The Skinscape

Uncommon Sense

Sensory studies involves a cultural approach to the study of the senses and a sensory approach to the study of culture. It emerged out of the sensory turn in history and anthropology that started in the early 1990s and has since spread across the humanities and social sciences, much like the roughly coterminous material and affective turns. Alternately, sensory studies may be seen as both encompassing and deriving from the division of the sensorium into visual culture, auditory culture (or sound studies), smell culture, taste culture and the culture of touch. ² Either way, by emphasizing the sociality of sensation and cultural contingency of sense perception, sensory studies has mounted a rigorous critique of the privatization of the senses within the discipline of psychology, and put an end to the monopoly which that discipline formerly exercised over the study of the senses and sensation. (We use the term ‘privatization of the senses’ to refer to the separation of the senses one from another and the retreat of the locus of perception to a place inside the head – namely, the brain – that has come over the Western sensorium since the Renaissance.)

The skin is, among other things, a visual surface to be regarded, a source of odours to be smelt, and a sentient surface to be felt. As such, it straddles the division between various sensory cultures, and perhaps particularly the division between visual culture and the culture of touch. This can be seen in the écart between the Borgerson and Schroeder article (this volume) on the representation of skin and the importance of physical appearance in contemporary consumer culture, on the one hand, and the Naomi Segal article (this volume) concerning itchiness, on the other. It can also be seen in the hybrid concept of ‘haptic visuality’ (which is still more visual than it is haptic) that Heidi Kellett (this volume) applies in her study of skin portraiture in the era of Bio Art. For his part, in the Introduction, Lafrance insists on the indissociability of skin in its visual and felt aspects: skin is ‘both/and’ (i.e. both object and subject, enveloping and porous, seen and felt, etc.). To put this another way, skin is intersensory.

Such a relational and syntagmatic (or contiguous) understanding of skin – that is, the skin as intersensory – is nicely captured in the illustration from John Amos Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus, a picture book dating from the mid-1600s (see Figure 1). It depicts the various external sense organs (1–5) as different folds of the ur-organ, the skin, and also enumerates the ‘inner senses’: namely, ‘the common sense’ (7), ‘phantasie’ (6) and ‘memory’ (8). This notion of ‘inner’ sensory faculties ³ is a testimony to the extended role ascribed to processes of sensing, as distinct from thinking or reasoning, in pre-modern understandings of the soul (or ‘mind’). These understandings would later fall away due to the precession of the scientific rationalism of René Descartes, who ‘called away’ his senses in a fit of rationality, and the empiricism of John Locke, who stripped the senses of their agency and sociability even as he reputedly underscored their primacy. (The writings of Descartes and Locke were but the philosophical excresence of massive social and cultural shifts in the life of the senses during the modern period; see Classen [1998, 2014].)

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

John Amos Comenius, Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658). Comenius explains the sensus communis as follows: ‘The common sense under the forepart of the head/comprehendeth things taken from the outward Senses.’

The notion of ‘the common sense’ (sensus communis) is particularly intriguing. This faculty, which was responsible for sorting and coordinating the deliverances of the other senses, as well as the ‘sense of sensing’, was understood as an inward form of touch, according to a certain reading of Aristotle, and this idea persisted down to the work of Marshall McLuhan and Michel Serres (two very un-Cartesian and anti-Lockean theorists). ⁴ One will not find this faculty discussed in any modern textbook of psychology, though. For us moderns, common sense has lost its connection with sentience and been assimilated to the notion of practical judgment. Its disappearance is due to the privatization of the senses in modern (Western) psychology, as discussed above.

Skin in Cross-cultural Contexts

When we turn to explore the significance of the skin across cultures we find that it is not always regarded as that which sets one self apart from others (i.e. it is not an envelope, the way it is presumed to be in the West) but rather something one shares with others. Consider the term ngalki, ‘skin’ in the language of the Yanyuwa of northern Australia. Ngalki is used to refer to a person’s group in the kinship system (or ‘skin group’), to the voice of a person, to the sweat of their armpits, and to their literal epidermis (Kirton and Timothy, 1977). This term is remarkable for its relationality and intersensoriality both. Parenthetically, the term ‘skinship’ has been coined by anthropologists to evoke the distributed or relational understanding of the skin as encompassing the various members of one’s kin group, such as found among the Yanyuwa (Gregory, 2011).

