Howes, David. The Misperception of The Environment
Howes, David. The Misperception of The Environment
Howes, David. The Misperception of The Environment
Anthropological Theory
1–24
The misperception of the © The Author(s) 2022
David Howes
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia
University, Montreal, Canada
Abstract
This article presents a critical evaluation of the work of Tim Ingold from the standpoint
of social and sensory anthropology. It acknowledges the novelty of the emphasis on
enskillment, movement, process, and growth in Ingold’s work. However, it is critical
of his abstraction of the senses, which are rendered ‘interchangeable’, and of persons,
who are reduced to generic individuals. Ingold’s anthropology is shown to be pre-cul-
tural and post-social at once, with the result that it fails to address the sociality of sensa-
tion and cultural mediation of perception. Ingold’s doctrine of ‘direct perception’ is
exposed as particularly problematic. In place of his emphasis on ‘the life of lines’, this
article foregrounds the life of the senses, and in lieu of his diminution of the social, it
acknowledges the politics of perception that inform most every perceptual act. The art-
icle concludes with a series of reflections on how to go about sensualizing anthropo-
logical theory and practicing sensory ethnography (i.e. the methodology of participant
sensation).
Corresponding author:
David Howes, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve
Boulevard West, Montreal, Quebec, H3G 1M8, Canada.
Email:[email protected]
2 Anthropological Theory 0(0)
Keywords
Phenomenology, ecological psychology, affordances, sensory ethnography, cultural
contingency of perception, sociality of sensation
Introduction
I had been reading the works of Tim Ingold till well into the night on the plane from
Montreal to Heathrow in preparation for a talk at the Institute of Social and Cultural
Anthropology in Oxford. I had booked a room at St Benet’s Hall on St Giles’ Street,
and as I made my way up the stairs to my lodgings, I was arrested by the beauty of a
series of framed sketches on the wall. One was of a child’s head, others were of
women in flowing gowns. The sketches were profoundly sensuous, and their volumi-
nousness (thanks to the sinuous lines and subtle shading of the artist’s pencil) was
awe-inspiring. Later, I asked the porter whom the drawings were by, as we inspected
them together. They were bequeathed to the college by the Pre-Raphaelite painter
Edward Burne-Jones, she informed me. I said to her: ‘There is a lot more than lines to
those drawings’. ‘Yes’, she responded enthusiastically, ‘there is life!’ So true, I
thought to myself, yet Ingold has a lock on ‘life’ (the term figures in the titles of a
number of his books), and he has reduced life to lines – bold, stark lines, or in some
cases squiggles, without the least trace of nuance or shading.
I think of Tim Ingold as the great gadfly of contemporary anthropology, like that other
renowned gadfly, Socrates, continuously asking questions that disturb our complacency.
He is a prolific scholar, a proficient cellist, an accomplished administrator, a generous
host, and there is no denying the originality of his thinking. Based in Aberdeen,
Ingold is a giant of the contemporary academic scene, with over 75,000 citations, accord-
ing to Google Scholar.
I have met Tim Ingold in person a number of times over the years. The last time he was
in Montreal, as the guest of my colleagues in McGill Anthropology, I invited him out for
coffee. I couldn’t very well take him to a café; it would not fit this theorist, who places so
much stress on the activity of life, to sit. So, I packed a thermos-full of coffee and picked
up some croissants, and we drove, together with his wife Anna, and a scholar who was
visiting the Concordia Centre for Sensory Studies from Finland, up Mount Royal and
then hiked to the look-out. We sat on some steps and ‘took in the colors’, a favorite
Montreal pastime. (It was a glorious October day, and the maple trees were at their
finest.) Our conversation ranged over many topics, and was highly memorable, as usual.
In print rather than in person, Ingold is a different man. Consider his acid critique of
the ‘anthropology of the senses’ in The Perception of the Environment: Essays on
Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (2000). This is a field that I and others, such as
Constance Classen (1993, 1997), Paul Stoller (1989, 1997), and Steve Feld (1982,
1996), as well as Edmund Carpenter (1972)1 and Alfred Gell (1977, 1995) had been cul-
tivating over the previous decades. In his critique, Ingold dismissed the contributions of
the whole lot of us and promulgated his own vision of the senses, grounded in the
Howes 3
Sensory awakenings
My talk at the Institute was entitled ‘Multisensory Anthropology: Prospects and
Impediments’. I began by acknowledging my debt to my teacher, Rodney Needham,
Professor of Social Anthropology at All Souls College from 1976 until his retirement
in 1990. Needham was the gadfly of an earlier generation. His radical empiricism (in
the tradition of the philosopher David Hume) led him to question whether a capacity
for belief constitutes a ‘human universal’ (Needham, 1972), and also to caution fellow
anthropologists against positing causal relations where the ethnographic record contains
no evidence of anything beyond associations (Needham, 1976).
Needham was one of those responsible for my own sensory awakening. For example,
‘Olfaction and Transition’ (Howes, 1987) was directly inspired and modelled after his
seminal piece on ‘Percussion and Transition’ (Needham, 1967). The other main influence
4 Anthropological Theory 0(0)
was Marshall McLuhan. I attended an informal talk McLuhan gave in the Senior
Common Room at Trinity College, Toronto, in 1979 at which he expounded on the
‘laws of media’ (posthumously published as McLuhan and McLuhan, 1992). A decade
later, I went to Papua New Guinea to explore his hypothesis to the effect that oral socie-
ties are more ‘ear-minded’ than literate societies due to the prevailing technology of com-
munication being speech as opposed to writing or print, which reduce words to ‘quiescent
marks on paper’ (Ong, 1982). During my sojourn at Ambunti in East Sepik Province and
Budoya in Milne Bay Province, I came to see that it was misleading to conceptualize the
difference as turning on a contest between the eye and the ear alone, for there are as many
differences to the orchestration of the senses between (and within) societies without
writing as between so-called oral societies and literate societies. In other words, there
is no great divide, only a panoply of different sensory orders, and each society must
be approached on its own sensory terms.
