exogamic groups within the general communal territory. 12 Indeed, when travelling from one region to another, members ofthese tribes continually sniff the air and remark on the different territorial and tribal odours. 13 These distinct group odours all have different symbolic associations which serve to order the interaction between one tribe and another. 14 Odour thus functions in this Amazonian society as a marker of tribal identity and territory, andas a regulator of intertribal relations. The establishment of social boundaries through recourse to olfactory markers can take place within communities as well as between them. It is common, for instance, for the dominant class in a society to characterize itself as pleasant-smelling, or inodorate, and the subordinate class as foul-smelling. In ancient Greece, for example, Socrates opposed the use of perfume by men on the principie that it masked the natural olfactory distinctions between freemen and slaves: 'If you perfume a slave anda freeman, the difference of their birth produces none in the smell; and the scent is perceived as soon in the one as in the other.' 15 In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, the principal olfactory distinction was between the upper class, who lived in a clean, inodorate or fragrant environment and used light delicate scents, and the working class, who lived in a dirty, foul-smelling environment, and used heavy coarse scents. Somerset Maugham wrote in 1927:

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In the West we are divided from our fellows by our sense of smell ... I do not blame the working man because he stinks, but stink he does. It malees social intercourse difficult to persons of a sensitive nostril. 16 George Orwell likewise argued that the 'real secret of class distinctions in the West' could be 'summed up in four frightful words ... The lower c/asses sme/1' .17 It is odour, according to Orwell, which serves to malee the class barrier impassable: Race-hatred, religious hatred, differences of education, of temperament, of intellect, even differences of moral code, can be got over; but physical repulsion cannot. 18 The social hierarchy of smell described by Maugham and Orwell is also evidenced in the imaginative literature of the period. In My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell, for example, the superfine sensibility of an aristocrat is described in terms of her olfactory preferences: The choice of odours was what my lady piqued herself upon, saying nothing showed birth like a keen susceptibility of smell. We never named musk in her presence . . . her opinion on the subject was believed to be, that no scent derived from an animal could ever be of a sufficiently pure nature to give pleasure to any person of good family. 19 Indeed, even musky-scented flowers were suspect. If a suitor of one of Lady Ludlow's maids appeared wearing an offending sprig in bis buttonhole, 'she was afraid that he liked coarse pleasures, and I am not sure if she did not think that bis preference for this coarse sweetness did not imply a probability that he would talee to drinking'. 20 If the olfactory delicacy of the upper class was due to the fineness of its sense of smell, the olfactory promiscuity indulged in by the working class was reputed to be the result of a dull sense of smell. As a Victorian perfumer explains: Among the lower orders, bad smells are little heeded; in fact, 'noses have they, but they smell not'; and the result is, a continuance to live in an atmosphere ladeo with poisonous odours, whereas anyone with the least power of smelling retained shuns such odours, as they would anything else that is vile or pemicious. 21 As these citations malee plain, the working classes' apparent proclivity for 'disreputable' odours was considered an index of their propensity for all else that was disreputable. As is also evident, these olfactory class

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distinctions were not thought to be based on mere social circumstance, but rather on fundamental differences in the quality of the sense of smell itself between the classes. The odour of the proletarian other in nineteenth-century Europe was often real enough: many workers did reek of the filthy conditions in which they lived and worked. 22 The disapprobation accorded this reek by the middle and upper classes, however, was as mucha product of certain social sensibilities as of natural olfactory sensibilities. Orwell, for example, admits as much by saying that 'even "lower class" people whom you knew to be quite clean - servants, for instance - were faintly unappetising. The smell of their sweat, the very texture of their skins, were mysteriously different from yours. ' 23 lndeed, in previous centuries members of the European aristocracy had reeked just as much as anyone. The typical stench of the elaborate wigs affected by the eighteenth-century nobility, for instance, led one English writer of the time to comment that he had had 'the honour of smelling in the most unsavoury manner very many heads of the first rank',24 'rank' wittily conveying here both class and reek. So closely associated were certain 'foul' odours with the nobility of the day, that, according to the contemporary playwright, Sebastien Chamfort, one provincial gentleman, on returning home from Versailles, ordered bis servants to urinate around bis manor so that bis home would acquire the same aristocratic aroma as that famed court. 25 Thus while certain odours, such as that of urine, tend to be universally disliked, cultural norms can make these odours a matter of indifference or even of appeal. Just as 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder', so 'fragrance is in the nose of the smeller'. With this in mind, let us tum to the rigorous olfactory class division effected by the Dassanetch of Southwestem Ethiopia. The Dassanetch divide themselves into cattle-raising pastoralists and fishermen. As cattle are of pre-eminent practical and symbolic importance for the Dassanetch, pastoralists are regarded as greatly superior to fishermen. Each of these two social groups is identified with the odour of the species of animal it depends on for its livelihood. The Dassanetch, in fact, believe that humans are naturally inodorate and that their odours are acquired through contact with their particular environments.26 The value accorded cattle by the Dassanetch is such that the smell of everything associated with cattle is considered good, and the pastoralists do all they can to augment their identification with this prestigious odour: They often wash their hands in cattle urine; men smear manure on their

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bodies to advertise the fertility of their herds; and nubile girls and fertile women smear ghee [liquid butter] on their shoulders, heads, hair and bosoms to ensure fertility ... The Dassanetch explicitly say that the smell of ghee serves to attract men and is the 'perfume', so to speale, of women. 27 While other odours, such as those offlowers, are also considered good by the Dassanetch, the odour of cattle has the added characteristic of serving as a marker of group identity for the pastoralists. 28 As pastoralists are identified with the odour of cattle in Dassanetch society, so fishermen and their families are identified with the odour of fish. Unlike cattle, however, fish are symbolically suspect: they are considered to exist outside the natural cycles of weather and sexuality, so fundamental to the well-being and procreation of cattle. Fish, and the fishermen who are associated with them, are therefore said by the pastoralists to be foul-smelling. 29 The supposed acyclical nature of fish malees their odour particularly noxious for, 'unlike other bad smells, which come and go, stimulate awareness, and evaporate, the bad smell of fish is a kind of stagnation and is permanently connected with [fishermen] '.30 This belief in the foul odour of fishermen is so strongly held by the 'upper-class' pastoralists that they will hold their noses when walking by fishermen's huts. Although a certain amount of interchange talees place between the two groups, usually to the advantage of the pastoralists, the social and olfactory barriers between them are so rigidly established as to prevent any merging of identities. 31 lt is noteworthy that for most outsiders the smell of the Dassanetch pastoralists, perfumed with butter, manure and cattle urine, would probably be more repellent than that of the fishermen, who apparently do not malee any special effort to give themselves a piscine odour. Nonetheless, the social and olfactory codes of Dassanetch society state definitively that pastoralists are good-smelling and fishermen badsmelling. Evidently, here again the standards of olfactory classification are being strongly influenced by cultural considerations. The odour of cattle is held to be superior to that of fish by the Dassanetch because cattle are considered superior to fish. The odour of pastoralists, who are identified with cattle and form the elite within Dassanetch society, is therefore considered good, while that of fishermen, who are identified with the inferior fish, is considered bad. The odour of the fisherman other is classified as foul by the dominant pastoralists, however, not only because fish and fishermen constitute an 'inferior' and 'alíen' group, but also - as seems to be the rule in such

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cases - because the pastoralists perceive them as threatening decay within their own community. 32 For the pastoralists, the world of fish and fishermen, independent as it apparently is from periodic cycles, represents a world without order which can disrupt the orderly cycles on which their own bovine world depends. The pastoralists' repugnance to the odour of fish and fishermen is thus above ali a repugnance to the disorder which it represents. This repugnance is heightened by the fear that disorder, like odour, has the ability to transgress boundaries. The pastoralists, for example, believe that 'the bad smell of fishermen can infect the cattle'. 33 The fact that the two groups are not entirely separate but constitute one interdependent community probably only increases the pastoralists' concern to safeguard their own identity and social structure from external forces of corruption. Even within the general order of a society, therefore, certain peoples can represent disorder from the perspective of the dominant class andas a result be attributed the foul smell of decay. Another, more complex, example of a society which distinguishes between its own members through a symbolic system based on odour is provided by the Suya of the Brazilian Mato Grosso. The Suya use three principal odour classes for symbolic purposes: bland-smelling, pungentsmelling, and strong-smelling. Adult men who live in the men's house in the village plaza constitute the dominant group in Suya society and are classified as bland-smelling or inodorate. Old men and women are classified as pungent-smelling, boys and girls as strong-smelling, and women as very strong-smelling. 34 Women, in fact, are referred to as 'our rotten-smelling property' by Suya men. 35 These odour classes stand for degrees of culture and socialization, with a bland smell signifying the highest degree of culture, and a strong smell the lowest degree. This olfactory classificatory system thus establishes menas the best exemplars of social order, and women as the worst. 36 Menare said to have a bland odour, according to this system, because the male community of the men's house constitutes the ideal society in Suya culture. Women are assigned a very strong odour because they are said to distract men from their ideal social life centred in the men' s house, and because their fertility associates them with nature - the antithesis of society. Old women are presumably less strong-smelling because they are no longer attractive tomen and no longer fertile. The reason why old men are said to be pungent-smelling is because the relaxation of cultural restrictions in old age malees old men more 'natural' and less social. Children are classified as strong-smelling because they are not yet fully socialized. 37 Tribal leaders constitute another group within Suya society classified

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by odour; they are said to be very pungent or even strong-smelling. 38 If a strong smell symbolizes the anti-social, however, why should a tribal leader, the head of society, be considered strong-smelling? The Suya say that the tribal leader is less socially complete than other men because bis spirit resides with sorne species of animal or plant. 39 As in the case of women, therefore, this association with nature is perceived as constituting a threat to society which is symbolized through odour. Another reason for the pungent odour attributed to leaders would seem to be that their unique status within an otherwise confonnist society renders them anomalies, capable of disturbing the ideal of social unifonnity. 40 By being at the head of society, tribal leaders are, to sorne extent, outside the main body of society. Perhaps most importantly, however, tribal leaders are classified as pungent-smelling because they are powerful. Toe Suya here apply a principie they derive from their knowledge of the animal world: the most powerful animals also have the strongest odour. Tribal leaders are, in fact, compared to jaguars, which are said to be powerful, dangerous and odorous. 41 Thus the association between a strong odour and power implicit in many other cultures where those groups which appear to threaten the stability of the dominant class are characterized as strongsmelling, is explicit in Suya culture. The odour of the other in these cases signifies not only the disorder of the other, but also the power of the other to cause disorder. Toe Suya offer an instance of a society in which the odours attributed to different groups are largely symbolic. Most people, for example, would consider men to have a stronger odour than boys. Por the Suya, because mildness of odour symbolizes social centrality and men are the most socially central group, the reverse holds true. The relationship of body odour to social integration in Suya culture is brought out in the male initiation rite, which takes place when a boy reaches puberty. This rite, which serves to transfonn unsocialized boys into socialized men, is said by the Suya to reduce the strong odour of boys into the bland odour of men. 42 Toe use of olfactory tenns to indicate social status is evidently of much greater cultural importance to the Suya than any classification of natural distinctions of human body odours would be.

Women, nature, and foreigners The strong odour attributed to women by the Suya is characteristic of many male-centred societies in which, from the dominant male perspective, women are the excluded and feared other. In such societies

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it is often women's odour of menstruation which is singled out as particularly foul-smelling. The highly olfactory-conscious and maledominated Tukano-speaking tribes of the Amazon, for instance, consider the odour of menstrual blood the most offensive and polluting of all odours. lt is said to attract soalces and other venomous animals and to harm food crops and game animals. 43 The Tukano believe that a menstruating women 'stands quite outside of culture, and has become a receptive she-animal which exposes society to shame and pollutions'. 44 Menstruation, as a kind of 'break-up of the bodily structure' would seem, by analogy, to threaten the stability of the social body. The odour of menstruation is thus the odour of anti-culture, and it signals women's dangerous ability to undermine the structures of society. In pre-modem Europe, menstruation and its odour were accorded similarly destructive and anti-cultural properties; for example, the ability to render fields barren, mirrors dim, iron rusty, and dogs mad.45 This antipathy to the odour of menstruation, however, while common to many cultures, is by no means universal. The Dassanetch, for instance, say that menstrual blood has no smell, or a neutral smell, and they regard it as a necessary part of the cycles of nature, like rain. Menstruation is, in fact, called 'the rain of a woman'. For the Dassanetch, it is post-menopausal women who are foul-smelling; such women are said to smell of fish. If one recalls that the odour of fish symbolizes the disorderly non-cyclical world in which fish are thought to live in Dassanetch culture, then it becomes evident that the odour of fish attributed to old women refers to their similar separation from the orderly world of natural cycles. The odours ascribed to women, therefore, vary according to the different preoccupations of particular cultures. 46 While, as a general class, women are often characterized as foulsmelling in male-dominated societies, different attitudes towards different 'types' of womanhood may be expressed through a more complex system of olfactory symbolism. The three-fold categorization of women as (1) sluts or prostitutes, (2) maidens, wives or mothers, and (3) seductresses, prevalent in Western tradition, for example, has a corresponding olfactory classification. Sluts and prostitutes are identified with stench. The Spanish term for a whore, puta, in fact, is based on the Latín word for putrid, as are similar terms in other modem Latín languages. This stench is the metaphorical product of prostitutes • and sluts • failure to regulate their bodies in accordance with cultural norms and it signals their symbolically polluted and polluting status. The seventeenth-century poet John Donne thus writes that

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the seely Amorous [frail lover] sucks bis death By drawing in a leprous harlots breath. 47 In the eighteenth century, a French sanitary reformer noted that prostitutes disappeared along with foul odours after the drains of Florence were covered and the streets cleaned and strewn with odoriferous flowers, 48 a manifest association between corrupt women and corrupt odours. Maidens, wives and mothers, as exemplars of cultural norms, tend to be identified with pleasant, non-threatening odours - in the case of wives and mothers, the odour of food, perhaps, and in that of maidens, the odour ofinnocuous flowers. 49 The association between maidens and fragrance, in fact, is so ubiquitous as to constitute a commonplace in Western culture, and undoubtedly has a great deal to do with the high valorization of female virginity in Christian tradition. Old maids, however, constituting a social anomaly and a threat to the reproductive power of society, are more likely to be accorded a stale or sour odour. Seductresses resemble prostitutes in their lack of sexual morals. They differ from them in that, whereas prostitutes tend to be characterized as ugly, promiscuous and unlovable, seductresses are beautiful, discriminating and (while heartless themselves) heartbreakers (femmes fatales). In the olfactory scheme of things, seductresses are associated with heavily sweet and spicy odours; the sweetness of the scent signifying their beauty and attraction, and the spiciness and heaviness their exotic status and overwhelmimg powers of fascination. Put on your silks; and piece by piece Give them the scent of Amber-Greece: And for your breaths too, let them smell Ambrosia-like, or Nectarell wrote Robert Herrick in the seventeenth century in a poem entitled 'To bis Mistresses'. so Cleopatra and Marie Antoinette are classic examples of the scented seductress, while modern examples are provided by perfume-vending models and film stars. Sluts and seductresses, taken to their extremes, become witches and enchantresses in Western lore, with the disruptive powers of the former magnified into the supernatural powers of the latter. The qualities and odours attributed to the witch and the enchantress are likewise those of the prostitute and the seductress magnified. The following quotation, from a nineteeth-century book on mysticism, illustrates the association commonly made between the impure sexuality of the witch and her impure odour:

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[Witches] exhale a stench from the mouth, the whole body, which is cornmunicated to their garments and fills their houses and the vicinity and infects those who approach. We can attribute this to the secretion of a malodorous animal oíl, within the organism, arising from the impure ardors which consume them. 51 In the dialect of the Pyrenees, indeed, the word for witch, poudoueros, is derived from the Latín for putrid, justas are colloquial terms for prostitute in Southern Europe.52 The enchantress, on the other hand, who is as attractive as the witch is repulsive, exhales an irresistible, bewitching perfume. One Elizabethan clergyman compares such sexual sorceresses to panthers, believed by the ancients to attract ali other animals by their sweet breath: for as the Panthers by their sweet smels drawe the beasts unto them and then destroy them, so also do Harlots deck and adorn themselves with ali alluring provocations, as it were with inchanted odors, to draw men unto them, of whom they make spoil and rapine. 53 The association between the archetype of the enchantress and sweet, evil scents penetrates our modern consciousness through the marketing of perfumes with names such as 'Black Magic' and 'Poison', and through folklore and popular fiction. In the children's book by C.S. Lewis, The Si/ver Chair, for instance, the beautiful and evil Queen of the Underland attempts to keep a Prince of the Overworld captive through the use of magical scents: She [took out] a handful of a green powder. This she threw on the fire. It did not blaze much, but a very sweet and drowsy smell carne from it. And ali through the conversation which followed, that smell grew stronger, and filled the room, and made it harder to think. 54 The extraordinary powers of the witch and the enchantress render them dangerous to society as a whole, but particularly to men. In passages highly symbolic of male concerns over losing their cultural dominance to powerful women, one major medieval tract on sorcery, The Malleus Ma/eficarum, recounts how a man discovered that bis genitals had disappeared soon after he had been spurned by a young woman (evidently a witch), and how witches kept male organs imprisoned in boxes and nests. 55 The repulsiveness of the odours and other physical qualities attributed to the witch, and the attractiveness of those associated with the enchantress, suggest a simultaneous Ioathing and desire on the part of mento lose themselves in the feminine other.

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Toe cultural and olfactory categories outlined aboved are, of course, not absolute nor mutually exclusive - prostitutes can be mothers; wives, and indeed all women, can be witches. (In fact, many of the deeds witches were commonly accused of, such as rendering fields and cattle barren, were the same as the effects menstruating women were thought to cause.) Even sweet-smelling maidens are still, from another perspective, foulsmelling women who need to render themselves inoffensive through the use of deodorants. While these categories are not hard and fast nor explicity stated, they are, however, so embedded in Western folklore as to be familiar to any Westerner. Perhaps because men do not constitute an 'other' in Western tradition, this olfactory classification of women does not have a comparable male counterpart. In the West and elsewhere, olfactory symbolism often serves to express an association between the otherness of women and the otherness of nature. The Tukano, for instance, say that menstruating women are 'she-animals', attracting dangerous animals and spirits with their 'feral' odours. In turn, certain animals are said by the Tukano to resemble women; peccaries, for instance, 'are compared to savage forest women, foul smelling, always foraging and grunting, and openly promiscuous'. 56 The Suya explicitly state that women are the least social of human beings because they are the closest to nature. Toe strong smell attributed to women by the Suya is a sign ofthis identification with the 'otherness' of the natural world. In the West, the association ofthe odour ofwomen with that of nature is evidenced not only in the commonplace association of women with flowers, but also in allusions to the 'animality' of women, particularly non-conformist women. An example of this is found in the passage cited above in which the stench of the witch is said to be due to a 'malodorous animal oil' within the witch's body. The olfactory classification of women in male-dominated societies defines women' s otherness in relation to the centrality of men. Similarly, the olfactory classification of nature defines the otherness of the natural world from the perspective ofthe human world in many cultures. lndeed, in the West, the lore surrounding the gathering and preparation of scents themselves often describes a mythic passage from the savagery of nature to culture. The spices which played such a fundamental role in ancient Greek culture, for example, were reputed to be found in inaccessible locations surrounded by dangerous animals. According to tradition, the gathering of these spices was possible only through ruses of one sort or another by the human collectors. Cinnamon sticks, for instance, were believed to be found in the nests of great birds built on precipitous crags. The cinnamon

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collectors were said to leave carcasses of large animals for the birds to take to their nests so that the nests would break under the weight of the carcasses and fall to the ground, whereupon the collectors would gather up the sticks of ciMamon. 57 Spices thus enter the human world through a human defeat of nature. In the modem West, a similar tradition regarding the gathering of musk can be found. In The Science and Art o/ Perfumery, published in 1945, we read: The method of killing the [musk) deer is of more than passing interest. Since the animal is fast on foot, the use of dogs would be impossible ... But the deer has been endowed by nature with a keen sense of melody, a love for harmony, and the hunter, taking out bis flute, suddenly breaks the stillness with stirring music. The musically inclined deer comes closer to the spot from which the melody is emanating, and this proves bis undoing. 58 As with spices in Greek mythology, musk is obtained by the defeat of the animal other through human cunning. Musk, however, coming from a pseudo-anal gland ofthe deer, is in its pure form repulsive-smelling to most humans. In fact, it was once believed that 'the odor of the musk deer's abdomen ... killed the foolhardy hunter who failed to hold bis nose before approaching bis prey' .59 Only when it is diluted does the odour of musk become tolerable. The same holds true for civet, obtained from the scent gland of the civet cat. Why would such animal odours be used by humans? The reason lies in part in the symbolic meanings attached to such odours. The Dassanetch pastoralists anoint themselves with the odour of cattle because in their society cattle signify cultural order. In our society we anoint ourselves with musk and civet because such odours signify natural vitality. Thus, while the strong smell associated with animals signals their 'otherness', their dangerous opposition to human society, it is at the same time a sign of their participation in the power of nature, from which humans have alienated themselves. By appropriating (diluted) animal scents, humans hope to acquire sorne of the powers atnibuted to animals, particularly with regard to sexual attraction, while remaining within the structures of society. The symbolic logic informing this appropriation of the odour of the animal other is manifested in a quotation from The Science and Art o/ Perfumery: 'Seldom in the history of science is there an example of man' s magical transformation of the ugly to the beautiful such as is found in the use of animal scents in perfumes.' 60 According to this logic, then, the use of animal odours in perfume involves the magical transformation of an

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ugly, natural object into a beautiful cultural product. As usual, no attempt is made to consider the matter from the other side - in this case, that of the animal. As an object, the other has no concems with which one need concem oneself. Its importance lies solely in the extent to which it may affect or be used by oneself. The olfactory classification of nature in the West resembles that of women, exhibiting a similar tripartite structure. In general, cultivated or controllable nature - fields, gardens, woods, etc. - is thought to have a pleasant, refreshing smell. Wild nature, in contrast, tends be associated either with stench or with strong sweet or spicy odours. The jungle, the quintessential symbol of wild nature, for example, might be presented as reeking of animals and rot, oras redolent with the scents of exotic flowers. In either case, the odours are overwhelming for 'civilized' humans and dangerously conducive to 'savagery'. For this reason, in Victorian novels scenes of seduction were often placed amid the concentrated scents of the exotic flowers of the hothouse. 61 This symbolic classification of certain types of wild nature as putridsmelling or overly-sweet-smelling, which also applies to 'wild women' such as prostitutes and seductresses, holds for foreigners as well - 'wild humans', who can be characterized as putrid, as we have seen, or perfumed. In the West, those foreigners who were accorded the foulest odours were generally those who were deemed to be 'savages'.62 Those foreigners who were characterized as perfumed tended to come from India or the Middle-East, and undoubtedly this characterization has a great deal to do with the traditional provenance of spices from those regions,63 and the traditional placement of sweet-scented Paradise in the East. Fragrant foreigners, however, tend to be just as much an object of mistrust as foul foreigners, as their fragrance not only signifies disruptive othemess in itself, but also deceit, seductive power and self-indulgent hedonism. This stereotype of the fragrant foreigner can be found in popular romances (for example, Beckford's History of the Caliph Vathek of 1786 and Moore's Lalla Rookh of 1817), and children's stories (e.g. C.S. Lewis' The Horse and his Boy).64 It would seem that, in the West at least, foreigners, women, and nature, as different varieties of 'othemess', tend to be typed according to a basic olfactory chart whereby the repulsive aspect of the other is conveyed through the symbolism of corrupting stench, and the seductive aspect through the symbolism of corrupting fragrance. 65 Only in so far as the other is perceived as complying with cultural norms can it be attributed a pleasant, relatively innocuous odour.

