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While Howes’ approach opened up new avenues of investigation and scholarship, it did not escape criticism. The ethnographic evidence certainly demonstrated that different cultures could be associated with the use of different sets of sensory categories and meanings (e.g. Geurts, 2002; Pink, 2004). Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, the comparison of how sensory categories and moralities and practices associated with them are articulated and engaged across cultures is a viable proposition and can offer useful insights (Pink, 2004, 2006). Nevertheless, taking cultural difference as the unit of comparison can be problematic when it shifts attention away from the immediacy of sensory experience as lived, and abstracts it into representational categories. Ingold’s critique of this dimension of Howes’ approach was that its focus on the ‘incorporeal “ideas” and “beliefs” of a culture’ treated ‘sensory experience as but a vehicle for the expression of extra-sensory, cultural values’ (2000: 156). This, Ingold wrote, ‘reduces the body to a locus of objectified and enumerable sense whose one and only role is to carry the semantic load projected onto them by a collective, supersensory subject – namely society – and whose balance or ratio may be calculated according to the load borne by each’ (Ingold, 2000: 284). Instead, Ingold proposed a re-focusing of research in the anthropology of the senses, away from ‘the collective sensory consciousness of society’ and towards the ‘creative interweaving of experience in discourse and to the ways in which the resulting discursive constructions in turn affect people’s perceptions of the world around them’ (2000: 285). Howes responded to the critique with a further insistence on the importance of undertaking ‘an in-depth examination’ of the ‘social significance’ of the ‘sensory features of a society’ (2003: 49). The disagreement between Howes and Ingold is based both in their different theoretical commitments and in their agendas for approaching the senses in culture and society. While Howes has recognised the importance of perception (2003: 40), he nevertheless seems to be calling for anthropologists of the senses to take cultural models as their starting point. This, like the classic approach to ethnography discussed above, focuses attention away from the specificity of individuals’ practices and the experiential (see also Pink, 2004). In contrast Ingold places human perception at the centre of his analysis (see also Chapter 2 of this book).

A second strand in the work of Howes (1991a) and Stoller (1989) emphasised the commonly assumed dominance of vision, or occularcentrism, in modern western culture. Through cross-cultural comparison a body of work emerged that suggested how in other cultures non-visual senses may play a more dominant role. A particularly striking example is presented in Constance Classen’s, Howes’ and Anthony Synnott’s work on smell, through their discussion of Pandaya’s work on the Ongee people in the Andaman Islands. They describe how for the Ongee ‘the identifying characteristic and life force of all living beings is thought to reside in their smell’. Indeed, they write: ‘it is through catching a whiff of oneself, and being able to distinguish that scent from all the other odours that surround one, that one arrives at a sense of one’s own identity in Ongee society’ (Classen et al., 1994: 113). This and other ethnographic studies (see also Classen et al., 1994) leave little doubt that in different cultures notions of self and more might be attributed verbally and/or gesturally to different sensory categories. Yet it does not follow from this that the embodied experience of the self, for instance, is necessarily perceived simply through one sensory modality. To deconstruct the argument that in different cultures different sensory modalities are dominant we need to separate out the idea of there being a hierarchically dominant sense on the one hand, and on the other, the ethnographic evidence that in specific cultural contexts people tend to use particular sensory categories to conceptualise aspects of their lives and identities. While the latter is well supported, the former is challenged in recent literature. This argument can be expanded with reference to the status of vision in modern western societies. Ingold argues that the assumption that vision is necessarily a dominant and objectifying sense is incorrect (2000: 287). He suggests this assumption was brought about because instead of asking, ‘How do we see the environment around us?’ (Gibson, 1979: 1, cited by Ingold, 2000: 286), ‘philosophical critics of visualism’ presuppose that ‘to see is to reduce the environment to objects that are to be grasped and appropriated as representations in the mind’ (2000: 286). Based on theories that understand perception as multisensory, in that the senses are not separated out at the point of perception, but culturally defined, Ingold thus suggests understanding vision in terms of its interrelationship with other senses (in his own discussion through an analysis of the relationship between vision and hearing). As noted above, the debate between Ingold and Howes is ongoing, and has since been played out in the context of a written debate in four parts in the journal Social Anthropology. In this 2011 debate between Ingold and Howes it becomes clear how, while Howes’ approach can be aligned with a culturalist and representational trajectory, Ingold’s is aligned with the non-representational or more-than-representational accounts associated with human geography (Howes, 2011a, 2011b; Ingold, 2011a, 2011b; see also Howes, 2010a, 2010b and Pink, 2010a, 2010b, 2015).

Following Ingold’s (2000) critiques, others took up questions related to vision and sensory experience (e.g. Grasseni, 2007a, 2007c; Willerslev, 2007). Cristina Grasseni proposed a ‘rehabilitation of vision’ not ‘as an isolated given but within its interplay with the other senses’ (2007a: 1). Grasseni argued that vision is ‘not necessarily identifiable with “detached observation” and should not be opposed by definition to “the immediacy of fleeting sounds. Ineffable odours, confused emotions, and the flow of Time passing” (Fabian 1983: 108)’. Rather, she proposed the idea of ‘skilled visions [which] are embedded in multi-sensory practices, where look is coordinated with skilled movement, with rapidly changing points of view, or with other senses such as touch’ (2007a: 4). Tom Rice, whose research has focused on sound, also questions the usefulness of what he calls ‘anti-visualism’. Rice suggested that in the case of sound the effect of the anti-visualist argument is in ‘re-re-establishing the visual/auditory dichotomy that has pervaded anthropological thought on sensory experience’ (2005: 201, original italics; and see also Rice, 2008). My own research about the modern western ‘sensory home’ (Pink, 2004), through a focus on categories of sound, vision, smell and touch likewise suggested that no sensory modality necessarily dominates how domestic environments or practices are experienced in any one culture. Rather, the home is an environment that is constituted, experienced, understood, evaluated and maintained through all the senses. For example, British and Spanish research participants decided whether or not they would clean their homes based on multisensory evaluations and knowledge that they verbalised in terms of how clothes, or sinks or floors look, smell or feel under foot. The sensory modalities research participants cited as being those that mattered when they evaluated their homes varied both culturally and individually. However, this was not because their perceptions of cleanliness were dominated by one sensory modality. Rather, they used sensory modalities as expressive categories through which to communicate about both cleanliness and self-identity (see Pink, 2004).