The anthropology of the senses or sensory anthropology (I use these terms inter-
changeably) is a dynamic and highly robust field of study.2 It stands for a cultural
approach to the study of the senses and a sensory approach to the study of culture: the
senses are treated as both subject of study and means of inquiry. In The Life of the
Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology, François Laplantine summed up the
gist of this approach as follows: ‘The experience of [ethnographic] fieldwork is an experi-
ence of sharing in the sensible [partage du sensible]. We observe, we listen, we speak
with others, we partake of their cuisine, we try to feel along with them what they experi-
ence’ (Laplantine, 2015: 2). Sensory ethnography, then, departs from the conventional
anthropological methodology of participant observation by virtue of its emphasis on par-
ticipant sensation – or sensing and making sense along with others.
Since the 1990s, the social anthropology of the senses has spread throughout the dis-
cipline as it has been taken up by archaeologists (Hamilakis, 2014; Skeate and Day, 2020)
and linguists (Majid and Levinson, 2010). It has also spread across the disciplines of the
humanities and social sciences as it has been adopted and refined by historians (Corbin,
1990, Classen, 1993, 2014), sociologists (Synnott, 1993; Vannini et al., 2012), and geo-
graphers (Pocock, 1993, Rodaway, 1994, Paterson, 2009), among others. These develop-
ments have been charted on the Sensory Studies website (www.sensorystudies.org) and
came to a head with the publication of the four-volume Senses and Sensation: Critical
and Primary Sources compendium (Howes, 2018), which includes a chapter by
Ingold, incidentally.
The sensory revolution in scholarship, or joining of the senses in research and
research-creation, can also be seen in the recent reconstitution of the field of visual
anthropology as ‘multimodal anthropologies’ (Collins et al., 2017). The latter term
denotes how anthropologists have increasingly taken to experimenting with diverse
media, such as audio recording, drawing, photography, videography, VR, installation
art and performance, as well as such practices as walking and even combat sports, to ‘con-
ceptualize, design, conduct, and communicate ethnographic research’ (Elliott and
Culhane, 2017: 3; Cox et al., 2016; Spencer, 2014). In the result, anthropology is no
longer the ‘discipline of words’ it once was (Grimshaw, 2001), and sensing cultures
has taken over from the notion of ‘writing culture’ that was so prevalent in the 1980s
Howes 5
(Howes, 2003, 2016). Yet the current explosion of creative methodologies – i.e. the cross-
ing of art and anthropology – appears to have left Ingold cold: ‘most attempts to combine
art and anthropology, deliberately and self-consciously, have focussed on ethnography as
the glue that holds them together. These attempts have not, in my view, been wholly suc-
cessful: they tend to lead both to bad art and bad ethnography’ (Ingold, 2018b: 3)
Benchmarks
We shall deal with Ingold’s objections to mixing art and anthropology presently. But first
we need to take stock of some of the points at which the anthropology of the senses had
arrived before Ingold intervened. What does it mean to approach a culture on its own
sensory terms? It entails, first of all, suspending any analytic preconceptions as to the
nature and function of the senses, including their number, their bounds, and how they
interact. It means recognizing that the senses are made, not given. Hence the focus on
inquiring into how the senses are fashioned in and by myth, ritual, cosmology, technol-
ogy, art and architecture (or ‘material culture’), language, childrearing (the ‘education of
the senses’), and so forth (Howes and Classen, 1991) with a view to delimiting a given
culture’s ‘sensory model’ (Classen, 1997)
Second, it involves attending to the mediatory role of the senses. In addition to med-
iating the apprehension of the environment and modulating each other, ‘[t]he senses
mediate the relationship between self and society, mind and body, idea and object’
(Bull et al., 2006: 5). This focus on the dynamic interrelations of the senses and that
which they relate set the anthropology of the senses apart from the anthropology of the
body. The latter approach, through promoting such notions as the ‘embodied mind’
and/or ‘mindful body’, had succeeded in overcoming the Cartesian split between mind
and body that is so deeply engrained in Western thought and culture, but it has also
tended to foist a spurious unity on the sensorium. This fusion can sometimes do violence
to indigenous understandings (see Leenhardt, 1979). Furthermore, the anthropology of
the senses is as interested in how the senses are distinguished from one another and con-
flict as in how they coalesce.
Third, it entails being alert to the politics of perception or ‘distribution of the sensible’
(Laplantine, 2015). As Constance Classen stated in ‘Foundations for an Anthropology of
the Senses’ (1997) and reiterated in Ways of Sensing: ‘Anthropologists must be attentive
to intracultural variation, for there are typically persons or groups who differ on the
sensory values [and practices] embraced by the society at large, and resist, instead of
conform to, the prevailing sensory regime’ (Howes and Classen, 2014: 12; Classen,
1997: 402)
Fourth, by starting with the senses and sensation, the anthropology of the senses had
begun to put ‘cognition’ in its place by charting a middle course between cognitivism and
empiricism. The former treats perception as determined by cognition. The focus is on
analyzing the ‘cognitive map’ of the individual subject which is supposed to dictate
how their senses function. The latter views the mind as a tabula rasa and the senses as
passive receptors of the impressions made on them by the exterior world. The former
is too top-down, and the latter too bottom-up. Both approaches ignore the mediating
6 Anthropological Theory 0(0)
role of culture and the socialization of the senses in addition to overlooking the agency
and interactivity of the people doing the sensing and of the senses themselves.