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The following passage, from Aromatics and the Soul by Dan McKenzie, neatly describes a series of early twentieth-century English olfactory stereotypes such as we have been discussing: Our modern theatre . . . has not yet risen to anything higher than a continuous discharge of incense during spectacular dramas depicting the (theatrical) East. Why not go further? Think how the appeal of a love-scene would be strengthened by an invisible cloud of roses blown into the house through the ventilating shafts! The villain would be heralded by an olfactory motif of a brimstony flavour mingled, if he was of the usual swarthy countenance, with a soupron of garlic. The hero, well groomed and clean-limbed, would waft a delicate suggestion of Brown Windsor to the love-sick maidens in the dress circle. Toe heavy father would radiate snuff with his red pocket-handkerchief. The large-eyed foreign adventuress would permeate the auditorium on wings of patchouli. The dear broken-hearted old mother would disseminate that most respectable of perfumes (for there is a caste-system among smells) eau de Cologne. 66 Here we have the swarthy foreign villain smelling of foul sulphur and garlic, the foreign seductress of spicy patchouli, the respectable mother of respectable eau de Cologne, and so on, in keeping with the traditional olfactory codes of the West. Another olfactory classification we have not yet examined in depth is that of inodorate. While a lack of odours is generally associated with cleanliness, in certain cases it signifies barrenness and insensibility as well, as in the examples of the empty desert and the unfeeling woman. Thus in one French tale in which flowers are transformed into women, the Camelia is told 'You are beautiful, Madam, but you have none of the true perfume of beauty which is known as love.' 67 This symbol of inodorateness is used to sorne extent to classify men in the modern West as 'clean' and 'no-nonsense', shunning the frivolity of perfume. In an attempt to overcome the modern male' s suspicion of scent, advertisements for perfume for men play on images of both male sensuality and male sensitivity.68 Interestingly, the use ofperfume by men, once widespread in the West, declined with the rise of the machine at the time of the Industrial Revolution. 69 It might be that, formen to enter into the new world of the mechanical other, they had to renounce the fragrances which are metaphorically antithetical to the symbolic inodorateness of the barren, insensible machine. This metaphorical opposition between fragrance and

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machinery may also explain in part why our modem media (such as television and computers) are so tellingly devoid of odours. In any case, machines are classified as inodorate in Western culture not only because they in fact tend to be made of materials which give off little odour, but because their sterility malees them symbo/ica/ly inodorate. 70 Nothing more absurd than a perfumed machine. The robot is neither fragrant nor foul. Its othemess is the othemess not simply of anti-culture, but of anti-life.

Odours and the supernatural Thus far we have examined sorne of the olfactory symbolism applied to the human other, the natural other and the mechanical other. The one primary type of othemess which remains is the supematural other. Although the inorganic nature typically attributed to supematural beings would seem to argue for their being odourless, such beings are as often as not characterized by odours in the traditions conceming them. In many cases this is likely due in part to an association between the 'airiness' attributed to spirits and the 'airiness' of odours. More significantly, however, odours, along with a variety of other physical characteristics, are commonly used to signify the moral qualities attributed to supematural beings. Thus evil spirits are said to emitan 'evil' odour in cultures the world over, while good spirits emit 'good' odours. The Bororo of Brazil, for example, classify the two basic types of spirits in their cosmology by odour. The negatively perceived spirits of transformation, the hope, are said to give off a strong putrid odour, while the positively perceived spirits of structure, the aroe, are said to have a sweet smell.71 In the West, devils are traditionally said to smell of brimstone, or sulphur, and angels and holy beings of ravishingly sweet odours. This association of good spirits with fragrance would seem to offer one example of a case in which the strong scent accorded to the other has a primarily positive valuation. Unlike the fragrance of the enchantress, for example, which works to the smeller's harm, the fragrance of the good spirit works to the smeller's good. The battle which takes place between good and evil forces in different religious traditions is sometimes associated with a battle between 'good' and 'evil' odours. Among the Shipibo-Conibo of Peru, evil spirits are said to try and pervert the beneficia! power of the 'good-smelling • songs sung by the shaman in the context of the healing ritual, by singing 'evil-smelling' songs of gasoline, fish-poison, menstrual blood and so on. 72 In sorne cultures spirits and odours are so closely identified as to

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seem one and the same. The jinn of the Muslim world, for instance, are popularly believed to live in dung-heaps and to harm humans by their evil odours.73 The Warao of Venezuela hold that odours are independent beings: foul odours originate in the land of the dead located in the West and fragrant odours with the god of life in the East. Odours are said to travel in the wind and attach themselves to certain beings and places. 74 When a foul odour attaches itself to a person the result is an illness which must be cured by administering remedial fragrant odours: Once it has obtained access to the body, a therapeutic innoxious and fragrant odour detaches itself from its vehicle of transmission and diffuses throughout the body region permeated by fetid air. Curing is achieved by the interaction of the two gases and the expulsion through the portholes of the body of the fetid air by the 'denser' fragrant air. 75 In such a culture, odours do not merely characterize others, but are

themselves others. The association between stench and death found among the Warao is common to many societies in which death and the dead are accorded a foul odour. The origin of death, in fact, is attributed in one way or another to a foul odour in many traditions. The Uduk of Sudan say that originally people resurrected from the grave. This immortality was lost when a woman, newly risen from the grave, was rejected by her neigbours because ofher stench and in consequence her angry mother burned down the tree connecting heaven and earth. 76 Likewise, in a myth of the Shipaya of Brazil, death comes into existence when humans reject a basket of rotten meat containing immortality. The Kraho of Brazil, however, say that death was originally caused by humans succumbing to the stench of aquatic spirits. 77 In this last case it is the odour of the other which causes death, in the first two cases death is caused by the rejection of the odour of the other. In any case, immortality is made irrevocably 'other' for humans by their antipathy to stench. The anointing of corpses, particularly mummies, with perfume in many cultures can be interpreted in part as an attempt to overcome mortality by transforming the foul odour of death into fragrance, otherness into oneness. 78 The association of the stench of decay with the horrors of death, disease and dissolution is undoubtedly basic to the almost universal dislike of putrid odours. The strong smell and terrifying 'otherness' of the corpse might well furnish the basic model for according a foul odour to disturbing others of many kinds. Consequently, the foul smell attributed to the spirits of the dead among the Uduk79 is due both to the association of such spirits with corpses and to their anti-cultural otherness.

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Toe Batek Negrito of Peninsular Malaysia say that the sun has a foul odour because it travels through the putrid underworld of the dead at night. Symbolically, however, the foul odour of the sun is due not so much to the sun's association with corpses, as to its negative perception among the Batek Negrito, who deem the heat of the sun to be unhealthy. Significantly, the moon, which is said to pass through the underworld during the day, but which is accorded the culturally desirable quality of coolness, is said to be fragrant. 80 Thus olfactory symbolism is used to morally code the cosmos, as well as the human world.

WHEN ONE BECOMES OTHER In Gulliver' s Travels, when Gulliver retums home from bis voyages, he finds that he cannot abide the odour of bis family. Even after having been home for five years, Gulliver can still barely tolerate the smell of other humans. He states: I began last week to permit my wife to sit at dinner with me, at the farthest end of a long table ... Yet the smell of a [human] continuing very offensive, I always keep my nose well stopped with rue, Iavender, or tobacco Ieaves. 81 This olfactory antipathy was instilled in Gulliver during bis stay in a land in which human-like creatures, called Yahoos, manifested all the coarsest vices, and horse-like creatures, called Houyhnhmns, the highest virtues. On retuming home after this experience Gulliver found that bis cultural and olfactory antipodes had become inverted: he felt at odds with bis own kind, and at one with horses: The first money I laid out [on retuming] was to huy two young stone-horses, which I keep in a good stable, and next to them the groom is my greatest favourite; for I feel my spirits revived by the smell he contracts in the stable. My horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four hours every day. They are strangers to bridle or saddle; they live in great amity with me, and friendship to each other. 82 For Gulliver humans had become the threatening other, dangerous 'brutes' who Ieave the earth 'reeking with the blood of its inhabitants' ,83 while nature had come to represent harmony and order. Toe olfactory consequence of this was that the odour of humans became repulsive to Gulliver, and the odour of horses attractive. The olfactory reversa! described so strikingly in Gulliver' s Travels can

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be found in actual tales of journeys in which travellers are assimilated into other cultures and odours. One such case deals with a young white man, Manuel Cordova, who was captured by an Amazonian tribe in the early twentieth century. Cordova' s first olfactory impression of his captors was that they hada strange, musky odour. In tum, the Amazonians apparently did not consider Cordova to have quite the right 'odour of culture', for, as part of their rite of tribal initiation, they brushed Cordova' s body with fragrant leaves and bathed him with a fragrant liquid. 84 After a period of living with the tribe, Cordova became 'attuned' to its olfactory traits. Eventually, however, he began to long to retum to his own people. 'It was at this time', he states, 'that I began to notice again the smell of these people, a strange, persistent musky odor that I began to dislike. ' 85 As his dissatisfaction with tribal life grew, Cordova found that the 'overpowering musky smell' of the tribe 'nauseated' him. 86 The Indians had once more become 'other' for Cordova and he retumed to the world of whites. One can imagine that, without the cultural and olfactory re-reversal that Cordova experienced before retuming to his own people, he would have found himself in a similar predicament to Gulliver on his retum home. A similar 'olfactory reversal' is sometimes described as occurring after a joumey to the world of the supematural. An example of this is found in the legend of the twelfth-century Dutch mystic, Christina Mirabilis. Christina, on resurrecting shortly after her death, found that her experience of the divine fragrance had rendered her unable to abide the odour of humans. It was only after she immersed herself in a baptismal fount and was symbolically bom again that she was once again able to tolerate the odour of humans and live among them. 87 One's own odour is also often altered through association with the supematural in the traditions of different cultures. In the West holy persons were believed to manifest an 'odour of sanctity', signalling the presence of the Holy Spirit, while the wicked manifested the stench of the Devil. Similarly, among the Warao of Venezuela, the bad breath of the sorcerer indicates that he has recently returned from a journey to the foul underworld. 88 Those persons who come into the presence of supernatural beings without undergoing the correct olfactory transformation are experienced as 'other' by such beings. In a legend of the Andes the daughter of a mountain deity falls in love with a human and tries to hide him in her home. Her parents discover the man by his foul odour, however, and he is forced to leave the supematural abode. 89 In ancient Egypt the dead king had to be perfumed with incense in order to be acce,ted by the gods:

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The use of [incense] in assuring the divinity of the dead king is important, for when he goes to the Horizon or the West he is most easily accepted by the gods when he is like them, and being like them means among other things that 'your scent is as their scent ... ' 90 For the ancient Egyptians, incense was the scent of the gods. By acquiring this scent, the king affirmed his basic identity with the gods: 'My sweat is the sweat of Horus, my odour is the odour of Horus. ' 91 One can become other not only through contact with others, but also through a change in one's social status, which often produces a corresponding change in one's olfactory status (and vice versa). In Bororo society, for instance, new parents, who constitute a particularly anomalous class, are surrounded by olfactory taboos: they are not supposed to engage in strenuous labour because the odour of their sweat would be harmful to them, and they are not supposed to engage in sexual relations because the odours of sexual fluids would be harmful to their child. New mothers are not allowed to prepare food for others for their 'stench' would be communicated through the food and harm those who ate it. 92 In parts of Southem Europe, the anomalous nature of couples who contracted what was considered a socially inappropriate marriage was traditionally signalled by incensing the couple' s house with foul smoke. 93 In such cases, olfactory symbolism is used to mark a person' s separation, temporary or permanent, from cultural norms. Significantly, individuals who feel themselves to be cut off from society can sometimes attribute a foul odour to themselves. Such persons imagine that their bodies give off putrid emanations, often as a result of an inherent fault or evil within themselves, which cause them to be socially isolated. Interestingly, this disorder is particularly found in Japan. Toe sufferers tend to be timid young men, who believe that the odours they emit are so repugnant that they avoid contact with others, and constantly wash and deodorize themselves. 94 This disorder would seem to be a literal actualization of the expression 'to be in ill odour', meaning to be in a state of social disfavour. One feels that, in sorne intrinsic way, one is 'other' within one's society, and one imagines that this 'otherness' is communicated to one's fellows through a distinguishing evil odour.

OLFACTORYINTERCHANGES It is traditional in many cultures, including the West, to believe that odours not only signal the qualities of their sources of origin, but also communicate themi. The odours of disease, for instance, are widely

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believed to communicate disease.95 Involved here is the notion of odour as 'essence', containing the intrinsic identity of its source of origin. In consideration of this, in order to protect one's integrity it is necessary to keep not only the other, but also the odour ofthe other, at hay. One method of warding off intrusive odours is by employing counteractive odours. In the West this method was particularly prevalent during the olfactory onslaughts occasioned by plagues, when people employed strong scents of all kinds in order to ward off the contaminating odours of disease. The diarist Samuel Pepys, for instance, writes after seeing houses marked with the cross which indicated the presence ofthe plague: 'It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to huy sorne roll-tobacco to smell and chaw - which took away the apprehension.' 96 The custom in pre-modern Europe and other societies of hanging scented plants over the door of one's dwelling no doubt served in part to protect one's home from alien olfactory influences. 97 Similarly, the ancient custom of perfuming guests would serve to annul the guests' potentially dangerous odours and integrate their otherness into an olfactory oneness. Another method of preventing olfactory and categorical transgressions is through the strict separation of conflicting categories and their odours. In certain olfactory-conscious societies, such as those of the Tukano and the Batek Negrito, for example, certain kinds of foods must be cooked at different times to prevent their odours from intermixing: a confusion of categories which would representa breakdown of cosmic order. The Batek Negrito say that foods with different odours should not be cooked together because such foods were established as separate by the gods. 98 The Tukano believe that to cook animals with 'male' odours together with those with 'female' odours would be like committing adultery. 'The mere idea causes revulsion and is emphatically rejected as unthought of and highly dangerous.' 99 A similar symbolic logic can be seen in the Batek Negrito belief that improper contact between relatives can produce illness caused by the intermixing of their odours. 100 A more universal belief in this regard, as we have seen, is that the odours of menstruating women are harmful to the rest of the community and so must be contained through practices of exclusion. Odour need not always serve as a mark of separation, however, for the transitive quality of odour which makes it a dangerous transgressor of barriers also renders it an apt medium for interchange and integration with others. One thinks of the olfactory exchange of the greeting, implicit in the West, explicit in many other societies. Smelling the head, for example, is a traditional form of greeting in parts of India. In the Hindu epicRamayana we read: 'I will smell thee on the head; that is the greatest

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sign of tender love.' 101 Through the act of smelling one fills oneselfwith the presence of the other. Such olfactory interchanges extend into other areas of social life. For the Northern Yaka of Zaire the reciproca! interaction of procreation is expressed as 'smelling one another' . 102 The Tukano tribes of the Amazon use olfactory symbolism to characterize their reciproca! relations. Each tribe as a rule finds its own odour, and in particular the odour of its women, preferable to those of the other two. 103 Nonetheless, women are traditionally exchanged in marriage among the three tribes. In practica! tenns this can be explained as a means of avoiding excessive inbreeding. In olfactory tenns, the reason given for this practice is that marriage partners should not belong to the same odour category. This principie of olfactory complementarity is also expressed by the three tribes in their rituals of exchange, during which each tribe offers the others a class of ants with a different odour. 104 In such a case, achieving olfactory and social complementarity through interchange with the other, foul-smelling though it may seem, evidently takes precedence over one's preference for one's own group odour. Odour is also used almost universally as a means of entering into dialogue with the divine other. An ancient Egyptian text states: Your perfume comes to me, you gods; May my perfume come to you, you gods. May I be with you, you gods; May you be with me, you gods. May I live with you, you gods; May you live with me, you gods. I love you, you gods; May you love me, you gods. 105 Likewise, a Christian poem from the seventeenth century describes the dialogue between the believer and God as an olfactory exchange: For when My Master, which alone is sweet, And ev'n in my unworthinesse pleasing, Shall call and meet, My servant, as thee not displeasing, That call is but the breathing of the sweet. This breathing would with gains by sweetning me (As sweet things traffick when they meet) Return to thee.

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And so this new commerce and sweet Should all my life empty and busie me. 106 The odour of the divine other serves in these cases as an invitation to participate in a dynamic exchange of odours, of intrinsic essences, which expresses and forros the highest ideal of interactive harmony.

CONCLUSION Odours are symbolically employed by many cultures to serve as identifying marks of different classes of beings. The attractive/repulsive nature of olfactory experience makes odour a particularly useful symbolic vehicle for categorizing different groups according to cultural values, as it invests classificatory systems with a strong emotive power. The inhalation of a foul odour, for instance, produces the immediate physical repugnance a society might demand its members feel in response to a particular class of people. To characterize a certain group as foul-smelling, therefore, is to render it repellent ata very basic physical and emotional level, and not simply at a cognitive level. Likewise, to characterize a group as fragrant is to render it attractive, although this attractiveness may be tempered by connotations of underlying danger. The primary negative olfactory characteristics ascribed to the other in different cultures are: (a) foul, (b) dangerously fragrant and (c) inodorate. The foul other is immediately and obviously repellent. The dangerously fragrant other is a 'sweet deceiver', apparently attractive yet fundamentally destructive of one's integrity. (One can speculate that those societies prone to be suspicious of pleasure are also likely to use fragrance as a symbol of untrustworthiness.) Toe inodorate other, while not as obviously repugnant as the foul other, can repel through its fundamental lack of 'humanity': for example, the symbolically inodorate machine in the Western imagination. The primary positive olfactory characterizations are (a) fragrant, and (b) neutral-smelling or inodorate. Fragrance here suggests all that is fundamentally desirable. Neutrality of odour can signify both cleanliness and purity, and also a basic centrality and constancy, removed from dangerous extremes of all sorts and immune to the olfactory vagaries of unstable outsiders. It is also true that one (and on a larger scale 'one' is constituted by the dominant group which establishes the basic cultural codes) tends to take one 's own odour or status for granted, and only rank others according to their fragrance or foulness, desirability or undesirability.

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Such categorizations are not always absolute, for the same group may sometimes be characterized as fragrant, and sometimes as foul. In the West, for example, a woman rnay be a fragrant maiden in one context, and a foul witch in another. Similarly, among the Tukano, deer are sometimes seen as 'clean, sleek forest maidens, sweet scented and seductive', and sometimes as 'repulsive bitches in heat'. 107 This ambivalence of odour indicates the ambivalent attitudes of the dominant group towards those others it finds attractive on one level and repellent on another. As a rule, the dominant group in a society ascribes to itself a pleasant or neutral smell within this system of olfactory classification. What constitutes a 'pleasant' (or 'unpleasant') odour is by no means universally agreed upon, however. For the Dassanetch of Ethopia, the odour of cow manure is 'pleasant' and serves as the identifying olfactory mark of the dominant group. In the West, where the odour of manure is considered 'unpleasant', to identify a group as smelling ofmanure would be to place it in a position of exclusion and inferiority. Fragrance and foulness must therefore always be understood within a specific cultural context. In spite of such cultural divergences in the evaluation of odours, certain smells would nonetheless seem to be almost universally liked and others universally disliked. The odour of sweet-scented flowers, suggestive of freshness and bounty, for instance, is generally considered attractive by most cultures, while the odour of decay, with its implications of disease and death, is generally considered repellent. Again and again in different cultures, therefore, we find floral scents used to symbolize desirability, and putrid odours to signify undesirability. These odour values would seem to constitute something of constants in the varying symbolic olfactory charts of different cultures. Those cultures which make extensive use of olfactory symbolism customarily apply it to the sacred order, as well as to the social and natural orders. Thus, among the Bororo, the odours which are employed to classify human, animal and plant life are ultimately derived from the two fundamental classes of spirits: the hope, the foul-smelling negatively perceived spirits of transformation; and the aroe, the sweet-smelling, positively perceived spirits of structure. In the pre-modem West, the Devil was believed to emita foul odour, while God and bis saints suffused fragrance. When a group is classified by odour in such a society it is located not only within the cultural order, but also within the cosmological order. For example, the classification of Jews as foul in the West reinforced their association with the foul-smelling Devil. The aversion Christians felt to the supposed odour of Jews was thus not simply a physical or social repugnance, but a moral repugnance to the 'smell of evil'.

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It is not only the strong emotional appeal of smell which malees odours useful for classifying others, but also the fact that it can be perceived ata distance and does not require intimate contact to be experienced. Thus, to la bel a group 'foul', one does not need to have had any close association with it. At the same time, the ability of odours to travel through space renders them capable of crossing barriers. This transitive character of odour symbolically expresses the ability of different classes of beíngs to transcend class boundaries. Toe foul other can invade one; the fragrant other, absorb one. Odour therefore comes to symbolize not only the qualíties of the other, but also the ability of the other to disrupt one's own order. The disintegrative power of the odour of the other can be controlled through practices of strict separation of groups with different olfactory and cultural values, or through the use of powerful opposing odours - a classic example of the latter practice being the widespread use of fragrance to ward off evil spiríts. Toe very ability of odour to break down barriers, which renders it so dangerous in one regard, also malees it, however, a powerful force for íntegration. The incense employed in a religious ritual, for instance, serves not only to uníte humans and gods, but also to unite the participants in the rite. With regard to this characteristic of odour, a shared smell can give the partakers a strong 'we' feeling, while an interchange of personal or other odours between individuals and groups, such as takes place in many forros of greetings, can serve as a basis for the recognition and mediation of mutual differences. Olfactory codes function in association with other sensory codes. In certain cases there is a consonance between the message conveyed through the medium of smell and that communicated through other sensory media. A seductress in the West, for instance, is typically characterized not only by a heady scent, but also by a beautiful appearance, a soft touch, a euphonic voice, and so on- ali desirable traits. In other cases, however, the olfactory message differs from that produced by the other sensory characteristics. A saint, for example, might be accorded an ugly appearance and a beautiful fragrance, a conjunction of an undesirable trait with a desirable one. The conflicting messages in this case can be reconciled as follows: the attractive fragrance signifies the beauty of the saint's spirit which transcends the unattractiveness of the saint's visual appearance or material forro. The importance ascribed to olfactory markers as opposed to other sensory signs depends on the emphasis placed on smell by a particular culture. Every society has its own hierarchy of the senses, or sensory order, 108 and the ranking accorded to smell within that order can vary

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widely from culture to culture and from period to period. Much of the olfactory symbolism we are familiar with in the W est, for example, derives from an earlier period when smell was rated more highly than it is today. Not only do societies differ with regard to the importance they accord to smell, they also differ as to the qualities they ascribe to it. For instance, in the West, perhaps due to its exclusion from the realm of the intellect, smell is particularly associated with the memory and the emotions. A popular illustration of this association, celebrated by Proust in Remembrance ofThings Past, 109 is the rush of childhood memories which can be brought on by smelling an odour connected with one's childhood. The Tukano of the Amazon, in contrast, hold that smell, far from being evocative of personal memories, contributes to rendering a personal memory unnecessary. The reason for this is that odours, along with other sensory stimuli, are comprehensively encoded with social norms by the Tukano and so constitute a collective store of knowledge. 110 'It is not necessary to remember because an inspiration [sensory sigo] is a presence, it is a traditional moral value. That does not need a memory. A memory is something personal.' 111 Smell for the Tukano is not idiosyncratic and irrational, as it is commonly thought to be in the West, but is part of an essential intellectual process whereby fundamental ideals are recognized, understood, and acted upon. 112 In other societies it is the communicative nature of smell which is emphasized, or its association with the life force. Consequently, while smell, along with the other senses, has a number of intrinsic distinguishing characteristics, these are emphasized and elaborated differently in different cultures. The same holds true for the relations between smell and the other senses. Just as fragrance and foulness must always be considered within a specific cultural context, so must the role of smell. The 'odour of the other' thus becomes not simply the odour attributed to others, but the ways in which odour is understood and employed by others. There is a great deal to be learned from an exploration of the role of smell in different cultures. For example, Walter Ong and others 113 have suggested that the sensory order of a society is revelatory of its social and cultural order. Do societies which emphasize smell tend to display any concomitant cultural traits, such as a preference for content over form, spirituality over materialism, synthesis over analysis? In the modem West odours tend to be muted, rather than elaborated. How are scents utilized to convey meaning in more nose-minded cultures? In order to answer these and other questions one must first set aside the olfactory biases of one's own culture and endeavour to perceive the

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world from the 'point of smell' of the other. The penetrating power and emotional impact of odours, along with the fundamental association between smell, breath and life, malee the 'world-scent' thus arrived ata potentially much more vital concem than the detached 'world-view' which we in the West commonly limit ourselves to when considering the world of the other.

Chapter 5

Literacy as anti-culture The Andean experience of the written word

Up until the time of the Conquest, Andean culture was exclusively oral and the Andeans lived in a world set into motion by sound. Even the empire of the Incas, with a population of approximately ten million, was organized without the aid of writing. The Incas had access to an immense amount of data conceming their state stored in quipus, sets of multicoloured strings. The quipu, however, was basically a mnemonic device and could only be interpreted by one familiar with the information to which it referred. 1 When the Spanish conquered the Inca empire in the sixteenth century, the continuity of the oral traditions of the Andes was broken and the world was reordered, not by sound, but by a realm of written documents. This chapter looks at the oral basis of Andean culture and examines how the Andeans experienced the encounter with the literate culture of the Spanish.

ANDEAN ORALITY Viracocha went to a site now called Tiahuanaco, in the province of Collasuyo, and in this place he sculpted and drew on sorne large stones all the nations he thought to create. This done, he ordered bis two servants to commit to memory the names he told them of the peoples he had painted and of the valleys and provinces and places from where they would emerge, which were those of all the earth. He commanded each of them to take a different route and call these peoples and order them to come out, procreate and swell the earth. The servants, obeying Viracocha's command, set themselves to the task ... calling out: 'O peoples and nations! Hear and obey the commandment of [Viracocha] who orders you to come out, multiply, and swell the earth.' And Viracocha himself did the same ... On

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hearing the calls, every place obeyed, and sorne people carne out of lakes, others out of springs, valleys, caves, trees, cavems, rocks and mountains, and swelled the earth and multiplied into the nations which are in Peru today. 2 Thus reads part of an Andean cosmogony recorded in Peru in 1572 by the Spanish soldier Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa. In it we leam that humans are inanimate earth called into life and purpose by the divine word. The life given to humans, however, is contingent on their continued participation in the word of the Creator. Elsewhere in the cosmogony, those people who refuse to 'hear and obey' Viracocha, once again become inanimate earth. In the cosmogony, Viracocha is characterized by bis orality. An Andean chronicler of the colonial period, Pachacuti Yamqui, writes that Viracocha 'spoke all languages better than the natives. ' 3 The Spanish chronicler Pedro de Cieza de León states that Viracocha spoke to bis created peoples 'lovingly and gently, admonishing them to be good and not harm each other. ' 4 The primacy and potency of Viracocha' s speech is indicated by an Inca prayer that proclaims: 'O Viracocha who ... said let this be a man and let this be a woman, and by so saying formed and gave them being. ' 5 As representatives of the Creator, humans participate in the creative power of speech. Another version of the cosmogony states that Viracocha 'gave each nation the language it was to speak'. 6 In this way humans are granted the ability to enter into dialogue with their Creator and each other. The Creator's words are meaning coupled with the dynamic force of sound. It is said of Viracocha that 'with bis word alone he made the com and vegetables grow'. 7 When the Creator speaks, the world responds. In the Inca empire, the Inca, the supreme mediator of the sacred, was endowed with a similar ability to animate and order the world with bis voice. This belief survives in modem Andean legends in which the Inca is the one who moves rocks with bis voice and makes the mountains speak.8 The Incas' own word for their language, Quechua, was Runa Simi, Man' s Mouth, which reminds us that the words which order the world are imbued with the physical presence of the speaker: they are carried in sound which originates inside the body and travels outwards. To speak is to give birth, to create and to make a commitment of participation. The rhythm of speech is the rhythm of breathing, the rhythm of life itself. 9 The Andeans also recognized the potentially deceptive or destructive power of speech, however. In the cosmogony, Viracocha tells bis created

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peoples as he is about to leave them that people will come in the future proclaiming that they are the Creator, and that they should not believe them. 10 In another Andean myth of the same period, the Creator (here called Pacha Camac, 'Animator of the World') tells the Inca: I am the one who shakes you and the whole world. I have not spoken because I would not only exterminate your enemies, but all of you and the whole world at the same time. That is why I have remained silent. 11 Perhaps this is the response to the ardent desire expressed in many Inca prayers to be spoken to by the Creator. The immediate, active involvement of speech bridged the gap between interior and exterior, subject and object, animate and inanimate in Andean culture. At the same time, the orality of Andean culture infused the present with the past and the future, making all times one in the now of speech. In the Andes the past could be adapted according to the meaning of the present, in a way not possible where written records exist. All past events which had no transcendent meaning were quickly forgotten and all those which were archetypal belonged to a mythical time, and thus could interact with each other and the present through symbol and ritual, and through the voice of the person who spoke of them. The future also interacted with the present through speech. The major huacas (sacred beings embodied in objects or places) of the Andes were oracles who spoke to their followers of the future, much as Viracocha spoke to bis people of what was to come in the cosmogony. If time was not a barrier to speech, neither was space. Messages could be quickly transmitted along the roads of the Inca empire by professional runners waiting at regularly spaced posts. Cieza de León writes that as soon as a runner approached the next post he would begin to call out to bis replacement, saying, 'Set out at once and go to such and such a place and say that such and such has happened.' 12 The Incas made the transmission of information between themselves and their subjects possible by establishing Quechua as the official language of their state. Thus the vast area of the Inca empire was itself integrated by a network ofsound. This emphasis on orality, however, did not mean that the Andeans did not use other sensory channels as media of communication. Next to hearing, sight was the most important sense for this purpose. Information was visually stored, not only in the quipus previously mentioned, but also in visual symbols employed both in religious artefacts and in everyday objects such as pottery and clothes. 13 With the rise of the Incas, the

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cultural importance of sight increased. Toe patron deity of the Inca empire, the Sun, was considered to reveal himself primarily through light, and thus it was essential to the Incas that the sense of sight be properly valued by their subjects. Visually perceived distinctions, such as territorial boundaries, were also fundamental to the structure of the Inca state. 14 A myth recorded by Pachacuti Yamqui vividly portrays the imposition of the new Inca sensory order on the old: Toe Inca Capac Yupanqui wanted to see how the huacas spoke with their followers. The minister of a huaca took him into a dark hut and called on their huaca to speak to them. The spirit of the huaca entered with the sound of wind and left everyone chilled and afraid. Toe Inca then ordered that the door be opened so that he could see the huaca. When the door was opened the huaca hid his face. The Inca asked him why, ifhe was so powerful, was he afraid to raise his eyes? Toe figure, which was very ugly with a foul odour, shouted like thunder and rushed out. 15 Here the Inca, through the power of sight, defeats the local huaca, who communicates through sound and is evidently a thunder deity. Light reveals the huaca, who was previously believed to be worthy of worship, to in fact be repulsive, ugly and foul-smelling. Knowledge gained through the eye is therefore proveo to be more reliable than that gained through the ear. The Incas, however, did not want to negate the power of sound, but rather to control it and to establish themselves as the pre-eminent mediators of the oral. (The distinctive ear ornaments worn by the Incas perhaps served as visual signs of their privileged access to sacred aural information.) Pachacuti Yamqui notes that after Capac Yupanqui defeated the huaca, all the huacas of the empire carne under the power of the Incas and were obliged to respond to their queries. 16 Among the huacas engaged in dialogue by the Incas was an image of the Sun himself, kept in the principal temple. The ultimate proof that the Incas, despite their emphasis on the power of light and sight, were thoroughly grounded in the oral culture of the Andes is that they communicated ritually even with the Sun, the foremost visual symbol, through speech. Thus, one chronicler writes, for instance, that after a successful battle, the Incas would send a messenger to the temple of the Sun to inform the Sun of the victory, 'as though he wouldn't have seen it'. 17

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SPANISH LITERACY Although sixteenth-century Spain still retained many characteristics reminiscent of an oral culture, it was a society penetrated by the effects of writing. Even those man y people who were not literate experienced to sorne degree the transformation of consciousness which writing produces. Writing allows for an increased retention and manipulation of data, and hence makes analytic thinking possible. In a literate culture to think as an individual is nota dangerous waste of time, for with a society' s knowledge safeguarded in books there is no longer the same pressure to preserve it mentally. One can afford to preserve original thoughts themselves without losing any traditional material. Reading, in fact, encourages original thinking, for one is able to reflect at leisure on what is written without having one' s thoughts affected by the physical presence ofthe writer. 18 Writing, however, also creates a state of alienation by separating the writer from the written and the reader from the writer. What is written has a disembodied existence; knowledge is no longer contained within human bodies but exists sep~ately from them. In a literate society, therefore, knowledge - and by extension, the cosmos - is devitalized, de-personalized and reified. The literate world is a silent, still world, one in which the primary meaos of gaining knowledge is by looking and reflecting, not by actively engaging in an exchange of information with fellow subjects. One cannot engage a book in dialogue. A book never changes its mind, it always affirms what it affirms whether one agrees with it or refutes it. What is written participates in the thought of those who read it without any form of personal involvement. 19 The sixteenth-century Spanish had a heavy reliance on written documents and texts, pre-eminently the Bible, the textpar excel/ence. 20 In the crucial encounter of the conquistadors with the Inca emperor Atahualpa in 1532, the Spanish priest accompanying the expedition gave a brief summary of Christian doctrine, denounced Inca religion as invented by the Devil, and demanded that Atahualpa become the vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor. While giving this address the priest held a book, either the Bible ora breviary, in one hand. Atahualpa, deeply offended by this speech, which was received by him in a garbled form through a translator, demanded of the priest by what authority he made these claims. The friar held the book up to him. Atahualpa examined it, but as it said nothing to him he dropped it to the ground. This rejection of the essence of European civilization was the excuse the Spanish needed to begin their massacre.

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Atahualpa was captured by the conquistadors and, without the voice of their ruler to lead them, bis subjects were immobilized. Toe Spanish realized that their grounds for holding the Inca were shaky. They therefore accused him of a series of crimes, held a trial for him and condemned him to death. This satisfied their desire to proceed within a legally acceptable framework. The whole process was pervaded by writing. The charges against Atahualpa were documented, a scribe recorded the trial, and those conquistadors who opposed the procedure set down their protest in writing. Among the Incas law was oral; for the Spanish, obsessed with the documented precedents of the reified past and anxious to record the proper precedents for the future, it was written. Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques states that 'the primary function of writing is to facilitate the enslavement of human beings', and that 'the struggle against illiteracy is indistinguishable, at times, from the increased powers exerted over the individual by the central authority'. 21 Writing is a form of power, the power to order reality and to conserve that order. However, while it can be used by the dominant group in a society to establish an order which oppresses the majority, it can also be used by the oppressed to develop and communicate an altemative order. The Spanish were well aware of this potentially liberating power of literacy. In the early seventeenth century in Peru, one Spanish priest was asked by another why he had not established a school for the native peoples under bis care. His reply was that 'lndians did not need toread or write, since such knowledge would be no use to them except to criticize their priests. ' 22 The identification of the doer with the doing that characterized the oral culture of the Andes was alien to the Spanish, who were accustomed to separate thought and action as independent exercises. In 1653 Father Bemabé Cobo wrote of the Andeans: The lndians are so lacking in reason and sense that it seems as if they go around stupefied, without thinking about anything. Often, in order to test the truth of this, I ask them in their own language ... what they are thinking about, to which they usually reply that they're not thinking about anything. Once a friend of mine asked an intelligent Spanish-speaking lndian I know, who worked as a tailor, what he thought about when he was sewing. The Indian answered by asking how he could think about anything while he was working. 23 Cobo deduced that the reason 'these people's understanding is so dim' was due on the one hand to their lack of 'writing, sciences and arts', and on the other to 'engrained savage vices' .24

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The Spanish were also frustrated by the tendency ofthe Andeans to act as a group rather than as individuals. Father José Arriaga wrote in 1621 of the difficulties in teaching Christian doctrine to the natives of Peru: 'When asked questions they reply in chorus, but if one of them is questioned by himself, not one in twenty knows the Christian doctrine. ' 25 Writing was so intrinsically connected by the Spanish with the achievements of their own culture that, whether they praised or condemned Andean culture, they inevitably saw it as blocked in its development by its lack ofwriting. Father Bias Valera, who spoke highly of many aspects of the Inca empire, stated this most categorically: The ability and great ingenuity of the people of Peru exceed those of many nations of the old world. Without having writing, they were able to achieve many things that the Egyptians, Greeks and Chaldeans did not achieve, and it is argued that if they had had letters as they had knots [quipus], they would have surpassed the Romans, Gauls and other nations. 26

THE TEXT FROM THE OTHER SIDE Soon after the arrival of the Spanish in the Inca empire, tales spread among the Andeans of how the strangers 'spoke alone in sorne white cloths, as one person would speak to another' .27 The Incas were quick to recognize writing as a source of power and authority and were intrigued as to its nature. Garcilaso de la Vega, half Inca, half Spanish, wrote that Atahualpa, while held captive by the Spanish, desired to penetrate the enigma of writing: Seeing the Spaniards read and write, he thought these abilities were innate among them. In order to verify this he asked one of bis Spanish guards to write the name ofhis God on bis [Atahualpa's] thumb-nail. The soldier did so. When another Spaniard carne in Atahualpa asked him, 'What does it say here?' The Spaniard told him, and three or four others gave the same reply. Soon after, Don Francisco Pizarro [leader of the conquistadors] carne in ... and Atahualpa asked him what the letters meant. Don Francisco could not tell him because he did not know how toread. The Inca then realized that reading was nota natural ability, but an acquired accomplishment. From that time on he thought less of [Pizarro] because the Incas ... held that superiors should not be outshone by inferiors. 28 Writing was thus seen by the Incas to be a skill, and not, as had been

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thought at first, a supernatural endowment of the Spanish related to their purported abilities to go without sleep and eat gold and silver. 29 Atahualpa, however, remained within the structures ofhis orally defined world. What convinced him of the inevitability of bis death was not, as would be the case with a literate person, any written death sentence, but the unmistakable portent of a falling comet. After witnessing this sign, he exclaimed, 'I am certain my death will soon occur, for this comet has told me so.' 3º While Atahualpa was in prison he sent bis (Inca) priests to consult with the foremost huacas of the land as to the future of the empire. Despite all of the priests' entreaties, however, the oracles remained 'deaf and dumb'. 31 At first this was thought to be a temporary and local condition, but then it was discovered to be general. Garcilaso de la Vega writes: The huacas lost their power of public speech and could only speak in secret with great wizards, and even then hardly at all . . . This occasioned a universal fear and astonishment among the Indians who did not know the reason for the silence of their oracles, although they did not fail to suspect that it was due to the arrival of the newcomers in their land. They consequently feared and respected the Spanish more day by day as a people so powerful that they left their oracles without the power of speech. 32 The huacas were silenced not simply spontaneously, but as a result of a thorough campaign on the part of the Spanish church. In the seventeenthcentury work The Extirpation o/ Idolatry in Peru, we learn how the huacas were systematically destroyed by 'visitors' (inspectors working for the Church), and the Andeans compelled to denounce their beliefs. One chapter, entitled 'How a Visit is to be Conducted', states: When the mass has been concluded, the visitor will install himself in the church with a table before him and a crucifix or cross on top of it. He will be provided with a blank book for the occasion ... giving it this tille: 'Accusations of the Indians of Such and Such a Town, on such and such a day, month, year'. And having a tax list of the town before him, he will call each one by name ... He will question each person briefly: Have you worshipped a huaca? And he will write down what he says. Have you had any dealings with a sorcerer? Have you confessed to him? 33 'Everything that is found out, by whatever meaos', says the author, 'should be written down clearly', stipulating that 'if there are any lndians who are literate, each one should bring what he knows in writing'. 34 One

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can well imagine the trauma which must have been produced in the native consciousness by this use of writing to abolish what the Andeans held sacred. Despite the Andeans' negative experience of writing, however, there were those who assimilated into Spanish culture sufficiently to achieve literacy. 35 One such was Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala, who wrote in the early seventeenth century. He repeatedly stresses the importance of literacy in bis work, particularly with regard to Christianity, which he fervently espoused, saying that all 'lndians, men and women, boys and girls, in this kingdom should know the language of Castille, to read and write like Spanish men and women', and that 'whoever does not know how to [read and write] cannot be a Christian'.36 Guarnan Poma condemned the Spanish, particularly the priests, for refusing to teach the lndians how to read and write and mocking those who knew. He defiantly proclaimed that there be 'schools, Christianity and purity in this kingdom, even if the fathers ... don't want it'. 37 However, education was not enough to counter the influence of the dissolute Spaniards. Guarnan Poma sadly concluded: The lndians of old were much more Christian. Even though they were infidels they kept God' s commandments and undertook good works of charity. Aside from their idolatries they were Christian. In these times [the commandments] are not kept, although they should be kept more since reading and writing are known and the Gospels and the laws of God are taught. 38 Guarnan Poma describes the Spanish as not only lacking control of their sensuality, but as suffering from a complete perversion of the sensorium: all they can see, hear, touch, taste or smell is gold and silver. He writes of the conquistadors: They were like desperate men, stupefied, crazy, senseless with their greed for gold and silver. Sometimes they did not eat for thinking of gold and silver. Sometimes they hada big fiesta, imagining everything they held in their hands was gold and silver ... Their desire for gold and silver was such that they did not fear death. With their greed for gold and silver, they go to heU. 39 Compare this with the ideal Christian sensory order Guarnan Poma proposes in a model prayer he writes for bis fellow Andeans: May Jesus Christ be in my eyes and in my sight. Cross. May Jesus Christ be in my ears and in my hearing ... Cross.

