David Howes is a Canadian anthropologist and legal scholar. He is a Full Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and Co-Director of the Centre for Sensory Studies, at Concordia University, Montreal. Since 2012, he has also held an appointment as an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law at McGill University. Howes is best known as a pioneer of the anthropology of the senses and leading theorist of the interdisciplinary field of sensory studies. He has otherwise published numerous articles on material culture, the museum and cross-cultural aesthetics as well as Canadian legal history and constitutional studies, legal pluralism and cross-cultural jurisprudence.
Life
David Howes was born in Montreal, the unceded traditional territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. He trained in social anthropology at the University of Toronto (1976-1979) and Oxford University (1979-1981) before pursuing two degrees in law at McGill University (1981-1985) and then switched back to anthropology and obtained a PhD from the Université de Montréal (1992) and a DLitt from Oxford (2024).
In 2006, together with Michael Bull (University of Sussex), Howes co-founded The Senses and Society journal. In 2010, he launched the Sensory Studies website. In 2012, together with Bianca Grohmann (Marketing, Concordia), he co-founded the Centre for Sensory Studies. The Centre has 18 faculty members, ± 40 graduate student members, and regularly receives visiting scholars from around the world. It hosts the biennial, international “Uncommon Senses” conference series. Howes is a past holder of the Chaire Jacques Leclercq at the Université Catholique Louvain (2018). In 2021, Howes was awarded the title of Distinguished Research Professor (Concordia); and in 2023 the Concordia University Award for Graduate Student Mentoring.
Research
Howes is the author, co-author or editor of fifteen books, the editor or co-editor of nine thematic issues of scholarly journals, and has published over 180 book chapters, journal articles and review essays. He was inspired to train his sights on the study of the sensorium when he attended a talk delivered by Marshall McLuhan in 1979, and went on to carry out field research on the social and cultural life of the senses in Papua New Guinea and Northwestern Argentina, the sensory life of things in the ethnographic museum, and the sensualization of the commodity form, or “hyperaesthesia” in late consumer capitalism.
Howes’ first book, The Varieties of Sensory Experience (1991) was at the origin of the sensory turn in anthropology and cognate disciplines. Sensory anthropology examines “how the patterning of sense experience varies from one culture to the next in accordance with the meaning and emphasis attached to each of the modalities of perception. It is also concerned with tracing the influence such variations have on forms of social organization, conceptions of self and cosmos, the regulation of the emotions, and other domains of cultural expression” (p. 3).
Aroma (1994), co-authored with the cultural historian Constance Classen and sociologist Anthony Synnott, adopted a multidisciplinary (historical, anthropological and sociological) approach to the study of olfaction. This book challenged many of the assumptions and conclusions of current research in the psychology and neurobiology of smell. It was awarded the 1994 Richard B. Salomon prize by the Olfactory Research Fund
Sensual Relations (2003) was inspired both by McLuhan’s notion of the “sense-ratio” and the German sociologist Georg Simmel’s constatation, in “Sociology of the Senses”: “That we become involved in interactions at all depends on the fact that we have a sensory effect upon one another.”. This book recounts the emergence of the anthropology of the senses in the early 1990s, and then presents a comparative study of the sensory orders of two Papua New Guinea societies. The book concludes with a pair of chapters on the “sensory biographies” of Freud and Marx, with particular emphasis on the sensual dimensions of their respective theories of the psyche and the social.
Ways of Sensing (2013), co-authored with Constance Classen, introduced a domain-based approach to the study of the sensorium in history and across cultures, with separate chapters devoted to analyzing the senses in art, medicine, law, politics, and the marketplace. This approach also informs A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age, 1920-2000 (2014), the sixth volume in the Cultural History of the Senses set from Bloomsbury Academic.