This focus on the interface between the sensible and the intelligible, the sensual and
the rational is reflected in Michael Taussig’s notion of ‘sensuous mimesis’, as elaborated
in his ‘particular history of the senses’ (Taussig, 1993). Sensuous mimesis refers to ‘both
the faculty of imitation and the deployment of that faculty in sensuous knowing, sensuous
Othering’ (Taussig, 1993: 68). So too does the Buddhist doctrine of the mind as a sixth
sense – that is, the mind as on a par with the other senses rather than lording it over them –
confound the conventional distinction between thinking and sensing. The psychologist
Rudolf Arnheim also challenged this distinction in his book Visual Thinking (1969),
where he sought to show that thinking is a continuation of seeing; vision is not the hand-
maiden of cognition (see further Halpern, 2014). Conversely, the ethnomusicologist
Anthony Seeger records that among the Suyà of Brazil knowing is assimilated to
hearing: the word m-ba means both ‘to hear’ and ‘to know’ (Seeger, 1975). When
Suyà know something, even something visual such as a weaving pattern, they say: ‘It
is in my ear’. Seeger relates how the Suyà regarded his practice of note-taking (the
visual inscription of data) as evidence that his ears were ‘swollen’. In Why Suyà Sing,
in keeping with the priority of aurality in Suyà culture, Seeger went on to elaborate
not an anthropology of music but a ‘musical anthropology’. Seeger’s work (1975,
1981, 1987) exemplifies sensory ethnography at its finest.
have it, ‘relations among humans, that we are accustomed to calling ‘social,’ are but a
subset of ecological relations’ (Ingold, 2000: 5). This skipping over the social, and prefer-
ring the term ‘relations’ (without further specification) to that of social structure, is what
makes him a post-social anthropologist. Ingold is not alone, of course. His methodical indi-
vidualism is consistent with that of other British anthropologists, such as Nigel Rapport,
author of I am Dynamite (2003), and can be seen as rooted in the venerable tradition of
‘English individualism’ (Macfarlane, 1991). In support of his position, Ingold poses the
question: ‘You can see and touch a fellow human being, but have you ever seen or
touched a society?’ and then with unseemly haste goes on to aver: ‘Granted that we are
not sure what societies are, or even whether they exist at all …’ (Ingold, 2011: 238).4
As a corollary to his agnosticism with respect to society, Ingold maintains that he sub-
scribes to a theory of the ‘relational individual’, but it would be more accurate to say that
his theory is one of the generic individual. Consider his persistent use of the pronoun ‘he’,
‘his’ or ‘him’ in The Life of Lines: ‘Let us imagine the walker … making his way’ over
hills and through valleys; or, again: ‘In walking the labyrinth, … the walker is under an
imperative to go where it takes him’ (Ingold, 2015: 42, 132). Here, he is merely (uncri-
tically) subscribing to the convention that the category ‘man’ encompasses that of
‘woman’, and ‘he’ includes ‘she’. There is admittedly a certain economy to this mode
of representation, but that does not excuse its exclusionary aspects, and there are alterna-
tives, such as using ‘they’ in place of ‘he’, or, to be resolutely inclusive and specific at
once, using ‘auteur.e’ or ‘flaneur.euse’ à la française.
Furthermore, as recent advances in medical research have shown (Holdcroft, 2007),
gender-blindness can lead to the infliction of many hidden injuries (misdiagnosis,
drugs that treat male ailments but exacerbate female disorders, etc.), and, as the extensive
body of research in the history and anthropology of the senses has revealed, gender dif-
ference is one of the major engines of ‘intracultural variation’ in the ordering of the senses
as of society (Classen, 1997, 1998); and, not only are the senses gendered (the male gaze,
the female touch),5 they are also racialized (Stoever, 2016; Sekimoto and Brown, 2020)
and modulated by class position (Bourdieu, 1987). With all due respect for Ingold’s scho-
larship, this is what makes it so necessary to attend to ‘the distribution of the sensible’
(Laplantine, 2015), and develop the capacity to be ‘of two (or more) sensoria’ about
things, rather than insist on the ‘prereflective unity’ of the senses or Gibson’s ‘ecological
equation’.
Ingold is largely mum as regards the constraints of social structure or politics of per-
ception. To his credit, he acknowledged this in a recent interview in Suomen Antropologi.
The interviewer, Timo Kaartinen, observed that: ‘one of the most difficult things to do …
is to find a satisfactory integration between a phenomenological account of landscape as
what you perceive and what it feels like to be in this world, and a politics of landscape
which is all about power relations and access and who can control what form this land-
scape is going to take’ (Kaartinen, 2018: 59). Ingold acknowledged that: ‘it’s very hard to
integrate the two. I still don’t know how it can really be done’, before going on to state
that his ‘response to those who say that what I have written on environmental perception
is apolitical – is to say that to write against the grain of mainstream understandings of
human cognition and action is itself a political act’ (in Kaartinen 2018: 59). Perhaps.
Howes 9
But surely a more effective strategy would be not to separate the two in the first place, to
recognize with Michael Bull and company that: ‘The perceptual is … political’ (Bull
et al., 2006: 5; see further Howard, 2018). Fortunately, there are other phenomenologies
(e.g. Ahmed, 2006; Voegelin, 2018; Mattingly, 2019) that embrace rather than displace
the critical and political.
Ingold attaches a premium to ‘practical activity’, to people ‘going about their busi-
ness’, or practicing their vocation. Being so disposed, he approved of the example I
gave in The Varieties of Sensory Experience (see Howes, 1991: 168) of the sensory spe-
cialization of the Western musician, who may develop a refined sense of hearing, or the
chef with their equally subtle sense of taste, even though both belong to ‘a society that is
inclined to describe the knowledge and judgement of each through metaphors of sight’
(Ingold, 2000: 283). ‘To his credit’, Ingold wrote, ‘Howes does recognize that human
beings are not simply endowed by nature with ready-made powers of perception, but
that these powers are rather cultivated, like any skill, through practice and training in
an environment’ (Ingold, 2000: 283, emphasis added). Here, he makes it sound like a
focus on skill (his term) distinguishes my work from that of Classen and company (i.e.
Stoller, Gell, Carpenter). But I was (and remain) with them, and I cannot accept his back-
handed compliment.
I hasten to add that Ingold’s theory of enskillment has inspired some fine ethnographic
works (e.g. Downey, 2005; Marchand, 2008, 2009), but for my part, following Mauss
(2007), I have always preferred the term ‘technique’ as in ‘les techniques des sens’
(Howes, 1990), or ‘way’, as in ‘ways of sensing’ (Howes and Classen, 1991: 257;
Howes, 2003: 32–34; Howes and Classen, 2014). This preference is motivated by the
fact that neither the notion of style nor that of moral value has any place in Ingold’s
theory of skilled practice.6 For example, in Kathryn Geurts’ masterful analysis of the
Anlo-Ewe sensorium in Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an
African Community (2003), she notes how, due to the premium attached to balance,
the Anlo-Ewe have a vocabulary of over 50 words for different ways of walking, or
kinaesthetic styles, each of which carries a different moral valence (Geurts, 2003: ch.
4). How does Ingold view walking? As locomotion (see Ingold, 2011: ch. 3). The
accent is on bodily mechanics and the cognitive concomitants thereof, not moral
action. Indeed, Ingold abstracts morality from his account of perception. Yet the exercise
of the senses is always and everywhere hedged in by moral norms. For example, the prac-
tice of looking is strictly curtailed and regulated in societies that subscribe to the notion of
the ‘evil eye’ (see Bille, 2017). So too with eating (gluttony is a sin), and a fortiori smel-
ling, which is perhaps the most morally ambivalent and discerning of the senses across all
cultures, from the Danish prince who smells a rat to the African diviner sniffing out
witches (Classen et al., 1994). I would attribute the amorality of Ingold’s approach to per-
ception to the instrumentalism and information-centric bias of ecological psychology.
Being mindful of the strictures entrained by Ingold’s exclusive focus on ‘practical
activity in an environment’, I called him out in our 2011 debate. I observed that his por-
trayal of the environment in ‘Stop, Look and Listen!’ (Ingold, 2000: ch. 14) is ‘one in
which you can look, listen, and are always on the move, but not taste or smell’
(Howes in Ingold and Howes, 2011: 313). His response was telling. He protested that,
10 Anthropological Theory 0(0)
despite the ostensible marginalization (or elision) of olfaction and gustation in The
Perception of the Environment, ‘there is nothing in my argument [that] … rule out
taste and smell. I do not subscribe to the Aristotelian hierarchization of the senses’,
and goes on to reiterate the ‘interchangeability’ (or amodality) hypothesis – namely,
understood as a ‘mode of active, exploratory engagement with the environment …
vision has much more in common with audition than is often supposed, and for that
matter also with gustation and olfaction’ (Ingold in Ingold and Howes 2011: 313–14).
No evidence is presented for the latter part of this claim. Elsewhere, he falls back on
the doctrine that ‘my body is a ready-made system of equivalents and transpositions
from one sense to another’ (alluding to Merleau-Ponty 1962: 235) to scuttle any sugges-
tion that it is necessary to attend to the full panoply of senses, their differences, or their
interplay.7 In other words, the twin doctrines of the ‘prereflective unity’ and ‘interchan-
geability’ of the senses excuse him from having to pay detailed attention to the ways in
which the senses are discriminated and combined in different ways in different cultures.
How convenient!
The curious thing here is that, quite apart from all the evidence of differential sensory
elaboration in the ethnographic record (e.g. Feld, 1996; Geurts, 2003; Finnegan, 2002;
Howes, 2003, 2022a), even Merleau-Ponty (whom Ingold professes to follow), for all
his talk of synaesthesia, was alert to the issue of sensory diversity, as when he describes
how the spatiality of sight contrasts with the spatiality of touch in the Phenomenology of
Perception (1962).8 The implication is that there are biases (spatial/temporal, distance/
proximity, etc.) to each of the senses, though I would add that these biases can be aug-
mented or diminished – and in any event modulated – by a given culture’s sensory
regime, or techniques as well as technologies of perception and communication.
Ingold blithely overrides all of these biases in the interests of legislating his doctrine of
direct perception for all humanity, and castigating the (alleged) hypostatization of the sign
and precession of interpretation in anthropology generally. I have some sympathy for this
critique. For my part, I have long been critical of the reduction of ethnography to the
‘interpretation of interpretations not our own’ (following Geertz, 1973 with his idea of
cultures ‘as texts’ to be read) or to a ‘process of textualization’ tout court (as per
Stephen Tyler in Clifford and Marcus, 1986) on account of the way the verbocentrism
of these language-based models deflect attention from the sensate (Howes, 2003: ch.
1). However, there is a less radical solution than banishing signification and suspending
the work of interpretation in the name of ‘affordance-thinking’. Ingold’s solution risks
throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The solution is rather to double down on
the notion of sensing. The word ‘sense’ includes both sensation and signification, both
feeling and meaning (as in the ‘sense’ of a word) in its spectrum of referents, which
may be thought of as forming a continuum. On this account, signifying is an aspect of
sensing, and semiosis is an aspect of sentience, though not all there is to perception.
Once we allow the idea of signing – as an aspect of sensing – back in, it quickly
becomes apparent that Ingold (2011: 138) is wrong to suggest that ‘we do not see light
but see in it’: we do see light - it comes in many gradations: from melancholy or
sombre through dull or gloomy to radiant or brilliant with the first terms in this series
having negative connotations and the last terms positive connotations (Dutson, 2010;
Howes 11
Bille, 2017). These gradations are what the late Nancy Munn (1986) would call ‘quali-
signs of value’ (see further Chumley, 2017). So too with sound. For example, we discrim-
inate between sound and noise. Noise is unwanted sound, which again implies a process
of valuation (Thompson, 2017; Mopas, 2019). Sound is never neutral. The harsh social
reality of this fact is brought out by Jennifer Stoever in The Sonic Color Line (2016)
where she discusses how the sounds and rhythms of Black English Vernacular are
excoriated by speakers of Standard American English (see further Eidsheim, 2019).
What is good about Ingold’s pre-cultural, post-social anthropology? Well, it is out-
doorsy: ‘We [anthropologists] do our philosophy out of doors’ (Ingold, 2011: 238).