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May Jesus Christ be in my nose and in my olfaction. Cross. May Jesus Christ be in my mouth, in my tongue, in all my words, in what I eat and in what I drink. Cross. 40 The only way to prevent the Spanish from corrupting the lndians, in Guarnan Poma's view, was to keep them completely separate from the native population. Guarnan Poma wrote his work in the hope that the Holy Roman Emperor would read it and be so moved by it as to implement his ideas. In fact, his written pleas were no more attended to by the authorities than were the vocal pleas of his compatriots. What is noteworthy for our topic is that, while rejecting most of Spanish culture, Guarnan Poma appropriated the Western view that writing expresses a more authoritative and enduring truth than does speech. 41 Nonetheless, Guarnan Poma's work, although written, is heavily influenced by the structures of orality. He presents his arguments in defence of the lndians in the form of an imagined dialogue between the Holy Roman Emperor and himself, and even goes so far as to draw a picture of himself personally presenting his book to the Emperor. 42 Guarnan Poma still conceived of knowledge as communicated through immediate, active involvement, rather than through a process of detached observation and reflection. Guarnan Poma was able to adopt the religion and the form of ordering language of the dominant culture and employ them to express the perspective of his oppressed fellows. The majority of Andeans, however, could not or would not relate to the new order and found themselves submerged in a cultural chaos. Those Andeans who resisted indoctrination into Spanish culture defiantly proclaimed that 'there [was] as much reason to believe their own ancestors and quipus and traditions as there [was] to believe the ancestors and writings ofthe Christians' .43 Justas the Spanish themselves first seemed like gods to the Andeans and later like devils,44 writing, which had first appeared to be a supernatural gift, carne to be seen as a demonic instrument of destruction. A story was developed that the Andeans themselves had once had writing, but that the Inca had forbidden its use after Viracocha said that writing caused plagues and great darnage. 45 The conflict between Christianity and Andean religion, and between literacy and orality, also manifested itself as a conflict between sensory orders. 46 A sixteenth-century chronicle tells of an Andean, recently converted to Christianity, whose local huaca tried to regain its control over him, and his senses, by flashing light in his eyes and making his ears ring.47

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So confused were sorne Andeans between their old religion and the new that, when the Spanish priests told them to confess their sins, they denounced themselves for having neglected the worship of their huacas. Toe priests promised them Heaven as a reward for their obedience, but they declared that they didn't want to go to Heaven if the Spanish were there.48 In 1536 the Inca whom the Spanish were maintaining as a figurehead, Manco, escaped from bis captors and established a rebel Inca state in the mountains. He declared the religion of the Spanish to be false and urged bis followers to retum to their huacas, stating: '[The Christian God] is only a painted cloth ... the huacas speak to us. ' 49 In Manco' s declaration we find that not only the religion ofthe Spanish is being rejected, but also their visualist, surface-oriented culture. In 1571, Tupac Amaru, one of Manco's sons, succeeded to the leadership of the neo-Inca state. A year later he was captured by a Spanish expedition and brought to the city of Cuzco, where he was executed. Garcilaso de la Vega wrote ofthis event: When the lndians saw their Inca so near death they raised up such a cry of grief and pain that nothing else could be heard. The priests who were speaking with the Inca asked him to order the Indians to be silent. Toe Inca raised bis right arm with this hand open, brought it up to bis car, then slowly lowered it to bis right thigh. Toe lndians, understanding that they were being hade to be silent, ceased their shouting and crying and became so quiet that it seemed as if there were not a living soul in the whole city. 50 At a sign from its conquered Inca, the Andean world was silenced to malee way for the word of the European world.

THE CONSEQUENCES The Andeans withdrew into themselves when their world was silenced by the Conquest. This silence has penetrated even those communities which were able to retain much of their traditional culture. It is caused by the Andeans' realization of their exclusion from the dominant way of life compared to their pre-Conquest integration into the cosmic order. In one modero Andean community, this silence was expressed in the following way: Toe Incas could talk directly to the Earth and Mountains and ... herd gigantic boulders into fortresses ... Now that the Incas are gone,

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people have to move the rocks themselves and can communicate with the Earth and the Mountains only indirectly, through the medium of coca.51 In the time of the Incas, time and space were spontaneously ordered through a dynamic social structure; now the task is difficult and opaque. The event which brought about this transformation is relived anually by the Andeans in 'Conquest Plays'. The dominant theme in these dramas is that of the disjunction between the Andean and Spanish cultures, between orality and literacy, sound and silence. In one version the Spanish only move their lips when they speak, making no sound. They hand Inca Atahualpa a written letter which he raises to his ear, trying to listen to its contents. When he is unable to hear anything, he passes the letter around among his followers. No one can understand the mute message on this 'maize leaf'. One proclaims: Seen from this side, it is like a swarm of ants. I look at it another way and I seem to see the tracks that birds leave on the muddy banks of the river. Looking at it again, I see stags, upside down and their feet in the air. And if one looks at it this way round, it is like a herd of llamas lowering their heads, with antlers like stags. Who on earth could understand that? No, no, my lord, I cannot possibly guess at its meaning. 52 When the Spanish priest hands Atahualpa a Bible, the process is repeated. Atahualpa, unable to comprehend the new system of thought, is beheaded by the Spanish and the world is shattered. 53 In another Conquest Play the Spanish priest beats the lndians with his Bible, a graphic portrayal of the Andean experience of Christianity and writing as a brutal imposition. The association of Christianity with violence is further manifested when, in the play, the Spanish shoot Atahualpa immediately after he is baptized. 54 Nathan Wachtel has interpreted these Conquest Plays of the Andes as displaying an unbridgeable schism of incomprehension between the Spanish and the Andeans; the two cultures are presented as irremediably opposed. The plays end with the victory of the Spanish, but also with a messianic hope for the return of the Inca and the order of the pre-Conquest world. This is in contrast to similar plays from Mexico and Guatemala, which show a conjunction of the Spanish and native worlds and end with a glorification of Christianity. One possible reason for this is that the native peoples of this region had their own form of writing before the Conquest and were able quickly to adopt the Latin alphabet and

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use it to record their traditions. Andean cosmology was more resistant to being accommodated within a foreign symbolic structure. 55 Toe following condensed account, recorded in Peru in 1971, gives the most elaborate description of the Andeans' experience of their encounter with writing: God had two sons, the Inca and Jesus Christ. The Inca said to us, 'Speak' and we learned to speak. From that time on we teach our children to speak. Toe Inca conversed with our Mother Earth. He bought her presents and asked her for favours for us. Toe Inca married her and they had two sons. When these were boro it made Jesus Christ very angry and unhappy. He had grown up, and was now young and strong, and he wanted to triumph over bis brother, the Inca. The moon took pity on him and sent him a page with writing. Certain that this would scare the Inca, Jesus showed it to him. The Inca was frightened because he could not understand the writing, and he ran away until he died ofhunger. Jesus Christ was then free to break the neck ofMother Earth and build churches on her. Ñaupa Machu [the Old One from before the age of the Incas, before civilization] was happy the Inca was dead, because while he was alive he had had to hide himself. He lived in a mountain called School. The two sons ofthe Inca passed by and he said to them, 'Come, l'm going to show you where the Inca and Mother Earth are'. The children happily went to the school. Ñaupa Machu wanted to eat them. He said, 'Mother Earth doesn't love the Inca any more. Toe Inca has made friends with Jesus Christ and now they live together like two little brothers. Look at the writing, it says so here.' The children escaped, afraid. Since that time all children have to go to school and, like the two sons of Mother Earth, almost all of them don 't like it and escape. No one knows where the two sons of the Inca have gone. lt is said that when the elder is grown up he will retum. They say that it's the children who have to find him. If they don't, he might die of hunger like bis father. 56 Toe Inca and Jesus Christ are able to interact with each other in this myth because they embody archetypes: the Inca that of Andean sacred structure, and Jesus Christ that of Western sacred structure. Both are seen as sons of God, mediators of the Divine, but in mutually exclusive ways. The Inca animates and integrates the cosmos through speech, he speaks with the people and with the Earth. The relationship between the Inca - Andean sacred structure - and the Earth is one of reciprocity: he brings her presents and she grants him favours. Their marriage is a sign

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of the pennanence and stability of this union, and their two sons are proof of its dynamic power and cohesion. These two sons represent Andean culture with its synthesis of the sacred and the material. Jesus Christ is upset at the birth of the Inca' s sons because he realizes that there is no place for him in this structure. The moon, symbol of sorcery, provides him with the means to silence the oral intercourse which binds and vitalizes the union ofthe Inca with the Earth: writing. The Inca flees the writing because it represents a way of life which is incomprehensible to him. He dies of hunger - the lack of ritual offerings and worship. Toe cosmos is then plunged into a state of disorder in which Western sacred struture can devitalize the Earth and impose itself on her, and Ñaupa Machu, the personification of anti-culture previously kept at bay by Andean sacred structure, is free to act. Ñaupa Machu resides within the school, which thus becomes the abode of anti-culture. 57 He lures the two children - Andean culture - into the school with the promise of infonning them of their parents, their past. Once inside, however, the children find the forces of anti-culture overwhelming. Ñaupa Machu wants to eat them, to absorb them into himself. He tells the offspring of the Inca and the Earth that there is no longer any possible conjunction between the material world and Andean sacred structure, and that the latter has been reconciled with Westem sacred structure. This is ratified by writing. Andean culture (the Inca's children), however, rejects the world-view put forth by anti-culture and writing, and rejects the educational system ofthe West which promotes it. According to the myth, this is why the children of the Andes dislike school - they sense that it tries to indoctrinate them with a hostile world-view and they escape from it. The myth ends with the provision that it is only if Andean culture grows strong and is sought out by the children that it can survive. Andean culture has been silenced, but not destroyed. lt remains latent, awaiting the time of its retum.

CONCLUSION The Andean peoples of today are faced with what seems an insoluble dilemma: to participate in the world of writing and lose to sorne extent their cultural identity, or else not to participate and remain marginalized and at the merey of the dominant culture. Those Andeans who hold fast to their culture fear that to enter into the world of literacy would be to alienate themselves from their society, their traditions, and their land, and to become isolated fragments in a de-personalized cosmos.

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However, writing was not without its predecessor in Andean culture, for the quipu fulfilled many similar functions to writing. Toe encounter between the Spanish and Atahualpa, for instance, was recorded by the Incas on a quipu. 58 In Guarnan Poma's work we see clearly that writing is taking over from the quipu: the illustration in which he presents bis book to the Holy Roman emperor is very similar to another of bis in which a quipu specialist explains the contents of bis quipu to the Inca. 59 If their experience of writing had not been so traumatic, perhaps the Andeans, or at least the Inca elite with their emphasis on the visual, would have been able to make a voluntary transition from orality to literacy.60 Yet it cannot be denied that the transition would inevitably alter Andean culture. Those Andeans who become literate have to take on the burden of recorded, chronological history as understood by the West and reconcile their own understanding of the past to it. 61 They have to learn to deal with the silence which comes with literacy, the experience of alienation and individualism, and the critical analysis which literacy promotes. Perhaps, however, the advent of literacy does not mean that Andean cosmology must be replaced by a Western world-view, that dialogue with the earth must be replaced by exploitation of the earth. For this to happen, the structures of Western society must change to allow for the critical participation of those who are marginalized. Toe Andeans must be allowed to learn to write in their own languages and to use writing to express their own understanding of the world. In Language, Thought and Reality Benjamin Whorf writes: 'Western culture has made, through language, a provisional analysis ofreality and, without correctives, holds resolutely to that analysis as final. ' 62 To be able to conserve and have access to the alternate understanding of reality contained in Andean language and culture would be of benefit to us all.

Chapter 6

Worlds of sense

In the West we have two basic sensory paradigms for understanding the cosmologies of other cultures. The most prevalent is the visual paradigm, conveyed, for example, by the expression 'world-view'. This metaphor presents us with the image of a cosmology as a landscape which can be mapped - captured and conveyed through visual structures - by anyone with an adequate overview. Scholars who argue that this model is the cultural result of the visualism produced by literacy, and therefore not applicable to nonliterate societies, offer another sensory paradigm for understanding the cosmologies of such societies: that of aurality, expressed in the term 'oral/ aural culture'. Rather than being structured by sight, oral cultures are said to be animated by sound. Walter Ong, for example, states that:

As a concept and term, 'world-view' ... reflects the marked tendency of technologized man to think of actuality as something essentially picturable and to think of knowledge itself by analogy with visual activity to the exclusion, more or less, of the other senses. Oral or nonwriting cultures tend much more to cast up actuality in comprehensive auditory terms, such as voice and harmony. Their 'world' is not so markedly something spread out before the eyes as a 'view' but rather something dynamic and relatively unpredictable, an event-world rather than an object world. 1 Following this approach, many anthropologists have presented earminded interpretations of non-literate societies, in works with titles such as A Musical View of the Universe. 2 Aurality is indeed the driving force in the cosmologies of many cultures around the world. In the previous chapter we explored how the inhabitants of the Andes live in a world created, animated and integrated through sound. Scholars who reject the visualism of the Western

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'world-view', however, tend to typecast ali non-literate cultures as auditory. Yet there is certainly no intrinsic reason why the simple non-possession of the visual medium of writing should automatically make a society ear-minded. In fact, there is as much sensory diversity among so-called oral cultures as there is between such cultures and the visualist West. While 'oral culture', therefore, is a valid designation in so far as it indicates that a culture's dominant medium of communication is speech, it is not an accurate representation of a culture' s sensory model. In this chapter three examples of cultures with different sensory models will be presented: the Tzotzil of Mexico, the Ongee of Little Andaman lsland, and the Desana of Colombia. Ali three are traditional oral cultures, yet each has a very distinct way of making sense of the world: the Tzotzil order the cosmos by heat, the Ongee by smell, and the Desana by colour. The rich diversity of sensory symbolism in these different societies reveals the inadequacy of grouping and interpreting ali traditional societies as oral/aural, and the importance of expanding our perceptual field to appreciate other systems of sensory and symbolic organization.

A MODERN MAYA COSMOLOGY: THERMAL DYNAMICS Thermal symbolism is widespread among the indigenous cultures of Latin America. Classificatory schemes based on concepts of heat and cold can be found from the southem Andes to northem Mexico. This diffusion might be due in part to the impact of the Spanish Conquest, for the Spanish brought to the New World classic theories of humoral medicine, according to which health is based on an equilibrium of hot, cold, wet and dry elements within the body. The thermal symbolism employed by many of the cultures of Latin America, however, is much more encompassing than that expressed by Western humoral theory, and indeed can vary widely from place to place. 3 Nowhere in Latin America is thermal symbolism more elaborate than among the descendants of the Maya in Central America and Mexico. A particularly striking example of such symbolism can be found in the cosmology of the Tzotzil of the Chiapas highlands of Mexico. The Tzotzil, an agricultural people whose religion consists of a blend of Catholicism and indigenous elements, believe that heat is the basic force of the universe, ordering both space and time. The Tzotzil call the cool highlands where they live sikil ?osil, 'Cold Country', while the warm Pacific lowlands are called k'isin ?osil, 'Hot Country'. The cardinal directions of east and west are respectively known as lok' eh k' ak' al, 'emergent heat', and maleb k' ak' al, 'waning heat'. (North and south are called the

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'sides ofthe sky'.) Consequently moming is called 'heat is rising now', noon is called 'half-heat', and aftemoon 'in the waning heat'.4 The annual passage of time in the Chiapas highlands is marked by the cycle of indigenous and Catholic festivals. The close associations between the Tzotzil words for day and festival and the Tzotzil word for heat mean that these festival cycles can also be understood as heat cycles. Thus the sentence 'It is three days before the festival of Saint John', for instance, has the underlying meaning of 'It is three daily cycles of heat before a major (religious) cycle of heat'. 5 Everything in the universe is thought to contain a different quantity of heat, or dynamic power. As regards humans, men are believed to possess more heat than women, making women symbolically cold by contrast. At bi.rth, however, both men and women are deemed to be cold, possessing little innate heat. Newboms, consequently, are bathed in warm water, censed, wrapped in blankets and ritually presented with 'hot' chilli peppers, in order to keep them warm until they have acquired enough heat to survive on their own.6 Humans continue to accumulate heat throughout their lives, according to Tzotzil cosmology, reaching a thermal peakjust before death. Events deemed to increase an individual's heat, and therefore power, include being baptized, marrying, becoming a shaman, and officiating in communal rites. Thus, 'the man who is very old, a high-ranking shaman and a veteran of all levels of the [ceremonial] system, possesses the greatest heat possible for a human being. ' 7 Illness, in tum, can seriously deplete a person' s supply of heat, or else, in the case of a fe ver, produce a dangerous overheating. In the case of the latter, the patient is cooled down through the administering of cool baths and symbolically cold medicines and foods. In the case ofthe former, the patient is treated with 'hot' medicines and foods and undergoes a series of sweat baths (taken in the moming in order to benefit from the heat-force of the rising sun). 8 In this way, Tzotzil healers try to establish a healthy temperature level in their patients. The Tzotzil believe that when a human is bom the sun lights a candle in the sky. The word for this candle, ?ora, also means time, for the length of one's candle determines the length of one's time on earth. When the candle bums out, one dies. At death, a person is said to grow completely cold. A certain amount of heat-force is necessary for the deceased to make the journey to Vinahel, the afterworld, however, and this is supplied through the buming of candles and incense and the drinking of 'hot' alcohol by the participants in the funeral rites. 9 Thermal symbolism is omnipresent in Tzotzil ritual:

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All the 'culturalizing' agents in the ceremonies are involved with 'heat': the heat of the fire to cook tortillas; the heat of the burning incense over the candles; the heat needed to roduce cane liquor; the heat needed to grow flowers for the shrines. 1

f

At the same time as Tzotzil rituals emphasize heat, the participants have their senses of smell and taste engaged by fragrance and food, their sense of hearing by music and speech, and their sense of sight by colourful decorations. Thermal symbolism is thus integrated into a multi-sensory symbolic system. As might be expected from the close association of heat with light, visual symbolism is of particular importance to the Tzotzil. Like their forbears, the Mayas, the Tzotzil colour-code the cosmos, assigning different colours to the four quarters and centre of the world. Toe colours used by the Tzotzil in ritual are aligned with this cosmic colour scheme. In addition, shamans are thought to have visionary sight, and often use sight as a medium of divination. 11 Interestingly, much of the visual and other sensory symbolism employed by the Tzotzil contains thermal references: colours, food and even speech are classified as hot or cold. Red, for example, is used to signify heat, and black to signify coldness. Coro, one of the staples of the Tzotzil diet, is believed to possess a high degree of heat, while the potato, another staple, is classified as cold. Ordinary language is said to be cold because it is disorderly and unbounded. Ritual language, on the other hand, is classified as hot because it is fixed, stylized and repetitious. Toe hottest language of all is the 'ancient words' used in sacred songs and prayers. Believed to have been created at the beginning of time, ancient words have the accumulated heat of all the ages. 12 This system of correspondences enables the basic thermal schema of Tzotzil cosmology to be reinforced through all of the senses. Toe fundamental organizing symbol of Tzotzil cosmology and the ultimate source of heat-force is the sun, called 'Our Father Heat'. In Tzotzil ritual, the sun is evoked in a multitude of ways. The table on which the ritual meal is served in Tzotzil ceremonies, for example, represents the trajectory of 'Our Father Heat' across the sky. The red stripes running along the table cloth signify the east-west passage of the sun. At the head ofthe table stands the 'hot' cane liquor, representing the rising sun. At the foot is placed the 'cold' salt, symbolizing the setting sun. Toe 'hottest' part of the table, the head, is reserved for the gods; senior members of the community sit on either side of the head, while low-status 'cold' participants sit around the foot. 13

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Thus the social order of the Tzotzil community is structured according to the thennal order of the cosmos, with the most important members associated with the hot rising sun, and the least important with the cold setting sun. Through their placement in communal rituals, individuals know their degree of importance in the 'thennometer' of social status. At the same time, such rituals serve to establish an exchange of heat-force between humans and deities. Burning candles, called 'tortillas for the gods', are offered to the deities, while com tortillas and cane liquor, the 'heat of the sun', are consumed by the human participants. 14 In this way the circulation of heat-force through the cosmos is assured. The same principie of thennal social order found in Tzotzil ritual can be seen in the organization of the Tzotzil household. Gary Gossen writes of the Tzotzil community of Chamula: The importance of heat is ever present in Chamula life ... The daily round of Chamula domestic life centers on the hearth, which lies near the center of the dirt floor of nearly ali Chamula houses. The working day usually begins and ends around the fire, men and boys sitting and eating to the right of the hearth ... women and girls to the left of the hearth. Furthennore, men in this patrifocal society always sit on tiny chairs, which raise them above the cold, feminine ground, and wear sandals ... Women, in contrast, customarily sit on the ground and always go barefooted. 15 The relationship between male and female, hot and cold, is expressed in mythological tenns by the Tzotzil by the relationship between the sun and the moon. The Tzotzil say that the moon gave birth to the sun and that the sun then blinded his mother with hot water during a sweat bath. This act established the superiority of the sun's heat-force over that of the moon, and made the female moon dependent on the male sun. 16 Similarly, in the Catholicism practised by the Tzotzil, female saints take second place to male saints. The feast days offemale saints are given less importance than those of male saints, while during the period between the winter and summer solstices, a time of increasing atmospheric heat and, by analogy, of male power, no major female saints are honoured. 17 Toe use of heat as a force of domination is characteristic of Tzotzil mythology. Indeed, cosmic conflicts are often conceptualized as heat battles. The people of the first mythological age of the world, for instance, are said to have cooked their children in hot water and eaten them, a use of heat-force to transgress the moral order. The sun then destroyed the first people, either through fever, boiling rain, ora hot flood according to different versions of the myth, defeating heat through heat. 18

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Perhaps the best example of the dominance of thermal symbolism in Tzotzil mythology is the Tzotzil version of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ: A long time ago, the Jews decided that they were going to kili 'Our Father' (the Sun). They caught him in a tree and tried to hang him, but he would not die. He went to hide in a sweat-bath house ... They decided to try to bum him, again without success, for he carne out of the fire younger than he was before. They decided that it would rejuvenate them also, so ali the Jews jumped into the fire and died ... This is why they always bum the Judas on Holy Saturday. 19 Here the Tzotzil have transformed the central myth of Christianity into a thermal allegory, with the heat-force of 'Our Father', the arbiter of cosmic order, triumphing over that of the 'Jews', the representatives of cosmic disorder. Taking the analogy further, the Tzotzil interpret the resurrection of Christ as the rising of the sun in the east. 20 From the individual to society to the cosmos, thermal symbolism pervades Tzotzil thought, expressing the primal concepts of both energy and structure. The Tzotzil not only express their cosmology in thermal terms, however, they feel it throughout their bodies. Heat, indeed, can envelop a person's body more completely than any other sensory stimulus, from head to toe, inside and out. It can travel from as far away as the sun, and yet affect one as intimately as a touch. Heat is essential for life, without it one dies, and when one dies, one loses one's heat. In their daily lives, the Tzotzil thus constantly experience the thermal order of the universe: through the encompassing heat of the sun, through the change of temperature from day to night, summer to winter, highlands to lowlands, through the heat they expend in working, through the offering and consumption of 'heat' in ritual, through their positions around the household hearth, through the warmth of their very blood.

A SOUTHEAST ASIAN COSMOLOGY: ODOUR CONTROL In Little Andaman Island in the Bay of Bengal live the Ongee, a hunting and gathering people who have limited contact with the outside world. For the Ongee smell is the fundamental cosmic principie. Odour is the source of personal identity and the reason for living in society, a system of medicine and a system of communication; it determines temporal and spatial movements, it produces life and causes death. By controlling odour, the Ongee control their cosmos. When an Ongee wishes to refer to 'me', he or she puts a finger to the tip of his or her nose, the organ of smell. 21 This is not only because of the

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centrality of olfaction in Ongee thought, but also because living beings are thought to be composed of smell. The most concentrated form of odour according to the Ongee are bones, believed to be solid smell. Toe Ongee thus say that 'smells are contained in everybody li.ke tubers are contained in the ground' .22 An inner spirit is said to reside within the bones of living beings. While one is sleeping, this intemal spirit gathers all the odours one has scattered during the day and retums them to the body, making continued life possible. 23 Toe Ongee hold illness to result from either an excess or a loss of odour. The former is caused by cold, which 'solidifies' the liquid odour in a person's body, producing a sensation of heaviness. The latter can result from injury, which causes a 'flow of odour', or from an elevated body temperature, which liquifies the hard smell of the skeleton and causes it to be released by the body. In this case, the sensation is one of lightness. 24 Toe basic treatment for an excess of odour consists of warming up the patient in order to 'melt' the solidified smell. A loss of odour, in tum, is treated by painting the patient with white clay to induce a sensation of coolness and restrict the flow of odour from the body. Curing illness in the Ongee system of medicine thus deals mainly with inducing or restricting the release of odour. Meo are believed to be more susceptible to olfactory imbalances than women, as menstruation is thought to provide women with a natural meaos of regulating their odour-weight. 25 The concem of the Ongees to maintain a healthy state of olfactory equilibrium is expressed in their forms of greeting. The Ongee equivalent of 'how are you?' is 'konyune? onorange-tanka?', 'how is your nose?', or literally, 'when/why/where is the nose to be?' If one responds that one is heavy, one sits down on the lap ofthe inquirer, and rubs one's nose on that person's cheek. This ceremonial act is supposed to remove sorne of the excess odour which is causing the sensation of heaviness. If the response is that one feels light, the inquirer blows on one 's hand as a way of 'infusing' odour and weight. These two acts of rubbing the nose and blowing on the hand are described by the Ongee as e ?geie kwayabe, shifting smells, from one to the other. 26 Death is explained by the Ongee as the loss of one's personal odour. They believe that they kill the animals they hunt by letting out all of their smell and that they themselves are hunted by spirits, called tomya, who kill them by absorbing theirodours. Birth, in tum, is caused by a woman's consuming food in which a hungry spirit is feeding. Growth is conceptualized in terms of olfactory development. The Ongee word for growth, genekula, meaos a process of smell. A newbom

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has soft bones and no teeth, hence possesses little odour. On growing up, a child develops the condensed odour contained in hard bones and teeth. In old age a person loses odour through illness and the loss of teeth, until death reduces the person to a boneless, odourless spirit - which will eventually be bom again as a human. 27 Life for the Ongee is a constant game of olfactory hide-and-seek. They seek out animals in order to kill them by releasing their odours, and at the same time try to hide their own odours both from the animals they hunt and from the spirits who hunt them. 'To hunt' in the Ongee language is expressed by gitekwatebe, meaning 'to release smell causing a flow of death'. The word for hunter, in tum, is gayekwabe, 'one who has bis smell tied tightly' .28 The Ongee employ different techniques to keep their smell 'tied tightly'. Living in a community is believed to unite the odour of individuals and lessen their chances of being smelled out by hungry spirits. When moving as a group from place to place, for example, the Ongee are careful to step in the tracks of the person in front, as this is thought to confuse personal odours and make it difficult for a spirit to track down an individual. The Ongee also screen their odour through the use of smoke. When travelling in single file, the person at the head of the group carries buming wood so that the trail of smoke will cover the odour of all those walking behind. For the same reason, the Ongee keep fires buming at all times in their villages and have smoke-filled, unventilated homes. lndeed, for the Ongee a true fire is characterized not by the heat or light it produces, but by its smoke. (The Ongee also attribute an olfactory dimension to the sun, as they believe it to produce an invisible smoke.) 29 The Ongee limit their smell emission by painting themselves with clay. Clay paints are believed to help bind smells to the body while the different designs used in painting alter the ways in which the body releases smell. Thus an Ongee whose body has been painted will declare, 'The clay paint has been good! I feel that my smell is going slowly and in a zig-zag manner like the snake on the ground! ' 3º The Ongee also dab clay paint on their skins after a meal of meat in order to prevent the smell of the consumed meat from warning living animals that one of their kind has been killed and eaten. 31 While the Ongee generally try to avoid encounters with spirits, there are occasions on which they deliberately summon them. The Ongee retain the bones of their ancestors, for instance, both to keep their potentially harmful spirits under control and to be able to invoke their aid by meaos of the smell released by the bones. Another way of communicating with one 's ancestral spirits consists of painting a specific design on one' s skin

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with clay paint. The pattern of painted and unpainted skin is believed to determine the nature of the odour released by the body, making it possible to send one 's ancestors a message in olfactory code. lndeed, the Ongee believe that, by altering their body odours through the application of clay paint, they can communicate with all other beings. This communication through smell is called míneyalange, which literally means to remember. 32 The most important occasion on which spirits are summoned by the Ongee is when a man wishes to undertake a visit to the spirit world. Every Ongee man is expected to undertake this dangerous journey once, during the male initiation rite. At this time, contrary to ordinary practice, the Ongee make every effort to attract spirits by odour: men refrain from the use of odour-restricting clay paints; women and children disperse their body odours to the winds by swinging on swings, and baskets of rotten pig meat are hung on the trees. 33 This olfactory exhibition takes place so that the spirits will come and take the male initiate away with them to their world, where he can learn of their ways and appease them by making offerings. Only married men can undergo this rite, as it is their wives who ensure that the initiates have a safe journey to and from the spirit world. The initiates' wives help their husbands become light enough to travel with the spirits by inhaling their odour. They also undertake to shift the initiates' body odour/weight from their upper to their lower bodies through massage. This shift in odour/ weight distribution is thought to enable the initiates to float up to the spirit world. 34 When the initiates return from the spirit world, the women massage their odour/weight back into their upper bodies so that the returned initiate 'can remain safely and heavily with us'. 35 Toe initiation rite is called tanageru, which literally means blue-red but in fact has an olfactory basis. The blue referred to, rana, is ash blue and is associated with the lightness of ash, a quality which in turn is associated with an absence of odours. Ashes also have the characteristic of causing temporary blindness when blown in the eyes, and thus are associated with the spirits, who cannot see, but only smell. Toe red referred to, ougeru, is hot red, and is associated with red clay paint, used to make one sweat and release smell when one is heavy with odour. Toe initiation rite is therefore called tanageru, blue-red, because first one becomes light or empty of odour, like blue ash, in order to travel with the spirits, and then one grows heavy with odour, like one who uses red clay to release an excess of personal odour, in order to return to the world of the living. In the words of an Ongee, 'The young man has to be made into rana, light and spirit-like ... [T]he light body ... has to come back and become oegeru, heavy and human.' 36

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While most Ongee men only travel to the spirit world during their initiation, the shaman, called tora/e, visits the spirits regularly. When a tora/e is ready to undertake such a joumey, he absents himself from the community and allows the spirits to absorb his smell and carry him away with them. This situation would result in death for the ordinary person, but the tora/e, through his skillful negotiations with the spirits, is able to retum safely with knowledge of benefit to the community. 37 From the vantage point of the spirits, above the forest, the tora/e leams of the movement of the winds, spirits, and smells, the elements which order Ongee time and space. The Ongee seasonal cycle is based on the winds which blow in from different directions throughout the year, dispersing odour and bringing scent-hungry spirits. The Ongee conduct their own migrations from the coast to the forest according to this cycle: during the seasons when the spirits are believed to be hunting at sea, the Ongee hunt in the forest, and during the seasons when the spirits are believed to be hunting in the forest, the Ongee hunt along the coast. The infonnation the tora/e brings from the spirit world helps the Ongees plan their movements so as to continue to successfully play their game of olfactory hide-and-seek with the spirits. 38 In tenns of the Ongee sensory model as a whole, the senses of smell (along with taste) and touch are said to be shared by spirits and humans, while sight and hearing are believed to be particular to humans. The Ongee associate these latter senses with the two principal groups into which their society is divided: turtle hunters and pig hunters. Turtle hunters are said to have a keen sense of sight, and pig hunters a keen sense of hearing. Marriage is supposed to take place between individuals of opposite moieties 'so that hearing and seeing is completed'. 39 This union of hearing and sight is expressed in the tenn gawakobe, which means to speak so that the hearer 'sees' what one means and is able to show it to others.40 Complementing the coupling of sight and hearing in the Ongee sensory model is the union of olfaction and touch: heaviness, hardness and coldness are associated with the retention of odour; lightness, softness and heat, with its emission. Olfaction, indeed, underlies ali sensory processes, as the ultimate reason for sensory knowledge of any kind is to be better able to maintain the cosmos in a dynamic olfactory balance. Odour is thus what literally malees the Ongee world go round. The very altemation of life and space between the Ongee and the spirits that lies at the heart of Ongee cosmology is ordered by an olfactory model: the inhaling and exhaling of breath. The spirits inhale the exhaled odour of a

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human causing the death of the human and the birth of a spirit. Conversely, a spirit dies anda human is bom when a woman consumes a spirit in her food. The Ongee explain the altemating nature of their cosmos by saying that 'it is ne ver pos sible to inhale and exhale at the same time• .41 Without this continuous process of exchange, the Ongee cosmos would be still and lifeless. As the Ongee say, 'We have to give and take ... otherwise all the game of "hide and seek" will come to an end. ' 42

AN AMAZONIAN COSMOLOGY: COLOURING THE WORLD While for the Tzotzil the vital force of the cosmos is heat, and for the Ongee it is smell, the Desana of the Colombian Amazon believe the cosmos to be animated by colour. In Desana cosmology, the Sun creates life through mixing and matching colour energies. Each colour is associated with a different cultural value: yellow, for example, is associated with male procreative power; red with female fertility; blue with transition and communication; and green with growth. The cosmos itself is composed of layers of colours; on top is the creative yellow light of the sun, then the blue transitional region of the Milky Way, followed by the red, fertile earth, and undemeath the fresh green of Ahpikiondiá, Paradise.43 All people are said to receive an equal amount of colour energies at birth, and at death these colours retum to the Sun. Animals and plants also contain chromatic energies in differing proportions according to their distinct natures. Indeed, the whole process of the distribution, procreation and growth of people, animals and plants is seen by the Desana as a chromatic energy flow that has to be carefully watched over and controlled by shamans. The Desana shaman, called payé, observes the world at large by looking within a rock crystal which functions as a microcosm. His task is to blend and balance the different colours of the spectrum within the crystal to maintain an equilibrium of forces without. 44 Colour symbolism pervades Desana life. Apart from the colours attributed to the natural and supematural worlds, there are the colours the Desana use in their homes and artefacts. The maloca, communal house, is painted male yellow in front and female red at the back. In feather crowns, yellow feathers signify the procreative power of the sun and blue feathers contact and communication. The shield used in rituals is imagined to reflect a red light on the exterior and a pink light in the interior - colours of uterine protection. Other forms of colour symbolism apply to benches, mats, pottery, baskets and musical instruments. 45

132 The senses across cultures

Activities, as well as objects, are colour-coded by the Desana. Procreation, for example, is thought of as a pattem of red female dots against a bright yellow male background. This image is called noméri, which means 'to paint with fine dots'. Cooking is also conceived of as a colour process. Smoking meat, for example, is believed to transform the potentially dangerous yellow component of the meat into a safe red. After the meat is smoked, it is then cooked in a pot to render it an edible brown. The tripod structure used for smoking meat symbolizes this colour transformation: the lower part is said to be yellow, the grid in the centre is said to be red, and the upper part, from which the processed food is removed, is brown, the colour of edible food. Fire itself is said to contain the yellow of the sun and the red of the earth in its flames, and the blue of the Milky Way in its smoke, making ita symbol of cosmic energy. 46 Illness is another type of colour process, for the Desana define most diseases as an unbalanced condition of colour energies. By passing bis crystal over a patient's body and carefully observing the changes in colour reflections within it, the Desana shaman is able to detect such an imbalance. Once the shaman has pinpointed the colour flaw, he invokes the chromatic energies contained within the crystal to 'touch up' the patient's colour chart, adding certain bues, blending others, dimming an overly bright colour or brightening a dull one. Once the proper balance of colours is restored the patient is cured. 47 Extensive as the colour symbolism of the Desana is, it forms but one part of the sensory symbolism elaborated by the Desana. Colours constitute a primary set of energies in Desana cosmology, while a secondary set is formed by odour, temperature and flavour. Odour is thought to be the result of the combination of colour and temperature and is used by the Desana to classify people, animals and plants. Aavour, thought to arise from odour, is less important than the latter but still culturally elaborated. Different flavours are assigned to different kin groups and used to regulate marriage, for example.48 This secondary set of sensory energies supplements the primary colour energies in Desana cosmology and ritual. Thus in cooking, for example, it is not only the colours of different foods which are manipulated, but also their odours and flavours, while in healing rituals, shamans may invoke a variety of sensory forces, along with colour energies, to aid the recovery oftheir patients. Desana artefacts also manifest a multi-sensory significance. A basket, for instance, has meaning associated not only with its colour and function, but also with the design of its weave, its texture, the odour and taste of the vines of which it is made, and so on. 49 Even a specific sensory phenomenon can evoke a train of multi-

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sensory associations for the Desana. A certain pattern of colour, for example, will bring to mind related odours and flavours and their symbolic role in Desana social life and cosmology. Similarly, a particular sound will be associated with a colour, temperature and odour, and be thought to convey a particular message to the brain by its vibrations. For example, the drawn-out sounds of a certain large flute played by Desana menare said to have strong yellow colour, a very hot temperature, anda male odour. 50 The melody is said to be of a merry kind and is associated with the image of a multitude of fish running upriver to the spawning beds. The vibrations produced by the sounds are said to trigger a message which refers to child-rearing.51 The importance the Desana assign to light and colour, and the ways in which they interrelate the senses, undoubtedly derive in large part from their experience with hallucinogenic drugs. The narcotic used by the Desana, banisteriopsis caapi, produces hallucinations which are characterized by colourful imagery and a synaesthetic mingling of sensory perceptions. According to the Desana, the narcotic vine was born when the Sun impregnated a woman through the eye with bis light. The child - the narcotic - was made of light and overwhelmed men with its brilliance. 'Everything happened through the eye', the myth proclaims. 52 Narcotics are taleen by Desana men on almost all ritual occasions. Desana women are not allowed to talee hallucinogens and experience narcotic visions. They may possibly compensate for this by emphasizing other senses than sight, such as touch. Significantly, Desana women talee the many taboos surrounding sexual activity much less seriously than men. 53 The visions produced by the narcotics are believed to provide glimpses of the creation of the cosmos and the iconic images which embody original ideals. At the same time they are thought to induce states of consciousness which will lead an individual to act in accordance with social nonns. The senses primarily involved in this process are sight, hearing and smell. Through the use of hallucinogens and a controlled sensory environment shamans attempt to induce the following four processes: 'to malee one see, and act accordingly', 'to malee one hear, and act accordingly', 'to malee one smell, and act accordingly', and 'to malee one dream, and act accordingly'. lndeed, Desana shamans state that their main task as spiritual leaders is to direct the brain functions of the members of their communities through sensory manipulation. 54 The Desana conceptualize the brain itself in tenns of complex sensory imagery:

134 The senses across cultures

In [one] image the brain is fonned by a bundle of pencil-shaped hexagonal tounnaline crystals standing closely packed side by side; each crystal contains a sequence of colors which, from bottom to top, express a range of sensibilities. In another image a brain consists of layers of innumerable hexagonal honeycombs; the entire brain is one huge humming beehive ... Each tiny hexagonal container holds honey of a different color, flavor, odor, or texture, or it houses a different stage of insect larval development ... A brain can be seen as a bouquet of flowers, a fluttering cluster of butterflies, a glistening swarm of tiny tropical fish, or a quivering mass of multicolored frogs. 55 All of these different sensory characteristics are, of course, associated with cultural values. These values primarily concem marriage, procreation and food, but also deal with other aspects of Desana life. Thus, after drawing an outline of a brain for the ethnographer Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, one Desana man 'pointed rapidly to different areas ... and said: "Here it is prohibited to eat fish; here it is allowed; here one learns to dance; here one has to show respectful behaviour." ' 56 The Desana believe that the universe consists of two parts, the material world of the senses, maría turí (our dimension), and the divine world of pure, abstract ideals, gahí turí (other dimension). The two halves of the brain are conceived of in a similar fashion, the right hemisphere, called 'existential-first', is concemed with practical affairs and biological processes, while the left hemisphere, called 'abstract-first', is the seat of moral law. The function of the right hemisphere is basically to put the ideals of the left hemisphere into practice. The Desana help the right hemisphere do this by coding virtually all sensory impressions to serve as reminders ofthe original ideals. 57 For the Desana, existence in this world is a dream, a mere reflection of the reality which exists in the 'other dimension'. After death, those Desana who have lived according to the dictates ofmoral law awake into the reality ofthe other dimension. 58 Therefore, while on the one hand the Desana appear to be the most sensualist of peoples, dwelling on and assigning meaning to each and every sensory stimulus, they are, on the other hand, the most idealist. The value of sensory perception lies not in itself, but in its ability, when culturally coded, to lead one away from the material world of the senses to the timeless, abstract world of ideals.

