Scent, Sound and Synaesthesia Notes
Intersensoriality and Material Culture Theory
The importance of attending to the multiple sensory dimensions of objects, architectures, and landscapes is quickly becoming a central tenet of material culture theory.
This sensual turn is evident in references to the sensuous in The Material Culture Reader.
Barbara Bender: Landscapes are intimate encounters experienced with all the senses.
Nicholas Saunders: Material objects can bridge mental and physical worlds, especially in heightened sensory experiences like warfare.
Chris Pinney: Visual culture needs to recognize the unified nature of the human sensorium, engaging with embodied culture.
Christopher Tilley: Wala canoes embody sensory and social symbolism through carved ears, mouths, sexual organs, and tactile qualities, condensing the sensory, social, and symbolic orders of Wala culture.
Material culture gives expression to a particular set of sensual relations and embodies ways of sensing.
The aim is to discuss the significance of scent, sound, and synaesthesia for material culture studies.
Consideration of Lawrence Sullivan's model of synaesthesia (joining of the senses).
Synopsis of literature in the history and anthropology of the senses by Constance Classen and Alain Corbin, highlighting multisensoriality in human existence.
The sensual orientation of material culture studies and focus on objects and environments within sensual culture studies represent a confluence, linked to a counter-tradition reacting to textualism and ocularcentrism.
Sullivan's work was published the same year as Writing Culture, during the textual revolution in anthropology when Clifford Geertz suggested treating cultures as texts.
The idea of 'reading cultures' was productive but led to a deflection of attention from sensuous realities to styles of text construction.
Stephen Tyler: Perception has nothing to do with ethnography.
Sullivan intended his model of sensing as a multisensory alternative to the model of the text because logocentric models had a strong grip in humanities and social sciences.
The model of the text no longer enjoys the same grip over the anthropological imagination.
Caution against simplistic equation between language and materiality.
The evidence of our senses is equally worthy of attention.
Designs aren't words, and houses aren't texts.
Culture mediates sensation and sensation mediates culture, providing insights into the interconnectedness of human communication.
Society is grounded in consensus, making it a sensory fact, just as the sensorium is a social fact.
The Model of Synaesthesia
Sullivan reviews performance theory, hermeneutics, and information theory, suggesting that the symbolic experience of the unity of the senses enables a culture to entertain itself with the idea of the unity of meaning.
He applies his model of synaesthesia to interpret myths and rituals of South American Indian societies.
Medically, synaesthesia is a rare condition where stimulation of one sensory modality is accompanied by perception in other modalities.
Synaesthetes report hearing colors, seeing sounds, and feeling tastes.
Inter-modal associations are also reported by people under the influence of hallucinogens.
Sullivan's account is centered on South American Indian societies that use the hallucinogenic Banisteriopsis Caapi plant ritually.
He extends the term synaesthesia to refer to the ritual process of bringing many or all of the senses into play simultaneously.
His theory of cultural synaesthesia is potentially applicable to the interpretation of ritual and cosmological systems worldwide.
The strength of Sullivan’s model lies in the way it recognizes ‘the unified nature of the human sensorium’.
A weakness stems from Sullivan’s presupposition of ‘the oneness of meaning’ derived from information theory.
Information theory approach treats meaning as primary and senses as interchangeable channels, imposing a unity on ritual communication.
It would be more consonant with what we now know about the materiality of communication to regard sensing as primary and meaning as mediated.
The information theory approach deflects attention from the socialization of the senses through ritual.
Sullivan's interpretation of the Tukano-speaking Desana myth of the 'origin of communication' can be analyzed through the lens of Classen's account of the Desana sensory order.
Sullivan relates:
For Tukano speakers of the Northwest Amazon the crying sounds of a mythic baby called Cajpi are also the tastes and visual images of the hallucinogenic drink made from his body (the magical plant, Banisteriopsis Caapi) ‘for as soon as the little child cried aloud, all the people … became intoxicated and saw all kinds of colours.’
The divinity named Yepa Huaké commanded that the child be dismembered.
A piece of his body was given to each social group.
This distribution established not only the ranked hierarchy of groups in society today but also the different qualities of vision and modulations of sound that constitute each group’s cultural existence as art, musical performance, and speech.
Sullivan brings the Desana interpretation of ritual and mythic communication into alignment with information theory. The significance of the ritual beverage and the visions induced by ritual acts arises originally from the crying sounds of the sacred child.
Sullivan translates one cosmology into the terms of another (scientific Western) one, forcing a conversation overriding whether the Desana shaman would be willing to state his message without the medium that models it.
In the beginning there was sound (the baby’s cry), not a ‘word’ or ‘score’ (another favorite metaphor of information theory).
This sound embodied smells and temperatures, as well as colors and tastes.
These sensations are meaningful to different senses now, but were indistinguishable from each other in the mythic world.
Thus, the sound of the baby’s cry is viewed as having contained the Tukano ‘sense ratio.