Elsewhere in Australia, and among the San of South Africa, it is supposed that a person can foretell the approach of a relative from the feeling of ‘tappings’ on their skin. These twitches correspond to known points on the relative’s body, such as an old wound, or the pressure from a strap. To quote a San informant: ‘When a woman who had gone away is returning to the house, the man who is sitting there feels on his shoulders the thong with which the woman’s child is slung over her shoulders; he feels the sensation there’, and knows she will soon appear. ⁵ Evidently, among the San, touch is not a proximity sense. It can operate at a distance.

Beyond these examples of skinship, there is the skinscape. We use the term ‘skinscape’ to refer to the contiguity or intimate association between the surface of the body and the surface of the earth, or landscape, as found in many non-Western cultures. In Aboriginal Australia, the landscape is a skinscape: it is composed of the material traces of the bodies of the Ancestral beings who roamed and shaped the countryside during the primordial period referred to as the Dreaming (Biddle, 2003). A chief of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation of British Columbia, testifying at a land claim hearing, expressed this notion of the skinscape as follows: ‘If you know the territory well, it is like your own skin. Sometimes you can feel the animals moving on your body as they are on the land, the fish swimming in your bloodstream.…If you know the territory well enough, you can feel the animals’ (quoted in Howes and Salter, 2015).

The Cashinahua of Peru call this sort of awareness ‘skin knowledge’. It is what enables a man to find his way in the jungle and locate prey. He uses ‘hand knowledge’ to shoot the prey. In addition to the skin and hand, the Cashinahua distinguish four other percipient centres of the body: the ear (which receives and stores social knowledge), the liver (emotional knowledge), the genitals (seat of the life force), and the ‘eye-spirit’. Interestingly, this last visual sense is only deemed to be active when a person is under the influence of hallucinogens. A kind of X-ray vision, it enables the person to see the spritual ‘insides’ of other people and things. The Cashinahua sensorium thus has a very different configuration from the ‘normal’ Western sensorium. Cashinahua ‘feel’ with their skin and hands what an English-speaker, for example, would say they ‘see’. ⁶

What these cross-cultural facts point towards is an understanding of skin as social instead of individual, as interface instead of envelope, and as knowledgeable or sentient in its own right instead of subservient to cognition, the brain or the eye. In modern Western culture it took Didier Anzieu to arrive at this depth of understanding of the skin, whereas among the San or Wet’suwet’en such knowledge is commonplace: it is assumed, rather than repressed (i.e. relegated to an unconscious from which it must be dredged up). This understanding of the skin is also the awareness that the skin studies scholar strives to arrive at. In skin studies, according to Lafrance, ‘the skin is seen as open, relational, sentient and processual…as human and non-human, material and immaterial’ (Lafrance, this volume). The sensuous epistemology of skin studies thus dovetails nicely with much of what the anthropology of the senses teaches us about skin perception across cultures. It would clearly be very fruitful to explore what other points of agreement and what other lessons the anthropology of the senses has to offer the nascent field of skin studies. Limitations of space preclude us from doing so here (see, however, Howes and Classen, 2013: 3–5).

What would it feel like for a modern Western subject to experience the skinscape of the San or Wet’suwet’en, partial as that experience could only ever be? Tantalizingly, the opportunity to engage with at least some aspects of that experience is presented by Haptic Field, a large-scale artwork designed by another one of my colleagues, Chris Salter, who holds the Chair in New Media, Technology and the Senses at Concordia University. Salter is a master at combining the findings of sensory anthropology with new media technologies to create alternative sensoria or Umwelt (see von Uexküll, 2018). He calls these installation pieces ‘performative sensory environments’. Haptic Field was inspired by Salter’s engagement with the ethnographic literature on the sensory cosmologies and practices of the San and Wet’suwet’en (discussed above) as well as anthropologist Valentine Daniel’s classic essay, ‘The pulse as an icon in Siddha medicine’ (Daniel, 1991). In Siddha medicine (a humoral medical tradition), the physician seeks to synchronize his pulses to those of the patient and so arrive at first-hand knowledge of the patient’s symptoms. This is another example of exterodermality, or the fusion of haptic horizons across bodily boundaries, like among the San. It too defies or rubs against common sense, as common sense is constituted in the modern West.