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CONCLUSION The Tzotzil, the Ongee and the Desana each conceptualize the vital force of the cosmos in terms of a different sensory energy. These sensory energies order space and time, determine health and illness, life and death, and govern social and personal identity. In each of these cultures putting the cosmos in order, and putting one's house in order, involves putting the senses in order. Five interrelated points can be made from this cross-cultural exploration of sensory orders. The first is that the dominant sensory medium of symbolic orientation can vary widely from culture to culture and can only be understood within the context of a particular culture and not through generalized externa! sensory paradigms. It would be impossible to adequately encompass the cosmologies of the Tzotzil, the Ongee, or the Desana by either the visual or the auditory models proffered by Western academics. These cosmologies are so powerful in their differing sensory symbolism that they shatter conventional Western perceptual models and open us up to completely new sensory universes. The second point is that the sense most symbolically elaborated by a culture is not necessarily the sense of most practica! importance, as a medium of communication, or otherwise. Toe three cultures examined here can all be classified as oral cultures with regards to their dominant medium of communication, yet they are not all aural cultures. The Tzotzil symbolically orient themselves by temperature, the Ongee by smell. The colour-minded Desana, appear, at first sight, to be as visualist as the West. This leads us to the third point. Not only do Western sensory paradigms force all cultures into a visual or oral/aural model, they also recognize only one kind of visuality- that of the West - and one kind of aurality- that of the generic non-litera te 'tribal' culture. Yet the visualism of the Desana, with its emphasis on integrating and animating colour energies, is surely very different from the visualism of the West, with its emphasis on detached observation and surface appearance. In fact, the 'world-view' of the Desana is rather a sensory kaleidoscope, with colour merging into smell and then into flavour and so on. Similarly, aurality is not an unchanging concept across cultures, but is 'coloured' by the sensory and symbolic associations given to it by a particular people. McLuhan has written that 'non-literate cultures experience such an overwhelming tyranny of the ear over the eye that any balanced interplay among the senses is unknown at the auditory extreme. ' 59 Our fourth point, however, is that to understand a culture' s sensory model, it is not only the dominant sense of symbolic elaboration that must be considered, but the

136 The senses across cultures

interplay of all the senses. In the visualist West, we are apt to ignore the multi-sensory dimensions of other cultures. Though a Desana basket, for instance, is evidently a multi-sensory object, it would never occur to the ordinary Westemer viewing one in a museum that meaning might lie not only in its form and function, but also in its texture, taste and smell. Likewise, the body designs of the Ongee would appear to be a purely visual decoration in a photograph. It is only on entering into the Ongee sensory arder that one realizes that the painted designs are not there primarily for visual effect, but for the regulation of body odours. In each of the cultures examined here it is not only the hierarchy of the senses which is significant, but also the ways in which the senses are related. Thus in a Tzotzil ritual meal, eating results in an increase in personal temperature, while in an Ongee initiation rite massage leads to a loss of one's personal odour. This sensory interdependence is most evident among the Desana. To deny the importance ofthe interplay ofthe senses in that synaesthetic culture, where sensory perceptions are so closely related that it is scarcely possible to separate one from another, would be non-sense. Finally, sensory models are conceptual models, and sensory values are cultural values. The way a society senses is the way it understands. Thus, for example, the ethnographer A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, coming from a visual culture. that emphasizes clear-cut distinctions, found the ideas of the Andaman Islanders conceming spirits to be 'floating and lacking in precision' .60 Yet in the intermingling, olfactory culture of the Islanders (who include the Ongee) 'floating and lacking in precision' is precisely how spirits are characterized. Spirits, like odours, travel on the winds, coming and going, sharing the same world inhabitated by humans. They are not confined to any one place, they ' [do] not have a distinct shape yet can be experienced everywhere'.61 The 'imprecision' that a visual culture finds disturbing, therefore, can be normative for an olfactory culture, and where a visual culture may emphasize location, an olfactory culture will emphasize movement. It is not simply that a society's mode of thinking and acting is ordered by the cultural consequences of the sensory properties it emphasizes, however. Sensory values not only frame a culture's experience, they express its ideals, its hopes and its fears. Justice and life are conceptualized in terms of temperature or smell. Death is a loss of heat or a loss of odour. Fertility and procreation are colours. As sensory values are social values, sensory relations are also social relations. The relationship between hot and cold in Tzotzil cosmology

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structures the relationship between men and women. The relationship between sight and hearing in Ongee cosmology structures the relationship between pig hunters and turtle hunters. Among the Desana, marriage takes place between kin groups classified with different odours and flavours. These sensory relations are, at the same time, moral relations. By classifying men as hot and women as cold the Tzotzil are not merely conveying the idea of different sexes through different thermal sensations, they are making a statement about the different status and roles of men and women in their society. Heat is associated with order and power, coldness with disorder and impotence. The classification of men as hot, therefore, makes them dominant instruments of order in Tzotzil society, while women' s classification as cold makes them subordinate instruments of disorder. The penalty of defying this moral system is made clear by myth: women, and all other elements of disorder, who attempt to possess the power of heat are destroyed by heat. Thus in one Tzotzil story the female moon is scalded by the male sun in order to ensure that her radiance is less than bis. In another, a disapproving husband uses hot chilli pepper to kill bis overly lustful, and therefore unacceptably hot, wife. 62 Structures of power within a society can also receive sensory expression in the differential allocation of sensory powers. Thus, among the Ongee, only men are allowed to undertake the journey to the spririt world and thereby gain an 'overscent' of the olfactory processes which govern the cosmos. Likewise, among the Desana, only men are allowed access to the hallucinogens which provide a transcendent insight into cosmic reality. Those groups marginalized by the dominant sensory/ social order, however, sometimes develop alternative orders. Desana women, for example, may well elaborate their sense of touch to compensate for their exclusion from visionary sight. By imbuing sensory values with social values, cultures attempt to ensure that their members will perceive the world aright. When sensory orders express cosmic orders, cosmologies are not only read about or heard of, but lived through one's own body. Every time a Tzotzil woman walks on the cool earth with herbare feet she is reminded of her symbolic coldness. Toe Tzotzil feel their cosmology through the temperature of their bodies, the Ongee breathe in theirs with every breath. The Desana see their cosmology in colours, hear it in music, taste it in their food. These sensory cosmologies make us aware of the many different ways in which cultures shape perception, and the inability of standard Western models to comprehend such sensory and symbolic diversity. When

138 The senses across cultures

cultures are approached on their own sensory terms rather than through the paradigms dictated for them by the West, what we discover are not world-views or oral/aural societies, but worlds of sense.

Notes

lntroduction: through the looking glass 1 V. Pandya, 'Above the Forest: A Study of Andamanese Elhnoamenology, Cosmology and lhe Power of Ritual', Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1987. 2 G.H. Gossen, Chamulas in the World o/the Sun: Time and Space in a Maya Oral Tradition, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1974. 3 A good introduction to the di verse sensory systems of different societies is D. Howes, ed., The Varieties o/ Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, Toronto, University ofToronto Press, 1991. 4 L. Vinge, The Five Senses: Studies in a Literary Tradition, Lund, Sweden, Publications of lhe Royal Society of Letters at Lund, 1975, pp. 15-21. Vinge's book is an excellent guide to lhe history of lhe motif of lhe five senses in Western literature. 5 lbid., p. 26. 6 R. Rivlin and K. Gravelle, Deciphering the Senses: The Expanding World o/Human Perception, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1984, p. 91. 7 lbid. 8 Vinge, pp. 27-8. 9 See, for example, Vinge, p. 251, and T. Amold, ed., Select English Works o/ John Wyc/if, vol. 1, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1869, p. 262. 10 Vinge, pp. 17-19. 11 Pliny, Natural History, vol. 2, H. Rackham, trans., London, William Heinemann, 1947, pp. 517-27. Fanciful though they seem, Pliny's depictions of other races influenced European explorers in their understanding of the sensory orders of lhe indigenous peoples lhey encountered. Compare, for example, Pliny' s account wilh the description of the Incas' sensory abilities given by a Spanish priest in C. Classen, Inca Cosmology and the Human Body, Salt Lake City, University of Ulah Press, 1993, pp. 65, 75. 12 Vinge, p. 59. 13 lbid., pp. 58--9. 14 lbid., pp. 98--103. 15 Ibid., 135-142; A. Synnott, 'Puzzling Over the Senses: From Plato to Marx', in D. Howes, ed., The Varieties o/ Sensory Experience: A

140 Notes

16 17 18 19 20 21

22

23

24

25 26 27 28

29

Sourcebook in the Anthropology o/ the Senses, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1991, pp. 70-1. For example, Rivlin and Gravelle, pp. 197-214. D. Ackerman, A Natural History o/the Senses, New York, Random House, 1990. M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making o/Typographic Man, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1962. W. Ong, The Presence o/ the Word: Some Prolegomenafor Cultural and Religious History, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1967. McLuhan, pp. 42-3. G. Simmel, 'Sociology of the Senses: Visual Interaction', in R.E. Park and E.W. Burgess, eds, lntroduction to the Science o/ Sociology, Chicago, University ofChicago Press, 2nd edn, 1924, pp. 356--61. M. Jay, 'In the Empire of the Gaze: Foucault and the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-century French Thought', in Foucault: A Critica/ Reader, D. Couzen-Hoy, ed., Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. 175-204. S. Ewen, Ali Consuming /mages: The Politics o/ Style in Contemporary Culture, New York, Basic Books, 1988; Rachel Bouldy, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola, New York, Methuen, 1985. D. Howes, 'Toe Bounds of Sense: An lnquiry into the Sensory Orders of Western and Melanesian Society', Ph.D. dissertation, Université de Montréal, 1992, pp. 17-22. Cited by P. Westbrook, A Literary History o/ New England, Toronto, Associated University Press, 1988, p. 128. K. Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts o/ 1844, D.J. Struik, ed., New York, International Publishers, 1972, pp. 40-1. A. Seeger, 'Toe Meaning of Body Ornaments', Ethnology, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 211-24. M. Capek, The Philosophical lmpact o/Contemporary Physics, New York, Van Nostrand, 1961, pp. 170-1. Cited by Ong, The Presence ofthe Word, p. 322. B. Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Whorf, Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press, 1962, p. 55.

1 The odour of the rose: floral symbolism and the olfactory decline of the West 1 A. Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social lmagination, M. Kochan, R. Porter and C. Prendergast, trans. , Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1986, p.5. 2 E.T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension, New York, Doubleday, 1969, p. 45. 3 Sight has generally held first place among the senses in Western philosophy since Plato and Aristotle allotted it that position. However, the cultural prominence of sight has not always been quite as elevated as it is today, so that in earlier periods the other senses sometimes vied with vision for importance. L. Febvre, for instance, writes that while in modern Western culture sight reigns supreme, 'the sixteenth century did not see first: it heard

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and smelled, it sniffed the air and caught sounds'. The Problem o/ Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, B. Gottlieb, trans., Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1982,p.432. 4 D. Lowe, History o/Bourgeois Perception, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 13. 5 0n this see, for example, Lowe, p. 14. 6 W. Ong, The Presence ofthe Word: Some Prolegomenafor Cultural and Religious History, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1967, pp. 74, 128--30. 7 lbid., p. 74. 8 C. Joret, La Rose dans I' antiquité et au moyen age, Geneva, Slatkin Reprints, 1970, pp. 88-121. 9 There are, in fact, a variety of rose fragrances, as different breeds have different characteristic scents. In Rhodologia: A Discourse on the Odour o/ the Rose, J.C. Crocker asserts further that no two roses are alike in odour and that the odour of a rose changes according to the time of day. Brighton, W.J. Smith, 1894, p. 12. For a discussion ofthe roses popular in Antiquity, see Joret, pp. 3-5. 10 Pliny, Natural History, vol. 6, H. Rackman, trans., London, William Heinemann, 1951, pp. 187-9, 249-53. 11 R. Genders, A History o/ Scent, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1972, p. 91. 12 E. Rimmel, The Book o/ Perfumes, London, Chapman and Hall, 1867, pp. 72-3. 13 In the words of R. Wright, 'The excesses to which the late Greeks went in the use of perfumes were mild compared with the indulgence of the Romans'. The Story o/Gardening, New York, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1934, p. 85. 14 Martial, Epigrams, W. Kerr, trans. , Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1961, vol. 1, p. 205. 15 lbid, p. 417. 16 S. Lilja, The Treatment o/ Odours in the Poetry o/ Antiquity, Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 49, Helsinki, Societas Scientarum Fennica, 1972. 17 Joret, pp. i, 51; M. Detienne, The Gardens o/ Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology, trans. J. Lloyd, Atlantic Highlands, N.J., Humanities Press, 1977. 18 Cited by S. Harvey, 'The Fragrance of Sanctity: Incense and Spirituality in the Early Byzantine East', Dumbarton Oaks Public Lecture, March 11, 1992. 19 E. Gibbon, Decline and Fallo/ the Roman Empire, vol. 1, New York, The Modern Llbrary, 1952, p. 413. 20 Cited by Harvey, pp. 4--5. 21 The rose was also a popular symbol for love in folklore and romances, notably the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose. For an examination of rose symbolism in Western literature see B. Seward, The Symbolic Rose, New York, Columbia University Press, 1960. 22 J. Clements et al., The Rose, New York, Mayflower Books, 1979, p. 13. 23 W. Strabo, 'The Little Garden Poem', trans. H.E. Luxmoore, cited by E.S. Rohde in Garden-Craft in the Bible and Other Essays, Freeport, N.Y.,

142 Notes Books For Libraries Press, 1967 [1917], p. 104. An opposite olfactory allegory is employed by the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert in 'Toe Banquet': But as Pomanders and wood still are good, Yet being bruised are better sented: God, to show how farre his !ove could improve, Here, as broken, is presented.

24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

F.E. Hutchinson, ed., The Works of George Herbert, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1941, p. 181. Rohde, p. 113. P. Hunter Blair, The World of Bede, New York, St Martin's Press, 1961, p. 308. C. Clair, Of Herbs and Spices, London, Abelard Schuman, 1961, p. 15. Rohde, p. 32. See, for example, H. Lemaire, Etude des images littéraires de Fran,ois de Sales, Paris, Editions A.G. Nizet, 1969, pp. 27-8, 42, 98. This fundamental association between life and odour can be found in many writings of the pre-modero period. A seventeenth-century poem entitled 'Life', for instance, begins, 'I made a posie while the day ran by: Here I will smell my remnant out', and ends, 'Farewell deare flowers ... ifmy sent be good, I care not ifit be as short as yours'. Hutchinson, p. 94. P. Ackroyd, Words and Meaning, Cambridge, Cambridg~niversity Press, 1968, p. 34. Anacreon, cited by Rimmel, p. 87. Ascham' s Herbal, cited by E. Sitwell, A Book of Flowers, London, Macmillan & Co., 1952,p. 171. D. Frame, ed., The Complete Essays ofMontaigne, Stanford, Cal., Stanford University Press, 1965, p. 229. J. Taylor, 'Toe Fearful Summer', cited by l. Day, Perfumery with Herbs, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1979, p. 67. Joret, pp. 129-40. A. Amherst, A History of Gardening in England, Detroit, Singing Tree Press, 1969 [1896], pp. 46--7, 59. Amherst, pp. 54-7; Rohde, pp. 16, 83-4. W. Cavendish, cited by Amherst, p. 87. lbid., p. 83. Amherst, p. 128. Cited by Amherst, p. 124. From a letter by Peter Kemp, 1561. Cited by Amherst, p. 135. M. Kieman, ed., Sir Francis Bacon: The Essayes or Counsels, Civil/ and Moral, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985, pp. 140-1. J. Parkinson, A Garden of Pleasant Flowers (Paradisi in Sote: Paradisus Terrestris), New York, Dover, 1976 [1629], p. 413. Cited by Joret, p. 43. J. Evelyn, Fumifugium or the lnconveniencie of the Aer and Smoak of LondonDissipated, Exeter, England, University ofExeter, 1976 [1661], p. 15.

Notes

143

47 L. Leminus in The Touchstone of Complexions, 1581, cited by Amherst, p. 164. 48 Day, pp. 21, 25, 97; C.J. Thompson, The Mystery and Lure of Perfume, Detroit, Singing Tree Press, 1969, pp. 114--127. 49 Day, p. 25. 50 From 'Amoretti and Epithalamion', in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, William Oram et al., eds, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 638-9. Similar examples can be found in the poetry oí Robert Herrick. For instance, the following poem entitled 'Upon Julia's Sweat': Wo'd ye oyle oí Blossomes get? Take it from my Julia's sweat: Oyl oí Lillies and oí Spike, From her moysture take the like. Let her breath or let her blow, Ali rich spices thence will flow.

51 52 53

54

55 56 57 58 59

F.W. Moonnan, ed., The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick, London, Oxford University Press, 1951, p. 240. Hutchinson, pp. 174--5. For example, P. Knight, Flower Poetics in Nineteenth-Century France, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986, p. 52. There were, oí course, also numerous period poems and other writings dwelling on the perfections oí the visual. The point to be made here is not that the appreciation oí smell excluded that oí sight, but rather the extent to which odour was valued then in contrast to now, and the cultural significance which it was accorded. W.G. lngram and T. Redpath, eds, Shakespeare' s Sonnets, London, University oí London Press, 1964, p. 125. Cited by H.N. Ellacombe, The Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare, London, W. Satchell, 1884, p. 311. E. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, London, Scolar Press, 1976 (1596], Book II, Canto V. Lemaire, p. 98. R. Jeffries, Amaryllis at the Fair, London, Duckworth, 1908, p. l. In New Principies of Gardening, published in 1728, B. Langley writes: The End and Design oí a good Garden, is to be both profitable and delightful; wherein should be observed, that its Parts should be always presenting new Objects, which is a continual Entertainment to the Eye, and raises a Pleasure oí Imagination.

60 61 62 63

Cited by J. Dixon Hunt and P. Willis, The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620-1820, London, P. Elek, 1975, p. 178. A.J. Dezallier D' Argenville, The Theory and Practice of Gardening, trans. J. James (1712), cited by Hunt and Willis, p. 130. J. Addison, Paper from The Spectator, No. 414, June 25, 1712. In Hunt and Willis, p. 141. lbid., p. 331. H. Reptan, Red Book (1795--6). In Hunt and Willis, p. 361.

144 Notes 64 W. Chambers, Designs o/ Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils (1757). In Hunt and Willis, p. 284. 65 See Ong, pp. 66-8. 66 A. Synnott, 'Puzzling Over the Senses: From Plato to Marx', in D. Howes,

ed., The Varieties o/ Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology o/the Senses, Toronto, University ofToronto Press, 1991, p. 70. 67 Cited by E.L. Tuveson in The Jmagination as a Means o/Grace: locke and the Aesthetics o/ Romanticism, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1960, p. 102. 68 Explored by W. Paulson in Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Blind in France, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1987. 69 Thompson, p. 106. 70 lbid., p. 96. 71 Genders, p. 167. 72 P. Stubbes, The Anatomy o/Abuses, New York, Johnson Reprint Company, 1972. 73 lbid. 74 Amherst, pp. 59--60. 75 M. Waters, The Garden in Victorian literature, Aldershot, England, Scolar Press, 1988, pp. 37, 124. 76 Corbin, pp. 223-8. 77 Waters, p. 37. 78 lbid., p. 39. • 79 B. Elliot, Victorian Gardens, London, B.T. Batsford, 1986, p. 163. 80 A. Strickland writes of Queen Elizabeth in lives o/ the Queens o/ England: 'Elizabeth was very delicate in her olfactory nerves, and affected to be still more sensitive on that point than she really was.' Vol. IV, London, Henry Colbum, 1851, p. 709. 81 Cited by Waters, pp. 46, 127-8. 82 lbid., p. 124. 83 A. Rey, la Science dans l' antiquité, vol. 2, Paris, 1930-1948, p. 445. Cited by Febvre, p. 432. 84 B. Jonson, dedication to 'The Alchemist', in B. Nicholson ed., Ben Jonson, London, T. Fisher Unwin, n.d., vol. 3, p. 277. 85 E. Chamberlain and F. Douglas, The Gentlewoman's Book o/ Gardening, London, Henry and Co., 1892, pp. 43, 46. 86 lbid.,p.47. 87 C. Reade, lt is Never Too late to Mend, London, Collins, 1856, p. 67. In the Victorian 'Language of Flowers', significantly, marigolds are associated with negative characteristics such as cruelty and jealousy, while pinks are associated with love. Vemon Coleman, ed., The language o/ Flowers, Berkshire, England, Yorkshire Dialect Society, 1973 (1852]. 88 Cited by Knight, pp. 94-5. 89 'L'Art des parfums', l'Ariel, April, 1836, cited by Knight, p. 50. 90 J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. R. Baldwick, London, Penguin, 1959, pp. 118-29. 91 M. Proust, Remembrance o/ Things Past, Volume /: Swann' s Way, C.K. Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, trans. , New York, Random House, 1981, p. 53.

Notes

145

92 H.H. Thomas, Garden Flowers as They Grow, London, Cassell and Company, 1913, p. 27. See also p. 22: 'What, one wonders, will be the judgement of twentieth-century poets and writers? Will they, too, be able to sing of the sweet scent of the Rose?' 93 Wright, p. 83. 94 J. Clements et al., The Rose, New York, Mayflower Books, 1979, p. 15. 95 Elliot, pp. 214-15. 96 lbid., pp. 218-20. 97 In Roses: Four I Act Plays, trans. G. Frank, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913, p.6. 98 H. Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 1, New York, Random House, 1942 [1899], part 3, pp. 70-2. 99 lbid., p. 72. 100 lbid., p. 62; Thompson, pp. 131-2. 101 R. Ray and M. MacCaskey, Roses: How to Select, Grow and Enjoy, rev. edn, Los Angeles, Horticultural Publishing, 1985, p. 67. 102 The modem English term 'bouquet', introduced from the French in the eighteenth century, has also come to have certain associations with fragrance, for example when one refers to the bouquet of a wine, but these are secondary and appeared at a later date.

2 Natural wits: the sensory skills of 'wild children' 1 R. Zingg discusses many of the presumed cases of feral humans in J.A.L. Singh and R.M. Zingg, Wolf-Children and Feral Man, Hamden, Conn., Achron Books, 1966, pp. 177-365. 2 E.B. Tyler, 'Wild Men and Beast Children', Anthropological Review, vol. 1, 1863, pp. 21-32; C. Lévi-Strauss, Les structures elementaires de la parenté, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1949, pp. 1-12. 3 B. Bettelheim, 'Peral Children and Autistic Children', American Journal o/ Sociology, vol. 64, 1959, pp. 455-67. 4 S. Curtiss, Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern Day 'Wild Child', New York, Academic Press, 1977. 5 P.-J. Bonaterre, 'Historical Notice on the Sauvage de l'Aveyron', in The Wild Boyo/ Aveyron, H. Lane, ed., Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1976 [1800], p. 37. 6 lbid. 7 P. Pinel in H. Lane, ed., The Wild Boy of Aveyron, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1976, pp. 59-60. 8 For a discussion of the importance attributed to the sense of touch in eighteenth-century thought see D. Summers, The Judgement of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise ofAesthetics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 325. 9 J. Itard, 'The Wild Boy of Aveyron', in L. Malson and J. ltard, eds, Wolf Children, The Wild Boy of Aveyron, London, NLB, 1972 [1802], pp. 89-179; H. Lane, ed., The Wild Boy o/ Aveyron, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1976. 10 Singh and Zingg, p.8.

