On Sensing - with David Howes

How does attending to and engaging our senses reveal our world otherwise?

Our guest on this episode, On Sensing is David Howes, professor of anthropology and co-director of the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He also serves as an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law at McGill University. 

Howes is recognized as one of the leading figures in the anthropology of the senses and a theorist within the interdisciplinary field of sensory studies. His research and teaching cover fields such as the anthropology of the senses, sensory ethnography consumption, material culture, art and aesthetics, law and legal anthropology.

This conversation focuses on two of his monographs, Sensual Relations Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (2003) and Sensorial Investigations. A History of the Senses in Anthropology, Psychology and Law  (2023), which explore the engagement of perception across different temporal and spatial contexts.

He is the author of numerous books including monographs such as Ways of Sensing Understanding the Senses in Society (2014), co-authored with Constance Classen and The Sensory Studies Manifesto: Tracking the Sensorial Revolution in the Arts and Human Sciences (2022) Sensorium: Contextualizing the Senses and Cognition in History and Across Cultures(2024).

 Howes is also editor of numerous essay collections on the senses, including The Empire of the Senses.The Sensual Culture Reader (2005) and The Sixth Sense Reader (2009).

 Host: George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.

Production: Zainabu Jallo (Institute of Social Anthropology) in collaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel