On Sensescapes & Intersensoriality
I keep encountering the term sensescape in sensory geography and related fields, often positioned as a corrective to the visual bias embedded in ideas like landscape. I’m still unsure how useful the term is, but it seems to open up a way of thinking about environments as sensed rather than seen.
The term sensescape is seen to be more neutral compared to the term landscape. The departure from landscape to sensescape appears to be motivated by a desire to move away from vision as the dominant mode of spatial understanding. Landscape assumes distance, overview, and visual coherence. Sensescape, in contrast, suggests something more neutral and embodied.
At a basic level, the term is broken down into:
- Soundscape
- Smellscape
- Bodyscape and so forth
Every sense contributes to our understanding of space. This decomposition is meant to make visible the contribution of non-visual senses to spatial orientation; to their awareness of spatial relationships; and to the appreciation of the qualities of particular "micro- and macro-spatial environments” [1]. But it also risks pulling things apart that aren’t actually separate when lived.
This is where intersensoriality feels more valuable. It is the idea that senses operate in relation to one another rather than as discrete channels. Following Paul Rodaway’s lead in Sensuous Geographies [2], a number of geographers started taking note of the distinct ways in which different senses are “interconnected” with each other to produce a sensed environment.
- Cooperation and conflict between the senses.
- Hierarchy between different senses (dominant vs subservient).
- Sequencing of one sense which has to follow on from another sense.
- A threshold of effect of a particular sense which has to be met before another sense is operative.
- Reciprocal relations of a certain sense with the object which appears to ‘afford’ it an appropriate response” (Urry 2011: 388 summarising Rodaway 1994).
Any taxonomy of the senses in itself is rooted in cultural and historical context. According to the latest scientific estimates, there are at least ten senses and possibly as many as 33 [3]. In classical Indian philosophy (the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad), a list of eight senses is given: (1) prana (breathing organ, i.e., nose; also ‘breath of life’); (2) the speech organ; (3) tongue (taste); (4) eye (color); (5) ear (sounds); (6) mana (thought, mind, inner organ); (7) hands (work); and (8) skin (sense of touch) [4].
Sense of a place. Drawing on recent studies in sensory geographies and cultures, Neal Alexander contends [4] that our perception of different places (referred to as senses of place) arise from engaging all five of our senses, for observing, and also for comprehending the environments we are in.
Sense of a place can be interpreted as an innate faculty of humans or as ambience of an environment. John Brinckerhoff Jackson understands it as ‘the atmosphere to a place, the quality of its environment’ [5] , while Edward Relph frames it as ‘an innate faculty, possessed in some degree by everyone, that connects us to the world’ [6] . In the discourse of humanist geography at least, a sense of place appears to vacillate somewhere between objective property and subjective experience.