146 Notes 11 Charles Maclean discusses this controversy in The Wolf Children, New York, Hill and Wang, 1978, pp. 266-83. 12 lbid., pp. 294-300. 13 A. von Feuerbach, 'Caspar Hauser', in Singh and Zingg, pp. 277-365. 14 Malson in ltard and Malson, p. 67. 15 Singh and Zingg, p. 24. 16 Itard, p. 106. 17 Feuerbach, p. 296. 18 Itard,pp. 104,114. 19 Singh and Zingg, p. 33. 20 Feuerbach, p. 316. 21 lbid., pp. 316,322,332. 22 Singh and Zingg, p. 10 l. 23 Feuerbach, p. 318. 24 ltard, p. 97. 25 Feuerbach, p. 323. 26 lbid. 27 l. Ross, Journey into Light: The Story o/ the Education o/ the Blind, New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951, pp. 77-8. 28 P. Heath, trans., Glencoe, Ill., Free Press, 1960. 29 lbid., p. 213. 30 W. Paulson, Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Blind in France, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1987. 31 Itard, p. 150. • 32 Singh and Zingg, p. 23. 33 H. Keller, The World I Live In, New York, The Century Company, 1909, pp. 43-5, 69. 34 Feuerbach, p. 335. 35 lbid., p. 336. 36 R. Harper et al., Odour Description and Odour Classification, New York, American Elsevier, 1968, pp. 161-2. 37 P.C. Higgins, Outsiders in a Hearing World: A Sociology o/ Deafness, Beverly Hills, Calif., Sage, 1980, pp. 91-3. 38 Senden, pp. 130-5. 39 ltard, pp. 112-13, 151. 40 Singh and Zingg, p. 78. 41 lbid, p. 95. 42 Feuerbach, p. 293. 43 ltard, p. 105. 44 Singh and Zingg, p. 31. 45 Itard, p. 107; Singh and Zingg, p. 92. 46 Feuerbach, p. 321. 47 Itard, p. 104. 48 Singh and Zingg, p. 25. 49 Itard, p. 149. 50 Feuerbach, p. 337. 51 lbid., pp 337-9. 52 ltard, p. 97. 53 B. Bettelheim reports that autistic or schizophrenic children sometimes

Notes

54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72

147

manifest a hypersensitivity to smell and touch, while they are unresponsive to vision or sounds, p. 369. Singh and Zingg, p. 60. Itard, p. 150. Feuerbach, pp. 335-6. Singh and Zingg, p. 77. Feuerbach, p. 356. Feuerbach, p. 329. The craving for order is also characteristic of the autistic child. Cf. B. Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress: In/anti/e Autism and the Birth of the Seif, New York, Free Press, 1967, p. 83. 'Wild' children, dueto their isolation from society may, in fact, have traits in common with autistic children, who have often been abandoned by society. None ofthe wild children examined here, however, displayed the hostility which is often characteristic of autistic children, nor did any of them refuse to interact with their environments after the initial shock of capture . Singh and Zingg, pp. 92-3, 95. ltard, p. 110. Feuerbach, p. 322. lbid., p. 356. ltard, pp. 176-7. An interesting example of the impropriety of smell as a means of recognition in Western culture is provided by P. Gay in The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, Volume /: The Education of the Senses, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 415. Gay notes that when Thomas Carlyle's Journey to Germany, Autumn 1858 was edited by his nephew, the word 'smell' was replaced by the word 'see' in a phrase concerning the eagemess of a waiting crowd to 'smell the Prince of Prussia.' Paulson, p. 37. Itard, p. 138. Many of the techniques of sensory education developed by Itard for use with Victor, such as recognizing objects through touch, would later be appropriated by Maria Montessori in her method of child education. lbid., p. 150. lbid. lbid. lbid, p. 139.

3 Words of sense 1 Jacob Boehme, The Aurora, J. Sparrow, trans., London, John M. Watkins and James Clark & Co., 1960, pp. 174-6. 2 Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon, trans., London, The Soncino Press, 1949, vol. 1, p. 101. 3 The sources used for this exploration are E. Klein, A Comprehensive Etymo/ogical Dictionary ofthe Englishlanguage, New Yorlc, Elsevier, 1966; The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, 1989; W. Skeat, An Etymo/ogica/ Dictionary of the English language, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1898; and

148 Notes

4

5

6 7 8

9

1O

Webster' s New World Dictionary, 1968. The examples of historical usage of words are ali from The Oxford English Dictionary. L. Marks, The Unity o/ the Senses: lnterrelations Across the Modalities, New York, Academic Press, 1978, pp. 77-80; E. Sapir, 'A Study of Phonetic Symbolism', Journal o/ Experimental Psychology, vol. 12, 1929, pp. 225-39. J.M. Williams postulates a law of semantic change based on the pattems of transfer of adjectives from one sensory modality to another in 'Synaesthetic Adjectives: A Possible Law of Semantic Change', Language, vol. 52, no. 2, 1976, pp. 461-78. R. Rivlin and K. Gravelle, Deciphering the Senses: The Expanding World o/ Human Perception, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1984, pp. 88-9. lbid., pp. 85-6. For example, W. Ong, Interfaces o/ the Word: Studies in the Evolution o/ Consciousness and Culture, Ithaca, N.Y, Comell University Press, 1977, Chapter 5; Marcel Danesi, 'Thinking is Seeing: Visual Metaphors and the Nature of Abstract Thought', Semiotica, vol. 80, nos. 3/4, 1990, pp. 221-37; and Stephen Tyler, 'The Vision Quest in the West, or What the Mind's Eye Sees', Journal o/ Anthropological Research, vol. 40, no. 23, 1984, pp. 23-40. lt is notable that the terms read, write, and text, which we now think of as models of visualism, ali have non-visual bases. To read originally meant to counsel and interpret, to write meant to scratch or score, and a text was a woven fabric. Tactile and kinaesthetic terms such as slow, dense, soft, wet, cracked, crazy, unbalanced, and unstable, also serve to characterize a lack of intelligence or sanity.

•

4 The odour of the other: olfactory codes and cultural categories For example, A. Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the French Social Imagination, M.L. Kochan, R. Porter, C. Prendergast, trans., Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1986. 2 R.W. Moncrieff, Odour Preferences, New York, John Wiley, 1966, p. 209. 3 E. Carpenter, Eskimo Realities, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973, p. 64. 4 Corbin, p. 210. D. Howes and M. Lalonde suggest in their article on the 'history of sensibilities' that the symbolic importance of smell and/or taste - the discriminating senses - tends to increase when social boundaries are perceived as being threatened. 'The History of Sensibilities: Of the Standard of Taste in Mid-Eighteenth Century England and the Circulation of Smells in Post-Revolutionary France', Dialectica/ Anthropo/ogy, vol. 16, 1992, pp.125-35. 5 An anecdote conceming Queen Elizabeth I provides an amusing illustration of this. The Queen, who was reputed to be 'very delicate in her olfactory nerves', responded to a petitioner whose suit she did not wish to grant by remarking on the foul odour of his boots. The petitioner, grasping her meaning, replied: 'Tut, madam! lt is my suit that stinks, not my boots.' A.

Notes

6 7 8 9

10

11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29

149

Strickland, Lives o/the Queens o/England, vol. 4, London, Henry Colbum, 1851, p. 7f1}, G.P. Largey and D.R. Watson, 'Toe Sociology of Odors', American Jo urna/ o/ Sociology, vol. 77, no. 6, 1977, p. 1022. Corbin, pp. 38, 209. J. Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1937, p. 378. O. Klineberg, Race Differences, New York, Harper, 1935, pp. 129--30, and H. Ellis, Studies in the Psychology o/Sex, New York, Random House, 1942 [1899), vol. 1, pt. 3, pp. 129--30. I examine the symbolic importance of the proximity senses of smell and taste in different Amazonian societies in 'Sweet Colors, Fragrant Songs: Sensory Models of the Andes and the Amazon', American Ethnologist, vol. 17,no.4, 1990,pp. 722-35. G. Reichel-Dolmatoff, 'Tapir Avoidance in the Colombian Northwest Amazon'. In Animal Myths and Metaphors, G. Urton, ed., Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 1985, pp. 124--6. lbid., pp. 125-6. lbid., p. 125. G. Reichel-Dolmatoff, Basketry as Metaphor: Arts and Crafts o/ the Desana Jndians o/ the Northwest Amazon, Los Angeles, Museum of Cultural History, University ofCalifornia, 1985, pp. 24-33. A.O. Lindsay, ed., Socratic Discourses by Plato and Xenophon, London, J.M. Dent, 1910, p. 165. S.W. Maugham, On a Chinese Screen, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985 [1927), p. 142. G. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, London, Victor Gollancz, 1937, p. 159. lbid., p. 160. E. Gaskell, My lady ludlow, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1858, p. 18. lbid. C.H. Piesse, ed., Piesse's Arto/ Perfumery, London, Piesse and Ludin, 1891, p. 32. Corbin, pp. 142-60. Orwell, p. 160. T. Mclaughlin, Coprophilia ora Peck o/ Dirt, London, Cassell, 1971, p.113. L. Morrow, 'A Good Snob Nowadays Is Hard to Find', Time, Sept. 19, 1983, p. 76. U. Almagor, 'The Cycle and Stagnation of Smells: Pastoralists-Fishennen Relationships in an East African Society', RES, vol. 14, 1987, p. 115. Toe Dassanetch also characterize other peoples in the region by different odours (ibid, p. 110). lbid., p. 109. lbid., p. 110. Whether the fishennen consider themselves to be foul-smelling is an unanswered question. The same question can be asked of the working class in the nineteenth century, and of many other censured groups which have been characterized as foul-smelling throughout history. Toe 'other' is assigned an odour, but not usually allowed a voice.

150 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Notes

lbid., p. 116. lbid., pp. 110, 117. lbid., p. 111. lbid. A. Seeger, Nature and Society in Central Brazil: The Suya lndians o/ Mato Grosso, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 106-20. lbid., p. 107. lbid., p. 115. lbid., pp. 107-15. lbid., p. 203. lbid., p. 202. lbid., p. 203. lbid., p. 202. lbid., p. 119. G. Reichel-Dolmatoff, 'Desana Animal Categories, Food Restrictions, and the Concept of Color Energies', Journal o/Latin American Lore, vol. 4, no. 2, 1978,pp.243-9,273. lbid., p. 277. F. Barrett, The Magus or Celestial lntelligencer, Leicester, Vanee Harvey, 1970 [1801), p. 44. The association between menstrual odour and hunting-related menstrual taboos in various cultures is discussed in T. Buckley and A. Gottlieb, 'A Critica! Appraisal of Theories of Menstrual Symbolism', in Blood Magic: The Anthropology o/ Menstruation, T. Buckley and A. Gottlieb, eds, Berkeley, University ofCalifomia Press, 1988, pp. 21-3. J.T. Shawcross, ed., The Complete Poetry o/ John Donne, Garden City, New York, Anchor Books, 1961,.p. 50. Corbin, p. 143. lbid., p. 194. L.C. Martin, ed., The Poems o/Robert Herrick, London, Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 20. J.J. von Garres, la mystique divine, naturel et diabolique, 2nd edn, Paris, Poussique-Rusand, 1957 [1861), pp. 180-1. M. Summers, The History o/ Witchcraft and Demonology, New York, University Press, 1956 [1926), p. 44. E. Topsell, The History o/ Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents and lnsects, vol. 1, New York, Da Capo Press, 1967 (1658), p. 449. C.S. Lewis, The Si/ver Chair, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967, p. 149. H. Kramer and J. Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, M. Summers, trans., New York, Dover, 1988 (1486), pp. 119, 121. G. Reichel-Dolmatoff, 'Tapir Avoidance', p. 133. M. Detienne, The Gardens ofAdonis: Spices in Greek Mythology, J. Lloyd, trans., Atlantic Highlands, N.J., Humanities Press, 1977, pp. 5-35. E. Sagarin, The Science and Arto/ Perfumery, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1945, p. 60. Corbin, p. 67. Sagarin, p. 66.

Notes

151

61 M. Waters, The Garden in Victorianliterature, Aldershot, England, Scolar Press, 1988, pp. 270-2. 62 Corbin, p. 39. 63 The ancient Greeks, for example, believed that everything which carne from Arabia, the land of spices, was sweet-smelling. (Detienne, p. 10). 64 W. Beckford, Vathek, Delmer, N.Y., Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1972 [1786]; T. Moore, Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance, London, Longmans, Hurst, Reese, Orme, and Brown, 1817; C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy, Harmondsworth, England, Penguin, 1966. 65 In fact, these two categories of putrid-smelling and sweet-smelling, while antithetical in one sense, in another sense are but variations on a theme, as the odour of decomposition can smell sweetish (inducing sorne early perfumers to mix excrement with their perfumes [Corbin, pp. 16, 67]). Thus, the 'sweet-smelling' woman is but a whiff away from the 'rottensmelling' woman, as is the fragrant foreigner from the foul foreigner. 66 D. McKenzie, Aromatics and the Soul: A Study o/ Smells, London, ,----, Heinemann, 1923, pp. 56-7. '..§?; P. Coats, Flowers in History, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970, p. 44. 68 For a discussion of perfume symbolism see A. Synett, 'The Sociology of Smell', Canadian Review o/ Sociology and Anthropo/ogy, vol. 28, no. 4, 1991, pp. 449-50. 69 F. Kennet, History o/ Perfume, London, Harrap, 1975, p. 189. 70 The exception to this is the stench of machine oil and sweat often associated with factories (Corbin, pp. 148-9). 71 Jon C. Crocker, Vital Souls: Bororo Cosmology, Natural Symbolism and Shamanism, Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1985, pp. 37, 160. 72 A. Gebhart-Sayer, 'The Geometric Designs ofthe Shipibo-Conibo in Ritual Context',Journal of Latin American Lore, vol. 11, no. 2, 1985, p. 171. 73 E. Westermarck, Ritual and Be/ief in Morocco, vol. 1, London, Macmillan, 1968 [1926], p. 280; J. Boddy, WombsandA/ien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Ztir Cult in Northern Sudan, Madison, Wis., University of Wisconsin Press, 1989, p. 106. 74 W. Wilbert, 'The Pneumatic Theory of Female Warao Herbalists', Social Sciences and Medicine, vol. 25, no. 10, 1987, pp. 1141-2. 75 lbid., p. 1141. 76 W. James, The Listening Ebony: Moral Knowledge, Religion and Power among the Uduk o/ Sudan, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988, pp. 38-9. 77 C. Uvi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: lntroduction to a Science o/ Mythology, J. Weightman and D. Weightman, trans., New York, Harper and Row, 1964, pp. 154, 177. 78 P. Camporesi, The Incorruptible F/esh: Bodily Mutilation andMortification in Religion and Folklore, T. Croft Murray, trans., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988. 79 James, p. 73. 80 K. Endicott, Batek Negrito Religion: The World-View and Rituals o/ a Hunting and Gathering People o/Peninsular Malaysia, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1979. 81 J. Swift, Gulliver' s Travels, New York, Dodd, Mead, 1950 [1726], p. 309. 82 lbid., p. 303.

152 Notes 83 lbid., p. 308. 84 B.F. Lamb, Wizard o/ the Upper Amazon, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1975, p. 17. 85 lbid., p. 181. 86 lbid., p. 186. 87 M. King, 'The Sacramental Witness of Christina Mirabilis: Toe Mystic Growth of a Fool for Christ's Sake', in Medieval Religious Women 11: Peaceweavers, L.T. Shank and J.A. Nichols, eds, Kalamazoo, Mich., Cistercian Publications, 1987, pp. 150-2. 88 Wilbert, p. 1142. 89 B. Condori and R. Gow, Kay Pacha, Cusco, Peru, Centro de Estudios Rurales Andinos 'Bartolomé de Las Casas', 1982, p. 50. 90 K. Nielsen, Incense in Ancient Israel, Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1986, p. 9. 91 lbid.; D. Howes, 'On the Odour of the Soul: Spatial Representation and Olfactory Classification in Eastem Indonesia and Western Melanesia', Bijdragen TotdeTaal-,Land-en Volkenkunde, vol. 144, 1988, pp. 84-113. 92 J.C. Crocker, Vital Souls: Bororo Cosmology, Natural Symbolism and Shamanism, Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1985, pp. 59-60. 93 L.A. Roubin, 'Réseaux odorants et specificité culturelle chez les mediterran6eans nord-occidentaux', Ethnologia Europea, vol. 12, no. 2, 1981, pp. 168-9. 94 A. Le Guerer, 'Le declin de l'olfactif, mythe ou r6alité?', Anthropologie et Sociétés, vol. 14, no. 2, 1990, p. 33. 95 Corbin,pp.16-17. 96 R. Latham and W. Matthews, eds, The Diary o/ Samuel Pepys, vol. 6, Berkeley, University ofCalifomia Pre-, 1974, p. 120. 97 Roubin, p. 164. 98 Endicott, p. 76. 99 G. Reichel-Dolmatoff, Amazonian Cosmos: The Sexual and Religious Symbolism o/ the Tukano lndians, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1971, p. 235. 100 Endicott, p. 77. 101 J. Meyer, Sexual Life in Ancient India, vol. 1, London, George Routledge, 1930, p. 183. 102 R. Devisch, •Symbol and Psychosomatic Symptom in Bodily Space-Time: Toe Case of the Yak.a of Zaire,' lnternational Journal o/ Psychology, vol. 20, 1985, p. 596. 103 Reichel-Dolmatoff, 'Desana Categories', p. 273. 104 Reichel-Dolmatoff, Basketry as Metaphor, pp. 24, 33. 105 Nielsen, p. 9. 106 F.E. Hutchinson, ed., The Works o/ George Herbert, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1941, pp. 174-5. 107 Reichel-Dolmatoff, 'Tapir Avoidance', p. 128. 108 D. Howes, ed., The Varieties o/ Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses, Toronto, University ofToronto Press, 1991. 109 M. Proust, Remembrance o/ Things Past, Volume I: Swann' s Way, C.K.S. Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin, trans., New York, Random House, 1981. See also U. Almagor, 'Odours and Private Language: Observations on the Phenomenology of Scent', Human Studies, vol. 13, 1990, pp. 253-74.

Notes

153

110 C. Classen, 'Sweet Colors, Fragrant Songs: Sensory Models of the Andes and the Amazon', American Ethnologist, vol. 17, no. 4, 1990, pp. 72&-9. 111 Reichel-Dolmatoff, 'Desana Shamanism', p. 95. 112 lbid., pp. 90-1. 113 W. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomenafor Cultural and Religious History, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1967, p. 6; D. Howes, 'Sensorial Anthropology', in The Varieties of Sensory Experience, D. Howes, ed., pp. 182-5.

5 Literacy as anti-culture: the Andean experience of the written word 1 In The Domestication of the Savage Mind J. Goody argues that lists, formulas and tables play a seminal role in the transition from an oral culture to a literate culture. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977, p. 162. The quipu enabled a retention and manipulation of data similar to lists and tables, but remained basically an oral device. 2 P. Sarmiento de Gamboa, 'Historia Indica' in Obras de Garcilaso de la Vega, IV, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, vol. 135, Madrid, Ediciones Atlas, 1965, p. 209. 3 J. de Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui, 'Relación de antigüedades deste reyno del Pirú' in Tres relaciones de antigüedades peruanas, M. Jiménez de la Espada, ed., Asunción, Editorial Guaraní, 1950, p. 215. 4 P. Cieza de León, El señorfo de los Incas, M. Ballesteros, ed., Madrid, Historia 16, 1985, p. 36. 5 C. de Molina (el Cuzqueño), 'Fábulas y ritos de los Incas' in las cr6nicas de los Molinos, F. Loayza, ed., Lima, Los pequeños grandes libros de la historia americana, 1943, p. 38. 6 lbid., p. 8. 7 B. Cobo, 'Historia del Nuevo Mundo' in Obras del P. Bernabé Cobo, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, vol. 92, Madrid, Ediciones Atlas, 1964, p.150. 8 C.A. Wagner, 'Coca, Chicha and Trago: Private and Communal Rituals in a Quechua Community', Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1978, p. 47. 9 Regina Harrison writes: Viracocha's act of pronouncing the various vowel and consonant phonemes not only creates the things which will populate the world, but also represents a more significant act, 'camay' - animating or breathing a spirit into an object. 'Modes of Discourse: The Relaci6n de Antigüedades deste Reyno del Pirú by Joan de Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua', in From Oral to Written Expression: Native Andean Chronicles of the Early Colonial Period, ed. R. Adorno, Syracuse, N.Y., Maxwell School ofCitizenship and Public Affairs, 1982, p. 83. 10 Sarmiento de Gamboa, p. 210. 11 G. Urioste, ed., Hijos de Pariya Qaqa: la tradición oral de Waru Chiri, vol.