Furthermore, the world is always fresh or ‘alive’ and bustling with activity, there is
lots of room for improvisation, and you can be you!9 Many apparently find the
novelty and improvisatory nature of Ingold’s world attractive (or he would not have so
many citations). It is a world from which the ‘dead hand of objectification’ (Ingold,
2013: 96) and ‘deadweight of Durkheim’s sociologism’ (Ingold, 2011: 235) have been
expunged, a world in which ‘attention’ in the now is vaunted over ‘transmission’ the
inheritance of culture, as he argues in Anthropology and/as Education (Ingold, 2018c).
Ingold has written extensively about creativity and improvisation, and co-edited a book
on the subject (Hallam and Ingold, 2008). For my part, though, as a social anthropologist, I
wonder about his claim to the effect that ‘imagination’ should be defined ‘not as a capacity
to construct images’, but rather as ‘a way of living creatively in a world that is not already
created, already formed, but that is itself crescent, always in formation’ (Ingold, 2012: 3).
This formulation, which is consistent with Ingold’s privileging of attention over transmis-
sion in Anthropolgy and/as Education (2018c), abstracts the social preformation of the
senses and obfuscates the work of repetition that is integral to the mastery of a technique,
such as, for example, calligraphy (see Pearce et al., 2018). Coupled with the doctrine of
‘direct perception’, it eclipses the complex interaction between thinking and doing,
imaging and making, mind and material, which is better conceptualized, following
Christopher Bardt (2019) as a process of exchange, or bridging.
When we see a line of trees or a circle of stones we assume the presence of a connecting line
which is not actually visible. And we assume it metaphorically when we follow a line of
thought, a course of action or the direction of an argument; when we bridge a gap in the
conversation, or speak of the span of a life or of teaching a course, or lament our interrupted
career (Lee, 1959: 111).
Lee goes on to discuss some of the other codifications of reality presented by the
world’s societies (Trobriand, Wintu), which emphasize or value ‘patterned activity’
over lineality. We shall come back to this point presently.
I have stared at the line drawings in Ingold’s books repeatedly, trying to see them as
the ‘trace of a gesture’ and as ‘pulsional’ and brimming with life, the way he does. But I
cannot. All I see is senseless abstractions, which is of course what lines are: a line ‘has
neither body nor colour nor texture, nor any other tangible quality: its nature is abstract,
conceptual, rational’ (Billeter (1990) quoted in Ingold, 2013: 51). Ingold circumvents this
limitation by multiplying the species of lines: in addition to the geometric line (as above),
there are organic lines (or outlines) and abstract lines (after Deleuze and Guatari) which
are ‘laid down in growth and movement’ (Ingold, 2013: 136). Ingold points to the slime-
trails made by slugs on the flagstones outside his house by way of illustration. It is unclear
whether the slugs in question perceive their trails the same way Ingold does, but no matter
(Compare the account of how the elements (not lines) of Chinese calligraphy are all
“modulated elements whose common feature is that they are bodied” in Billeter 1990:
57-9).
Consider also Ingold’s doctrine of correspondence. There are many profoundly multi-
sensory takes on the notion of correspondence in Western culture, from medieval liturgy
and cosmology (Jørgensen et al., 2015; Classen, 1998: 13–20, 30–35) to Swedenborg’s
‘celestial sensorium’ (Schmidt, 2009) and from the Symbolism of the poets Baudelaire
and Malraux and the painter Moreau (Classen, 1998: 109–26) to the Structuralism of
Claude Lévi-Strauss (Boon, 1972). There are also many polysensory instantiations of
this notion without the confines of Western culture, such as the synaesthetic cosmology
of the Desana of Colombia (Classen, 1993: ch. 6) or the ancient Chinese Theory of the
Five Elements, according to which each of the five elements (Wood, Fire, Earth,
Metal, Water) corresponds to a different musical note, color, odor, taste, season, and dir-
ection (Howes and Classen, 2014: ch. 6). But Ingold’s is not one of them. What interests
him is the ‘correspondence of lines’ and he takes letter-writing (the most literal under-
standing of ‘correspondence’ there can be) as his model (Ingold, 2013: 105–8).
According to Ingold’s doctrine of correspondence, life becomes a matter of ‘put[ting]
out a line and let[ting] it correspond with others’, of ‘answering and being answered to’ in
the ‘in-between’ (Ingold, 2015:154–57). Ingold waxes eloquently about the responsivity
of his lineal vision of human interconnection, or ‘meshwork’, and would that his vision
were true. However, due to its formalism and the abstract tangles of his concept of ‘mesh-
work’, Ingold’s account flies in the face of sensing and making-sense together with others
(compare Finnegan, 2002; Keane, 2018).
It is a tribute to his tremendously fertile and abstract (albeit thoroughly Western)
imagination that Ingold is able to perceive lines just about everywhere, from the knots
Howes 13
in a tree to the way us ‘blobs’ (his rather unflattering term for persons) ‘send out lines’
when we relate to each other.10 Lee would smile. She would also point to how this phras-
ing is but one among others. For example, based on her analysis of Kilavila, the language
of the Trobriand Islanders, she shows how value is attached to ‘patterned activity’ and
lineality either fails to register or is actively disparaged. Thus, the arrangement of huts
in a Trobriand village (which Malinowski’s eyes obstinately saw as forming a circle)
is referred to by a term, kway, which means ‘aggregate of bumps’. Meanwhile, the
Trobrianders’ denial of lineality is evidenced not only by their notorious ‘denial of pater-
nity’, but also by the system of ceremonial exchange which Malinowski dubbed the ‘Kula
Ring’. The ‘pattern’ here is one of giving and receiving kula valuables (necklaces ‘circu-
late’ clockwise, armshells counterclockwise), but these acts of giving and receiving are
always separated in time and space, and when in the course of a visit a man gives gifts
to their kula partner to induce the latter to give a specially valuable kula article in
return, he is labelled with ‘the vile phrase: he barters’ (Lee, 1959: 113–14).11
So, too, there is nothing lineal about the way in which the Chinese Theory of the Five
Elements informed the etiquette of the Emperor’s court. The preservation of the order of
society as of the cosmos depended on the performance of cross-sensory correspondences:
the selection of which color clothes to wear, which incense to burn, which victuals to eat,
which direction to process in, etc. varied with the passage of the seasons (Howes and
Classen, 2014: 162–64). Lee brings this discussion of ‘patterning’ (as distinct from
‘lining’) home by invoking the eminently homely example of making a sweater:
‘When I embark on knitting one, the ribbing at the bottom does not cause the making
of the neckline, nor of the sleeves or the armholes; and it is not part of a lineal series
of acts. Rather it is an indispensable part of a patterned activity which includes all
these other acts’ (Lee, 1959: 113). Ingold would no doubt phrase this differently.