Haptic Field consists of four darkened rooms of varying dimensions with different lighting arrays. The light sources consist of small LEDs sheathed in acrylic tubes suspended on wires from the ceiling or affixed to the walls, all at different heights and different concentrations. The LEDs change in intensity, brightness and colour in sync with the sinusoidal sound waves of varying frequencies diffused by two- and four-channel speakers set up in two of the four rooms to create various pre-programmed ‘audio-visual states’. These design elements, which create a symphony of sound and light, are familiar from other immersive environments created by Salter (and his creative partner TeZ, Maurizio Martinucci) such as Displace (Salter, 2015). What sets Haptic Field apart is the costume, or second skin, one dons as one explores the artwork.

This supplementary skin consists of a garment with seven custom-designed wireless haptic actuators (or what Salter and developer Ian Hattwick call ‘Vibropixels’) that produce variegated levels of tactile intensity (or ‘haptic tracks’) across the body, albeit concentrated in the upper arms, chest and thighs. (These stimuli may be likened to the ‘tappings’ of the San, or the patterings of animal feet on the skin of the Wet’suwet’en.) The Vibropixels also emit light and this is synchronized to the haptic track, so each visitor can see and feel the luminous-vibrational pattern which they – along with the other visitors (there are up to 18 visitors at a time) – emit. But they do so only through a glass darkly, as it were, because the crowning piece of the suit is a pair of frosted safety goggles. The frosted glasses alter everything. They give the light sources an auratic, halo effect and the atmosphere a gauzy hue. Other visitors lack definition, and seem almost like spectres, except for the Vibropixels they wear, which pulsate, in unison with one’s own. (This may be likened to the harmonization of pulses in Siddha medicine.) One gropes one’s way though the rooms, though some visitors – sensing themselves free from the censorial gaze of the other – instead dance wildly. ⁷

The skinscape of Haptic Field is the (dark) mirror opposite of the experiments in self-representation discussed by Kellett in her article on ‘skin portraiture’ (this volume). It too introduces a form of ‘haptic visuality’, but one in which the visual is curbed instead of hyped, so that the haptic actually comes to the fore. Haptic Field also stages a very unique ‘distribution of the sensible’ – or rather tangible. It involves up to 18 random individuals (members of the general public) becoming a ‘skin group’ for the duration of their visit – that is, all come to share the same feeling, all pulsate as one. The experience can be an uncanny and unsettling one for a modern Western subject, because touch is supposed to be private. Haptic Field breaches the bounds of sense, which is why many visitors also find it liberating.

I have discussed Salter’s Haptic Field at length because, like the highly poignant sketches in Cynthia Hammond’s contribution to this volume, it represents an important cross-over. It is situated ‘between art and anthropology’, in Schneider and Wright’s (2010) apt phrase. Otherwise put, it is an exercise in research-creation which fuses aesthetic and social scientific methodologies and generates knowledge of a profoundly sensuous – and sensible – nature. This is in contrast to the purely verbal or ‘logocentric’ character of print publications, such as the ethnographic monograph, or the mainly visual (ocularcentric) character of cinematic productions, such as ethnographic film. The increasing experimentation with alternative modalities of expression and communication within anthropology (see e.g. Cox et al., 2016) and sensory studies generally (see Classen, 2017; Jones, 2018; Salter, 2015) is a welcome innovation, to be emulated.

A Brief Prehistory of Skin Studies

As an anthropologist, I was initially surprised not to see fellow anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s book Touching listed in Lafrance’s genealogy of skin studies, which begins instead with Didier Anzieu and finally takes on definitive form with the work of Jay Prosser or Claudia Benthien. But upon reflection I came to see the rationale for this elision. Touching is an important precursor or overture to skin studies, to be sure, but it does not make the cut: first, because Montagu’s account of skin is physiologocentric (it fails to strike the right balance between the biomedical and social sciences); second, while ostensibly anthropological, it is overly indebted to the Culture and Personality School approach (which has been discredited; see Bock, 1999); and, most seriously, Montagu actually took Harry Harlow’s primate experiments as one of the touchstones for his account. ⁷ Lafrance would put all this more succinctly: Montagu’s scholarship lacks reflexivity.