154 Notes

12 13

14

15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

2, Syracuse, N.Y., Maxwell School ofCitizenship andPublic Affairs, 1983, p. 181. Cieza de León, p. 83. R.T. Zuidema looks at how designs on certain Inca textiles may contain calendrical information in 'The Inca Calendar' in Native American Astronomy, F. Aveni, ed., Austin, University of Texas Press, 1977, pp. 221-6. G. Silvennan-Proust examines the iconography of modern Andean textiles in 'Weaving Technique and the Registration ofKnowledge in the Cuzco Area of Peru', Journal of latin American Lore, vol. 14, no. 2, 1988, 207--41. In The Ceque System of Cuzco Zuidema examines how Inca society was organized through the use of sight lines radiating out from the central temple in Cuzco; Leiden, International Archives of Ethnography, E.J. Brill, 1964. Pachacuti Yamqui, condensed from pp. 229-30. Ibid., p. 230. El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Historia general del Perú, vol. 1, A. Rosenblat, ed., Buenos Aires, Emecé, 1944, p. 265. W. Ong, Orality and literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London, Methuen, 1982, p. 109, and The Presence ofthe Word: Sorne Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1967,pp. 231-2. Ong, Orality and literacy, p. 79, and The Presence of the Word, p. 126. In The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America L. Hanke writes, 'Spaniards were so accustomed to certifying every action they took that notaries were as indispensable to their expeditions as friars and gunpowder'. Philadelphia, Unive~ity of Pennsylvania Press, 1949, p.6. C. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, J. Russel, trans. , New York, Atheneum, 1967, p. 292. P.J. Arriaga, The Extirpation of ldolatry in Peru, L.C. Keating, trans., Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 1968, p. 66. Cobo, p. 18 Ibid., p. 17. Arriaga, p. 16 Cited by Garcilaso de la Vega, p. 198. D. de Castro Titu Cusi Yupanqui, Ynstruci6n del Ynga don Diego de Castro Titu Cussi Yupangui, L. Millones, ed., Lima, Ediciones El Virrey, 1985, p. 2. Garcilaso de la Vega, vol. 1, pp. 98-9. F. Guarnan Poma de Ayala, El primer cor6nica y buen gobierno, vol. 2, J. Murra and R. Adorno, eds, Mexico, Siglo Veintiuno, 1980, p. 353. Garcilaso de la Vega, vol. 1, p. 19. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., pp. 83-4. Arriaga, p. 126. Ibid., pp. 123-4. Essays on the writings of these Andeans are contained in R. Adorno, ed.,

From Oral to Written Expression: Native Andean Chronicles of the Early Colonial Period, Syracuse, N. Y., Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, 1982 and R. Adorno, Guarnan Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru, Austin, University ofTexas Press, 1986. 36 Guarnan Poma, vol. 2, p. 767.

Notes 37 38 39 40 41

155

lbid., p. 635. lbid., p. 804. lbid., p. 347. lbid., p. 781. The supremacy of wntmg over speech (and probably also the untrustworthiness of the word of the Spanish) is manifested by Guarnan Poma in the following passage: Justice must never be done by word, but by letter ... And if it is by word, don't listen to it and ask for it to be written. And in this way his Majesty will see and provide. (vol. 2, p. 656)

42 lbid., vol. 3, p. 897. 43 J. Polo de Ondegardo, 'lnstrución contra las ceremonias y ritos que usan los indios conforme al tiempo de su infidelidad' in Colección de libros y documentos referentes a la historia del Perú, ser. 1, vol. 3, Lima, Sanmartí, 1916, p. 202. 44 Titu Cusi Yupanqui, p. 26. 45 F. de Montesinos, 'Memoriales antiguas historiales y politicas del Perú' in Colección de libros y documentos referentes a la historia del Perú, ser. 2A, vols. 4-7, Lima, Sanmartí, 1930, p. 67. 46 I examine this conflict at length in Constance Classen, Inca Cosmology and the Human Body, Salt Lake City, University ofUtah Press, 1993. 47 Titu Cusi Yupanqui, p. 26. 48 R. de Loaysa, 'Memorial de las cosas del Perú tocantes a los indios' in Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, vol. XCIV, Madrid, 1889, pp. 586-90. Cited by P.A. Means, Fall of the Inca Empire and the Spanish Rule in Peru: 1530-1780, New York, Gordian Press, 1964, p.180. 49 Titu Cusi Yupanqui, p. 26. 50 Garcilaso de la Vega, vol. 3, pp. 249--250. 51 Wagner, p. 47. 52 'Tragedia del fin de Atahualpa', quoted by N. Wachtel, The Vision of the

Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru through lndian Eyes, 1530-1570, 53 54

55 56

57 58 59 60

B. and S. Reynolds trans., New York, Bames and Noble, 1977, p. 39. Wachtel, p. 40. J. Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation inBolivian TinMines, New York, Colombia University Press, 1979, p. 144. Wachtel, pp. 33-58. A. Ortiz Rescaniere, 'El mito de la escuela', in Ideología mesiánica del mundo andino, J. Ossio A., ed., Lima, Colección Biblioteca de Antropología, 1972, pp. 238--43. lbid., pp. 246-7. Garcilaso de la Vega, vol. 1, pp. 61-2. Guarnan Poma, vol. 1, p. 309. The difference being, of course, that in the former the person-to-person encounter is purely imaginary and unnecessary, while in the latter it is essential. Modero Andeans, however, continue to resist the extreme visualism of the

156

Notes West and to function according to the structures of orality. The novel Yawar Fiesta by the Peruvian writer José María Arguedas illustrates this nicely.

For example, a portrait of a person hanging on a wall is addressed by a group of Andeans, and thereby made to participate in the discussion. When the government decrees that professional bullfighters must be hired for the local bullfights, the Andeans protest, 'And what's the bullfight going to be like? Aren't the Indians going to do anything but watch it ... ? Is the bullfight just going to be held in silence?' F. Horning Barraclough, trans. , Austin, University ofTexas Press, 1985, pp. 73, 45. 61 Guarnan Poma, for example, attempts to give Andean traditions historicity and credibility by fitting them into a biblical framework (vol. 1, pp. 16--72). 62 B. Whorf, Language, Thought and Rea/ity: Selected Writings of Benjamin Whorf, J.B. Carro!, ed., Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press, 1956, p. 244.

6 Worlds of sense l W. Ong, 'World as View and World as Event', American Anthropologist, vol. 71, no. 4, 1969, p. 634. 2 E. Basso, A Musical View of the Universe: Kalapalo Myth and Ritual Performance, Philadelphia, University of Philadelphia Press, 1985. 3 While the Tzotzil of Mexico, examined here, classify men as hot and women as cold, for example, the Barasana of the Amazon hold that men are cold and women are hot. S. Hugh-Jones, The Palm and the Pleiades, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 111. 4 G.H. Gossen, Chamulas in the World of¡J,,e Sun: Time and Space in a Maya Oral Tradition, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1974, pp. 18-19, 31. 5 Ibid., p. 31. 6 E.Z. Vogt, Tortillas for the Gods: A Symbo/ic Analysis of Zinacanteco Rituals, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1976, pp. 20, 23, 207; Gossen, p. 37. 7 Vogt, p. 24. 8 Ibid., pp. 82-90. 9 Gossen, p. 15; Vogt, p. 24. 10 Ibid., p. 115. 11 Vogt, pp. 32, 90, 132, 205. 12 Ibid., p. 32; Gossen, pp. 40, 48-9. 13 Vogt, pp. 40-1. 14 Ibid'., p. 50. 15 Gossen, pp. 36-7. 16 Ibid., p. 328. 17 Ibid., p. 41-2. In Tzotzil cosmology the hot solar male principie is associated with moral order, while the cold lunar female principie is associated with disorder. During the period of ascending heat from midnight to noon, therefore, the sun is believed to control female disorder, while during the period of declining heat, from noon to midnight, women are believed to be prone to immorality. Ibid., p. 42. 18 Ibid., pp. 331,336,346.

Notes

157

19 lbid., p. 156. 20 lbid., p. 337. 21 V. Pandya, 'Above the Forest: A Study of Andamanese Ethnoamenology, Cosmology and the Power of Ritual', Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1987, p. 167. 22 lbid, p. 17. 23 lbid., p. 108. 24 lbid., p. 107. 25 lbid., pp. 145, 211. 26 lbid., pp. 114--15. The Ongee believe that menstruation helps women maintain an appropriate olfactory balance, p. 211. 27 lbid., pp. xii, 19, 111-112, 312. 28 lbid., p. 102. 29 lbid., pp. 12fr7, 133-6. 30 lbid., p. 137. 31 lbid., p. 149. 32 lbid., pp. 111, 139-40, 147. 33 lbid., pp. 221-2, 226. 34 lbid., pp. 231,259,286. 35 lbid., p. 286. 36 lbid., p. 235. 37 lbid., pp. 168-78, 330-3. 38 lbid., p. 72, 98-9, 178. 'The tora/e ... brings to the community of human beings the perspective of 'above the forest', which is actually the perspective of the spirits, although the spirits cannot see everything but smell it ali from their position above the forest.' lbid., p. 176. 39 lbid., p. 58. 40 lbid., pp. 247-8. 41 lbid., p. 165. 42 lbid., p. 278. 43 G. Reichel-Dohnatoff, Amazonian Cosmos: The Sexual and Religious Symbolism of the Tukano Jndians, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1971, pp. 24--5, 47. 44 ldem, Beyond the Milky Way: Hallucinatory Jmages of the Tukano Jndians, Los Angeles, UCLA Latín American Center Publications, 1978, pp. 24fr71; ldem, 'Desana Shamans' Rock Crystals and the Hexagonal Universe',Journal ofLatinAmericanLore, vol. 5, no.1, 1979, pp. 117-28. 45 ldem, Amazonion Cosmos, pp. 110-18. 46 ldem, 'Desana Animal Categories, Food Restrictions, and the Concept of Color Energies', Journal of Latin American Lore, vol. 4, no. 2, 1978, pp. 278-9, 282-3; ídem, Amazonian Cosmos, p. 108. 47 Idem, 'Desana Animal Categories', pp. 265-8; ídem, 'Rock Crystals', p.120. 48 lbid., pp. 271-5. 49 Idem, Basketry as Metaphor: Arts and Crafts ofthe Desana Jndians ofthe Northwest Amazon, Los Angeles, Occasional Papers of the Museum of Cultural History, University of California, 1985, p. 24; Idem, Amazonian Cosmos, pp. 175-87. 50 Idem, Basketry as Metaphor, p. 33; ídem, 'Brain and Mind in Desana

158 Notes

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Shamanism', Journal of Latín American lore, vol. 7, no. 1, 1981, pp. 73-98.91-210. lbid., p. 91. ldem, Beyond the Milky Way, 1978, p. 4. ldem, Basketry as Metaphor, pp. 4-5. ldem, 'BrainandMind',pp. 76-7,90-5. lbid., pp. 82-3. lbid., p. 84. lbid., pp. 86-93. lbid., p. 85. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Toronto, University ofToronto Press, 1962, p. 28. The Andaman Jslanders, p. 168. Cited by Pandya, p. 13. Pandya, p. 234. Gossen, pp. 312, 328.

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Name index

Ackennan, D. 5 Amherst, A. 29 Aquinas, T. 3 Antiochus Epiphanes 18 Antiphanes 17 Aristotle 2, 3, 39, 63 Arriaga, J. 112 Atahualpa 110-13, 117, 120 Athenagoras 19 Austen, J. 73

Corbin, A. 15 Cordova, M. 97 Costis of Alexandria 19

Bacon,F.23,27,66,67 Baudelaire, P. 33 Baumgarten, A. 60 Beckford, W. 92 Bede 20 Bettelheim, B. 37 Boehme, J. 50-1 Bonnaterre, P.-J. 39 Bose, N. 40 Bront~, C. 74 Burton, R. 63

Elizabeth I 24, 30, 148 n. 5 Ellis, H. 35 Emerson, R. 6 Evelyn, J. 23 Ewen,S. 6

•

Capac Yupanqui 109 Capek,M.11 Carpenter, E. 79 Chamberlain, E. 31 Chamfort, S. 83 Chaucer, G. 65 Cheselden, W. 41 Chomsky, N. 3 Cieza de León, P. 107-8 Clement of Alexandria 30 Cleopatra 5, 88 Cobo, B. 111 Condillac, E. de 39, 47

Descartes,R.4,6,8,27 Dickens, C. 64, 66, 71 Diogenes 3 Dollard, J. 80 Donne, J. 87 Douglas, F. 31

Feuerbach, A. von 40, 43, 45 Foucault, M. 6, 15 Francis of Assisi 35 Francis of Sales 21, 23, 26, 29, 32 Frederick 11 2 Freud, S. 9 Garcilaso de la Vega, 'El Inca' 112-13, 116 Gaskell, E. 82 Genie 37 Gerard, J. 22 Gibbon,E. 19 Gossen, G. 125 Guaman Poma de Ayala, F. 114-15, 120 Hall, E. 15 Hauser, K. 8, 38, 40-6

Name index

Heliogabulus 18 Herbert, G. 25 Herrick, R. 88 Hill, T.23 Homer 19 Huysmans, J.-K. 33 lbn Ezra, A. 21 ltard,J.38--9,47-8 Jeffries, R. 30 John of the Cross 21 Johnson, S. 73 Jonson, B. 31 Julius Caesar 18 Kamala 8, 38--46 Keats,J. 61 Keller,H.42 Knox, V. 27 Lévi-Strauss, C. 37, 111 Lewis, C.S. 89, 92 Lille, A. de 4 Locke,J.4,6,27,39,47 Lowe,D.15 MacGregor, J. 61 McKenzie, D. 93 Maclean, C. 40 McLuhan,M.5,6, 135 Manco 116 Marie Antoinette 88 Martial 18, 33 Marx,K. 7 Maugham, W.S. 81-2 Milton, J. 68 Mirabilis, C. 97 Montaigne, M. 21 Montessori, M. 147 n. 68 Moore, T. 92 Morris, W. 30 Nero 17-18, 33 Ogbum, W.40 Ong,W.5, 15-16,104,121 Origen 3, 19 Orwell, G. 82-3

169

Pachacuti Yamqui, J. 107, 109 Parkinson, J. 23 Pasteur, L. 29 Pepys,S.99 Philo2 Pinel, P. 39 Pizarro, F. 112 Plato2 Pliny 3, 17 Proust, M. 5, 33, 104 Radcliffe-Brown, A. 136 Reade, C. 32 Reichel-Dolmatoff, G. 134 Rey,A. 31 Rogers, J. 65 Rohde,E. 20 StPaul 20 Sanderson, W. 28 Sarmiento de Gamboa, P. 107 Senden, M. von 42 Shakespeare, W. 8,25,61-2,65 Shaw, G.B. 61 Simmel,G. 6 Singh, J.A.L. 39-40 Socrates 81 Spenser, E. 24, 26, 61 Stubbes, P. 28 Sudermann, H. 34 Swift, J. 73 Thoré, T. 33 Tomkins, T. 4 Tupac Amaru 116 Tyler, E.B. 37 Valera, B. 112 Victor 8, 38--48 Wachtel, N. 117 Waters, M. 30 Whorf, B. 11, 120 Wild Boy of Aveyron, see Victor Wilde, O. 34 Wolf Children of India, see Kamala Wyclif, J. 33 Zola,E. 33

Subject index

Africans: olfactory classification of 80 Andes: effects of literacy on 10, 106, 110-20; olfactory symbolism in 97; orality in 106-9; rejection of visualism in 116, 155 n. 60 animals: in Dassanetch culture 83-5; in Desana culture 131; and feral children 39, 44; in Gulliver' s Trave/s 96; in Ongee culture 128-30; in perfumery 90-2; senses of 5; in Suya culture 86; in Tukano culture 90 anthropology: and feral children 37; sensory models in 121 Batek Negrito: olfactory classification a!iong 96, 99 blind: sensory experiences of 38, 41-3,56 Bororo: olfactory classification among 94, 98, 102 brain: Desana concepts of 133 Buddhism 2 Capitalism: and floral symbolism 30-1 children: autistic 37, 147 n. 60; feral 8, 37--49; senses of 56; in Suya culture 85-6 Christianity: in Andes 110-19, senses in early 19-20; smell in 19-21, 26, 28, 100, 102; in Tzotzil culture 125-6 colour: in Desana culture 10, 131-5; English tenns of 57-8, 61, 63, 71, 76; among feral children 41; in

Ongee culture 129; in Tzotzil culture 124 Dassanetch: olfactory classification among 83-5, 102 deaf: sensory experiences of 38, 42-3 death: as loss of heat 123; odour associated with 95-6, 127-8 Desana: sensory classification among 10, 81, 131-7; seea/soTu.k.ano Egypt, ancient: incense in 97-8, 100 emotions: and the senses 8, 56-7, 101-3 English: sensory tenns in 8-9, 51-76 feral children: debate over 37; sense of order among 45; senses of 8, 38-49; social conditioning of 8, 45-9 floral symbolism 7-8, 16-36, 93 food: in Desana culture 132; and feral children 8, 43, 45; olfactory classification of 99; perfumed 17, 24; in Tzotzil culture 124, 125; see a/so taste foreigners: and floral symbolism 31-2; olfactory classification of 92-3 gardens: sensory symbolism of 22-3, 26-34 Greece, ancient: senses in 2-3; smell in 17-19, 81; spice myths of90-l Gulliver' s Travels 96 hallucinogens: in Desana culture 133

Subject index Hausa2 hearing: among Desana 133; English tenns of 54-7, 59, 60-76; among feral children 41; in language 50-2, 55, 59; among Ongee 130; in oral cultures 121-2, 135; in physics 11; associated with spirituality 3-4; among Suya 9; in West3-4, 25 Hopi 11 Incas: see Andes incense: in ancient world 19, 97-8, in Christianity 20 India 39, 45, 99-100 Inuit 80 Japan 98 Jews: odour attributed to 80, 102 jinn 95 kinaesthesia: as component of touch 5; in language 50-1, 148 n. 10 Kraho95 language: in Andes 107; floral 32-3; senses in English 8-9, 50-76; senses in Hopi 11; sensory aspects of 50; Tzotzil 124; see a/so orality; speech literacy: in Andes 10, 112-120, cultural models derived from 121-2; non-visual bases of 148 n. 9; in sixteenth-century Spain 110-112; social effects of 5-6 medicine: colour in Desana 132; smell in Ongee 127; smell in Shipibo-Conibo 94; smell in Warao 95; smell in Western 21-2, 29; temperature in Tzotzil 123 men: anxiety over women among 89-90; in Desana culture 133, 137; in Ongee culture 127, 129; in Suya culture 85-6; in Tzotzil culture 123, 125, 137, 156 n. 17; in West 9, 31; use ofperfume by Western 81, 93 menstruation 87, 127

171

mind: see brain, thought museums: visualism of 136 nature: in Desana culture 132; and feral children 37-40; olfactory classification of 90-2 odours: classificatory role of 9-10, 79-105; in Desana culture 132-4; negative reactions to 42; in Ongee culture 126--31; of sanctity 21; in West 15-36, 80-3; see a/so incense; perfume; smell Ongee: olfactory cosmology of 1, 10, 126--31, 135-7 onomatopoeia: in English 51-2 orality: in Andes 10, 106--9; cultural models based on 121-2, 135; see a/so language, speech perfume: in ancient world 17-19; and class divisions 81-2, 88-9; derived from animals 91-2; in Enlightenment period 28; in pre-modern West 24; see a/so incense; odours; spices philosophy: sensationalist 4, 27-8, 47-8; sensory theories of ancient 2 physics: senses in 11 psychology: smell in 35 Rome, ancient: senses in 3; smell in 17-19 schools: Andean attitudes towards 118-19 senses: in colonial Andes 114-15; cultural construction of 1-7, 16, 46--9; cultural models based on 121-2, 135-8; of feral children 8, 38-49; literary treatment of 3-5, 24-6, 30-5; number of 1-3; ranking of 3-4; spiritual 3; see a/so hearing; sight; smell; speech; laste; temperature; touch Shipaya 95 Shipibo-Conibo: olfactory classification among 94 sight: in Andes 108-9, 155 n. 60;

172

Subject index

characteristics of 16; contrasted with smell, in West 7-8, 15-36, 147 n. 66; among Desana 131-5; dominance of, in West 3-8, 10, 15-16,27-9,36, 121, 135-6, 140 n. 3; English tenns of 53-4, 57--8, 60-76; among feral children 41; associated with intelligence 58; in language 50-1; among Ongee 130; reactions ofblind on recovery of 41-3, role of, in science 6; social effects of 5-7; among Suya 9; among Tzotzil 124; see a/so colour smell: classificatory uses of 79-105; characteristics of 16; among Desana 132-4; English tenns of 52-7, 60-76; among feral children 42, 45; associated with intelligence 59; in language 50; among Ongee l, 10, 126--31, 135-7; in West 7-10, 15-36, 147 n.66 Spain: influence of, in Andes 1~20; literacy in sixteenth-century 110 speech: in Andes 1~9; in feral children 41; as a sense 2-4; sensory dimensions of 50; among Tzc!zil 124; see a/so language; orality spices: Greek myths about 90-1; in medieval Europe 20 spirits: olfactory classification of 94-5; among Ongee 127-31 Suya: olfactory classification among 85-6, 90; role of senses among 9 taste: as aesthetic sense 27, 47-8, 57; among Desana 132-4; in early Christianity 20; English tenns of 52, 54, 57, 60-76; among feral children 43-5; associated with intelligence 59; in language 50; see a/so food

temperature: among Desana 132; among feral children 43; in Latín American cosmologies 122; among Tzotzil l, 10, 122-6, 135-7 thought: in Andes 111; association of hearing with 9, 59; effects of literacy on 110-11; influence of senses on 4-6, 8-9, 39, 58-9; association of sight with 9, 58; association of smell with 59; association of taste with 59; association of touch with 58; see a/so brain time: in Andes 108; among Tzotzil 123 touch: among Desana 133, English tenns of53-5, 57, 60-76; among feral children 43-4; associated with intelligence 3, 39, 58, 148 n. 10; among Ongee 130; sensory components of 5; see a/so temperature Tukano: olfactory classification among 81, 87, 90, 99-100, 102, 104; see a/so Desana Tzotzil: thennal cosmology of 1, 10, 122-6, 135-7 Uduk 95 Warao: olfactory classification among 95, 97 whites: odour attributed to 80 women: in Desana culture 133, 137; olfactory classification of, in West 9-10,31,87-90,92-3, 102;in Ongee culture 127, 129; in Suya culture 85-6; in Tukano culture 87; in Tzotzil culture 123, 125, 137, 156 n. 17 world-view: as sensory model 121-2, 135, 138 Yaka 100