The Cultural Senses of <em>Homo sapiens</em>

Humans are a curious mix of biology and culture, and one interaction area between these two that has recently come into focus is located in the senses, our biological apparatus to connect with the world. In this essay I address the variation in appreciation of the senses in various cultures, both historical and contemporaneous, in order to glean the measure in which culture steers not so much our observations, as our appreciation of the epistemological weight of our various senses. I concentrate on three, vision, hearing and smell, and show how the relative weight attributed to each of them shifts in different cultures or historical periods. Using data from anthropology, literature, psychology and linguistics, I argue that vision, sound and smell accrue different positions in various cultures, and that our sensorial balance shifts with culture. Thus, our present epistemological dominance of sight over all other senses, is neither a biological given, nor a cultural necessity.