The medieval historian Richard Newhauser, in the introduction to A Cultural History
of the Senses in the Middle Ages (2014) coined the term sensology, defined as ‘the recon-
struction of a period’s sensorium’, and deemed the effort at reconstruction to be ‘an essen-
tial step in writing a comprehensive cultural history’ (Newhauser, 2014: 1). Sensology is
a good antidote to Ingold’s linealogy. So too is reading the other five volumes in the
Cultural History of the Senses set to which Newhauser’s book belongs (Classen,
2014). If all one ever reads in preparation for fieldwork is the Phenomenology of
Perception, one risks being taken in by appearances (phenomenonology comes from
the Greek phainómenon meaning ‘that which appears’ and logos, ‘to study’) whereas
schooling oneself in the cultural history and anthropology of the senses fosters reflexivity
(or, ‘being of two sensoria’) and ‘critical practice’ (Cox et al., 2016)
Sensory ethnography
Sensory ethnography – or, the practice of participant sensation (not observation) – is the
methodology of sensory anthropology. It comes in many varieties. It is exemplified by the
work of Anthony Seeger and Kathryn Geurts (discussed above) as well as that of the
Manchester School (Andrew Irving, Rupert Cox), the Austin School (Kathleen
Stewart, Marina Peterson, Craig Campbell), and the Concordia Centre for Sensory
14 Anthropological Theory 0(0)
Studies, to mention but a few key sites. Its practice has been codified by Sarah Pink in
Doing Sensory Ethnography (2009) and it has also been the focus of extensive multime-
dia experimentation at the Harvard University Sensory Ethnography Lab, directed by
Lucien Castaing-Taylor.
Ingold is not sympathetic to the idea of ethnography – that is, to the ‘detailed descrip-
tion of other peoples lives’ and the idea that there should be a ‘one-way progression from
ethnography to anthropology’ (Ingold, 2011: 241–42). But if one does not start from eth-
nography how can one be sure that one is truly open to alterity? What is more, there are
now so many ways (besides writing) to go about ethnography by enjoining multiple
media – and, thereby, multiple senses – that crossing art and anthropology under the
banner of ethnography should surely be regarded as a good thing (e.g. Schneider and
Wright, 2010), not a bad thing.
Consider a work like Phone & Spear: A Yuta Anthropology (2019) by Miyarrka
Media.12 It is full of colors and patterns, which are of meaning to Yolŋu people, and
scantly any lines.13 The contributors, Paul Gurrumuruwuy, Enid Guruŋulmiwuy, and
four others, in conversation with Jennifer Deger (their adoptive daughter), are profoundly
mindful of their relationships with each other, with other Yolŋu, and with balanda (white
people), not merely their ‘relations’ (the rather thin descriptor favoured by Ingold). They
‘worry’ (warwuyun) about others, particularly their distant kin, and are always careful not
to speak for or act in place of anybody else on account of the distribution of the sensible:
for example, colors (such as red, green, blue and yellow) and modes of behavior (such as
thrashing like an angry shark or beaming like an octopus – both totemic creatures) are
constitutive of the identities of different social groups in accordance with rom (law, tradi-
tion, way of life) or, to put a finer point on it, dhäkay-ŋänhawuy rom (the law of relation-
ship through feeling).
It is true that Miyarrka Media’s ethnography comes in the form of a book, but it is a
book unlike any of Ingold’s treatises. It ‘hums’. This effect is due not only to the vibrancy
of the colors and patterns, but also to a recent event, the funeral of Fiona Yangathu, which
weighed on all of the contributors’ spirits. On their way to the burial site, Yangathu’s sur-
viving kin, holding roses,14 ‘danced around her coffin … dancing as bees darting back
and forth’, and saw her white coffin as ‘a fallen gadayka’: the fallen ‘mother’ tree that
once held the hive, meaning that the bees have to leave [despite their longing to stay]
and find another home [that is, accede to the necessity to go]’ (Miyarrka Media, 2019:
188–89). The book is dedicated to Yangathu, hence its ‘hum’. Phone & Spear is a col-
laborative ethnography that mixes art and anthropology, brilliantly.
Yolŋu perceive their world (including books) as multi- and intersensory, and they also
perceive each other as having distinct and complementary sensory orientations, in accord-
ance with their totemic affiliations. It is doubtful they would ever think of their selves
either as blobs or as bundles of lines, the way Ingold bids us do. This leads me to
suggest that we, too, could (and should) throw off the shackles of linealogy and sense
ourselves and others as the polysensory beings of whom Bruce Cockburn sings in
Lovers In A Dangerous Time:
Howes 15
We are all lovers in a dangerous time in the wake of the 2020 COVID19 pandemic. I
hope we shall recover our senses in its aftermath, particularly our senses of smell and taste
(which the novel coronavirus obliterates), and, with Cockburn, go on ‘kicking at the dark-
ness till it bleeds daylight’.
