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Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. By David Howes. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2003. Pp. xvi + 283, illustrations, maps, bibliography, references, index.)
David Howes's study of sensuality in social and cultural theory opens with a survey and critique of the textual-and therefore "disembodied"- turn in ethnography, in which anthropologists moved away from the experiential mode of sensing patterns in culture to reading and writing culture. Howes also explores in considerable detail the countertradition within the anthropology of the 1980s and 1990s, in which writers such as Paul stoller, Nadia seremetakis, and others rooted meaning in the medium of the body. Arguing that we need to see all sensory phenomena as culturally coded in order to have a full-bodied experience of social life, Howes constantly emphasizes the need to understand the cultural formation of the senses through the theories and practices developed within the society under study. we need, he suggests, to explore a "continual interplay between sensuality and sociality" (p. 56).
Having set the theoretical framework, Howes proceeds to examine Melanesian sensory formations. He begins with an analysis of the kula Ring exchange system in Massim, Papua New Guinea, before discussing eating habits, speech, and body decoration. There is an intimate link between the exchange system and becoming the subject of speech in Massim, where food and eating have little to do with taste and much more to do with community. Food consumption is an act of interiorization, associated with...