Of course, anthropological interest in other peoples’ skin goes back beyond Montagu. It stretches back to the very origin of the discipline. ⁸ The Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Strait of 1898 led by the biologist A.C. Haddon and directed by W.H.R. Rivers (the founder of British Psychology and British Anthropology) was the first scientific anthropological expedition ever, and its members were centrally concerned with measuring the ‘sensory acuity’ of the native races. William MacDougall, a medical man, was responsible for gauging cutaneous sensation, under Rivers’ supervision. A firm believer in the truth of psychophysics (and just as committed racist), MacDougall aimed to determine ‘racial characteristics’ (MacDougall, 1901: 189). Consequently, he applied his esthesiometer to the nape of his test subjects’ necks, or the inner surface of the pulp of the second toe, rather than, for example, their fingers because (so his reasoning went) if the fingers were used in a trade, such as weaving, then their sensitivity might be adulterated by ‘habits of life’ and not therefore a ‘true’ register of ‘racial characteristics’. Using the esthesiometer, MacDougall found that the Islanders’ skin was twice as sensitive as that of a comparison group of Scottish subjects, whom he tested on his return to the UK. Using an algometer, which amounted to little more than thumb screws, he found the Islanders to be half as sensitive to pain as the comparison group. MacDougall saw no contradiction here. It was common sense, by the standards of his day.

As Clifford Geertz observes in his classic essay on ‘Common Sense as a Cultural System’ (1983), common sense, far from an ‘immediate deliverance of experience’, should rather be seen as a complex tapestry of interwoven categories and considerations that cries out for anthropological investigation and critique. Following Geertz, we observe two things. First, it was convenient that the Islanders were found to be less sensitive to pain, since this meant that they could be subjected to brutish working conditions (cf. Dias, 2010). Second, it was expected that the Islanders would outperform the Scottish test subjects on this and other psychophysical measures (visual, auditory, and olfactory acuity were also tested) because sensitivity was supposed to vary inversely with intelligence or rationality. This was according to Herbert Spencer, the supreme authority on race and mental evolution in Victorian Britain. To excel at any of these tests was actually supposed to reflect poorly on the subject’s intelligence. This makes it rather pathetic to read about how the tests were presented to the Islanders:

The natives were told that some people had said that the black man could see and hear, etc., better than the white man and that we had come to find out how clever they were, and that their performances would all be described in a big book so that everyone would read about them. This appealed to the vanity of the people and put them on their mettle. (Rivers quoted and discussed in Howes, 2016)

To sum up, MacDougall’s uncritical (psychophysicalist) assumption that it is possible to gauge raw sensation (for a cultural historical critique of this very idea see Classen, 1997, 2012 and Connor, 2004), and his utter lack of reflexivity with regard to race, relegates his work to the prehistory of skin studies – the period on which skin studies scholars now train their critical faculties.

The premium placed on reflexivity in skin studies since the dermalogical turn is brilliantly exemplified by the lead article in this volume, by David Le Breton. Le Breton is the author of some 33 books, and his works have been translated into numerous European and non-European languages – except English. Finally, last November, Bloomsbury came out with an English translation of his 2006 book La Saveur du monde, under the title Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses (Le Breton, 2017). This book treats each of the five senses in turn, and the relations between them. It is noteworthy for its insistence on the intertwining of sensation and signification, feeling and meaning (both of which are given in the English term ‘sense’ or the French sens) and for its scathing critique of the racialized and racializing sensorium of MacDougall and his ilk.

While Sensing the World is mainly a work of theory, Le Breton is also a master practitioner of sensory ethnography, as appears from the article in this volume regarding adolescents who cut themselves. The latter article is based on some 100 interviews with teens spread out over many years. The quotations and discussion clearly show Le Breton ‘sensing along with’ his interlocutors, much like a Siddha physician. He resists the pathologization of self-cutting, and his position therefore rubs against common sense, particularly the common sense of the medical and so-called helping professions. Contrary to the latter, Le Breton argues that there is a logic to self-cutting. It is not a senseless act of self-destruction. Rather, the hurtful incision has the effect of counteracting the unbearable pain and turmoil of adolescent existence.

In his article in this volume, as in the chapter called ‘Skin Deep’ in Sensing the World, Le Breton makes it clear that skin studies need not be only a subfield of anthropology or body studies, but can in addition provide a fruitful perspective from which to examine many different medical, psychological, sociological and anthropological concerns.