Conclusion
This article has sought to disclose the exclusionary aspects of Tim Ingold’s perception
anthropology or ‘activity theory’ – and, in particular, his propensity to polarize discussion
on a wide range of issues such as, for example: ecological psychology versus sensory
anthropology; interchangeability versus multiplicity of the senses; direct perception
versus the cultural mediation of sensation; attention versus transmission; materials
versus materiality; linealogy versus patterned activity (as well as colour); practical activ-
ity or enskillment versus cultural practice and/or style; and, the generic individual versus
the individual as positioned at the intersection of gender, class, ethnic or racialized and
other social divisions.16 Ingold consistently privileges the first term in each of these
pairs of contraries and explicitly or implicitly belittles or dismisses the latter. This
groundclearing operation has attracted many adherents. It is to be wondered, however,
whether those who have gone over to ‘dwelling’ in Ingold’s world are fully cognizant
of all the elisions that his remake of anthropology entails, such as the diminution of
the social, the depoliticization of the perceptual, the abstraction of the senses and
human sensuousness. Should not these expunctions give them pause? Would not more
reflexivity and nuance be in order?
A few brave souls, such as Webb Keane in ‘A Minimalist Ontology, with Other People
In It’ (2018) have stood up to Ingold, and no doubt been surprised at the virulence of his
response (Ingold, 2018a). It was for daring to interpret Gibson’s ecological psychology
otherwise that Keane got himself excommunicated. Excommunicated from what?
Excommunicated from Ingold’s church of pre-cultural, post-social anthropology.
One of the cardinal tenets of sensory anthropology and sensory history, and of the
interdisciplinary field of sensory studies that has emerged out of their crossing, is that:
‘sensory critique is the beginning of social critique’ (Howes, 2022a: prologue). As
regards history, think of how Charles Fourier’s exposé and denunciation of the
‘sensory ills’ of civilization inspired Marx and Engel’s critique of the depredation and
alienation of the senses under capitalism (Classen, 1998: ch. 1; Howes, 2003: 204–8),
or, within anthropology, how the polysensory, ‘ensensed’ approach advocated in
Beyond Text? Critical Practices and Sensory Anthropology (Cox et al., 2016) and A
Different Kind of Ethnography (Elliott and Culhane, 2017) has contributed to the preci-
pitation of multimodal anthropologies.
16 Anthropological Theory 0(0)
Sensory anthropology, like the social anthropology of yore, is a broad church precisely
because it is open to entertaining other philosophies of life than Ingold’s singular defin-
ition of ‘life’ in Being Alive and The Life of Lines (2015).17 This openness stems from its
commitment to the practice of ethnography – sensory ethnography, that is, which depends
on cultivating the capacity to be ‘of two (or more) sensoria’ and, therefore, of more than
one mind about things. Now, Ingold criticizes the anthropology of the senses for the ‘case
against vision’ (i.e. critique of visualism) it presents (Ingold, 2000: 286). If that were all
sensory anthropology stood for, his critique would be just But it is (and has always been)
so much more than that. It insists on a relational and resolutely social as well as ‘particu-
lar’ (Taussig, 1993) approach to the study of the sensorium. In this way, it opens the
anthropological imagination up to other senses than the visual, and also brings to light
the varieties of visuality not only across cultures but within Western society itself
(Howes, 1991: chs. 10, 13, 15, 16, 17; Classen, 2014). It is not ‘antiocularcentric’
(Jay, 1993); rather it is polycentric, and it is in this polysensoriality that its chief contri-
bution to anthropological theory lies.
The term ‘theory’ comes from the Greek theō ria which means ‘a beholding, specula-
tion’, or basically ‘to look at’. In Downcast Eyes (1993), Martin Jay brings out well how
beholden to vision (or ‘ocularcentric’) Western philosophy has been throughout its
history, and how contemporary French thought (or ‘Theory’) is marked by an equally
virulent ‘antioculacentrism’. But deconstructing vision à la Foucault or Derrida is a
purely negative gesture (and still remains fixated on the ocular). Why not try changing
the register, as sensory anthropology suggests? What if theory-building were to
involve sensing instead of only ever seeing things, including own and other cultures?
In Time and the Other (1983), Johannes Fabian presented a powerful critique of the ‘visu-
alism’ of conventional anthropological theory, and when Classen (1997) proposes the
concept of the ‘sensory model’ or Taussig (1993) proffers ‘sensuous mimesis’, when
Feld (2015) gives us ‘acoustemology’ or Sutton (2010) suggests ‘gustemology’, they
are sensualizing theory, and they do so to great effect. There are diverse allusions to 'sen-
suous engagement' in Ingold's work (see, for example, Ingold, 2000: 345, 350), but he
rarely does more than pay lip service to the senses since his doctrine of the ‘interchange-
ability’ and ‘prereflective unity’ of the senses excuses him from having to analyze the
specific ways in which the senses are discriminated, valued and combined in cultural
practice.
Putting the senses first, or leading with the senses, holds out the promise that the senses
might become ‘directly in their practice theoreticians’ in that seminal (albeit cryptic)
phrase of Marx’s (Marx, 1987; Dawkins and Loftus, 2013). Of course, Marx held that
the senses could only come into their own with the overthrow of private property relations
(see Howes, 2003: ch. 8). But we anthropologists cannot wait: the ‘time of the senses’
(Bendix, 2005) is now.
Doing anthropology with and of the senses has the potential to radically transform
what Michael Herzfeld (2001) calls our ‘practice of theory’. Building on Classen
(1997), Herzfeld (2001: 252–3) affirms that: ‘The broad range of applications for a
sensory analysis of culture indicates that the anthropology of the senses need not be
only a “subfield” within anthropology, but may provide a fruitful perspective from
Howes 17
which to examine many different anthropological concerns’, from politics and gender to
‘religious beliefs and practices to the production and exchange of goods’.18 All anthro-
pology could, and Herzfeld would say should, be grounded in sensory ethnography.
To accomplish this, we will need to keep on keeping our wits (an archaic term for
senses) about us.
Acknowledgements
I begin by acknowledging that my place of work, Concordia University, is located on unceded
Indigenous lands. The Kanien’kehá:ka Nation is recognized as the custodians of the lands and
waters here. Tiohtià:ke/Montréal is historically known as a gathering place for many First
Nations. Today, it is home to a diverse population of Indigenous and other peoples. At
Concordia, we respect the continued connections with the past, present and future in our
ongoing relationships with Indigenous and other peoples within the Montreal community.