The Sensory Studies Manifesto (2022) presents a cultural and intellectual history of the “sensorial revolution” in the human sciences (most notably, history, anthropology, geography and sociology) as well as contemporary design, art history and museology. It also tracks the emergence of such interdisciplinary fields of inquiry as visual culture, auditory culture (or sound studies), and taste cultures. This book argues that the senses are made, not given, and that each culture or historical period must be approached on its own sensory terms.
Sensorial Investigations (2023) opens with a history of the senses in anthropological research (from Rivers and Boas, and Mauss and Mead to Stoller and Taussig, Geurts and Sutton) In Part II, Howes delves into how the senses and sense-perception have been constructed in the history of Western philosophy and psychology (from Aristotle to Locke to J.J. Gibson). In Part III, the focus is on trade (or cultural exchange) as sensory exchange between Europe and China in the early modern period and between explorers and settlers and Indigenous peoples in colonial North America. The book concludes with a series of proposals for doing justice by other peoples’ senses.
Sensorium (2024) is a volume in the Éléments in Histories of Emotions and the Senses series from Cambridge University Press. In the sections of Part I, this book explores such questions as: ‘How many senses are there?’ and ‘What would it be like to see feelingly?’ Part II presents a pair of études sensorielles: the first study centres on the sensuous epistemology of the seventeenth century natural philosopher, poet and playwright Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle; the second offers a sensory biography of the expatriate American painter James McNeill Whisler’s works and life.
Research-Creation
Around 2010, Howes became interested in employing more creative means of generating and communicating research results, alongside the traditional scholarly media of print publications and conference presentations. He embarked on a series of “research-creation” projects together with Chris Salter (Design and Computation Arts, Concordia; now of Zurich University of the Arts). Research-creation involves “uniting artistic expression, scholarly investigation and material experimentation to generate new ways of being and knowing” (Salter) The resulting performance/installation works occupy a space “between art and science.” The team of Salter and Howes, together with diverse collaborators, have designed, staged, and analyzed visitor responses to a wide range of “performative sensory environments” or PSEs
One of the first PSEs, called Displace v. 1.0, was shown at the 2011 meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal. It was billed as “a flight simulator for anthropologists,” and aimed to awaken the senses of participants to alternative modes of sensing by presenting novel (from a mainstream Western perspective) configurations of savours, scents, sounds, movement, and light. Other PSEs include Haptic Field (2017) at the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin and Totem (2019), a dynamic light sculpture, at the “AI: More than Human” exhibition at the Barbican.
Socio-legal Studies
Howes’s socio-legal research focusses on the interplay of legal and cultural orders. In such essays as “From Polyjurality to Monojurality” and “Faultless Reasoning”, he explored the history of exchanges between the civil law and common law in Canadian legal reasoning, with a particular focus on the decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada from its inception in 1875 down to the present. He has also forged a connection between constitutional studies and cultural studies in a series of articles showing how certain core constitutional principles have found expression in a range of iconic cultural productions, from painting to pop songs, in Canada and the United States.
Within law, Howes is best known for his advocacy of “cross-cultural jurisprudence” which posits that law is a cultural system, and that judges ought to take cognizance of the cultural background of the parties to a litigation, as well as their own personal culture, before rendering judgment. Finally, arriving full circle, Howes is the chief architect of the nascent field of “sensori-legal studies” (a cross between sensory studies and socio-legal studies). The sensory underpinnings of law are manifest in everything from the rules of evidence to the sensescape of the prison, and from the trademarking of sensations in Intellectual Property Law to the iconography of Justice itself.
Howes’s research and that of his numerous collaborators has been funded by inter alia the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture, the Australian Research Council, the Olfactory Research Fund of The Fragrance Foundation, the Fonds du Barreau du Québec, the Canadian Bar Association, and Concordia University to the amount of $3, 235,000 (as of 2022). The leitmotif of his research is given in the idea of “crossing” (confronting but also harmonizing or blending): crossing disciplines, crossing cultural and linguistic borders, and crossing the senses.