This paper was first presented as a talk at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology in
Oxford in November 2019. I wish to thank David Gellner and Thomas Cousins for the invitation,
and David Parkin for a highly illuminating conversation over lunch at All Souls. I am deeply
indebted to the two anonymous reviewers for the journal for their comments on an earlier draft,
and Steve Reyna for his guidance. I also wish to thank Tim Ingold for his engagement with my
work, which has helped sharpen my own sense of what doing anthropology with and of the
senses entails.
Funding
The research on which these sensory reflections are based was made possible by a series of grants
from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de Recherche
du Québèc – Société et Culture.
ORCID iD
David Howes https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6199-4358
Notes
1. Carpenter’s Oh, What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me! was hailed as ‘The best of all
school-of-McLuhan books’ (The New York Times Book Review) and ‘could be labelled an
anthropology of the senses’ (Newsday) to quote from the blurbs on the Bantam edition
(1972). This is the first recorded use of the term ‘anthropology of the senses’.
2. The development of this field has been charted by Classen (1997), Porcello et al. (2010);
Howes (2015), and Cox (2018), among others.
3. Just when you (may have) thought the reign of the unitary subject was over, it’s back, with a
vengeance, in the person of Tim Ingold. For an account of ‘the decentring of the subject” along
sensory lines see van Ede (2017), Elisha (2018), and Howes (2019).
18 Anthropological Theory 0(0)
4. Ingold’s diminution of the social also informs his critique of material culture studies, where he pits
the vibrancy or ‘liveliness’ of materials against materiality (Ingold, 2011: ch. 2). His circumscription
or abstraction of ‘life’ in this connection is interesting. The extensive (and very rich) literature on the
‘social life of things’ (Appadurai, 1983) and the ‘social life of materials’ (Drazin and Küchler, 2015)
has no currency for him. Why? Partly because there goes that word ‘social’ again - Ingold’s bugbear
(see further Howes, 2022b). As with so many of Ingold’s polarities, however, here it would be pro-
ductive to ask, with Knappett (2007): what of ‘materials with materiality?’
5. There are many variations to this stereotypical representation. See the discussion of the inter-
section of the division of the senses with the division of the sexes in Classen (1998: chs. 3, 4)
and Howes (2003: 121-23, 126-30, 139-40, 148-49).
6. Ingold’s elision of style is manifest in his account of basketry as a product of the ‘unfolding of
the morphogenetic field’ (Ingold, 2000: ch. 18; compare the discussion in Ingold and Howes,
2011: 328-29 and Howes and Classen, 2014: 21-5) and his analysis of a painting by Bruegel,
where he flatly asserts ‘my purpose is not to analyse the painting in terms of style, composition,
or aesthetic effect. Nor am I concerned with the historical context of its production’ (Ingold,
2000: 201). An art historian would be aghast at this.
7. Perhaps, because he was stung by my barbs, but also for reasons of his own, Ingold’s writings
post-2011 have become more attentive to the particularities of the senses, but when he is not
conducting ‘experiments’ on himself and his students (see Ingold, 2011b: ch. 4 and 2013: ch. 2)
he tends to cleave to philosophical constructions of the senses (e.g. Deleuze and Guattari)
rather than engage meaningfully with the ethnographic record of the multiplex varieties of
sensory experience and manifold relations among the senses across cultures.
8. I only came to this realization recently, thanks to Katharine Young, who suggested that I read the
Phenomenology of Perception again, unfettered by Ingold’s rendition. To my surprise (and
delight) I discovered that in the chapter on ‘Sense Perception’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 207-42),
Merleau-Ponty brings out the diversity and interplay of the senses before going on to speak in
terms of their (supposed) synaesthetic unity. (The switchover occurs at page 225.) This inconsistency
renewed my respect for the philosopher. Merleau-Ponty was of two minds about the senses, not one.
9. With the proviso that it helps to be a white Western male and not some other. If you are an
other, the affordances will not be so amenable. See Dokumaci (2019), Hetherington (2003).
10. It beggars belief the way Ingold dresses up lines as colors and sounds (Ingold, 2015: chs 20, 21)
or rather dresses the latter down to lines. The incommensurability of drawing and painting, line
and colour was a matter of vigorous debate in nineteenth century artistic circles (Roque, 2009).
For a full-bodied, intersensory (non-lineal) account of color see Classen (1998), Young (2006),
and Taussig (2009); and, of sound see Feld (1996).
11. Malinowski arrogantly professed that the ‘big picture’ of the Kula Ring was visible to himself
alone (not ‘the natives’). The irony is that he was probably right, but for the wrong reasons. As
we now know (Munn, 1986; Howes, 2003: chs. 3, 4) kulaing is not reducible to ‘the love of
give and take for its own sake’ (Malinowski). Rather it is geared to the production of butu,
a term meaning both ‘noise’ and ‘fame’.
12. Numerous other examples of the experimental sensory ethnography exemplified by Phone &
Spear could be cited: for an overview see Howes (2022a: ch. 8).
13. According to Gurumuruwuy’s instructions, Phone & Spear should be ‘all about colour, and
pattern, and making things lively’ (Miyarrka Media, 2019: 45). On just how this book hums
see pp. 31-7.
14. Yangathu’s surviving kin ‘danced with the flowers because it is the scent and sweetness of
those flowers that draw those honeybees close as they seek food’ (Miyarrka Media, 2019: 189).
Howes 19
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Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs.
22 Anthropological Theory 0(0)
David Howes is a Full Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and
Co-Director of the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University as well as an
Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law at McGill University, Montreal. He has pub-
lished extensively in the areas of sensory studies (including the anthropology and
history of the senses), art and aesthetics, culture and consumption, law and society,
and constutional law. He has a book forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press
entitled The Sensory Studies Manifesto: Tracking the Sensorial Revolution in the Arts
and Human Sciences.