Reading for Nov 26

This week’s reading focused on history of sense. In Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History, the historian Mart M. Smith explored historiography of five senses in his five chapters. He uses a lot of scholarly books to constitute historiography of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching from ancient time to present in worldwide perspectives.

In his analysis of five senses, I was intrigued by the fact of touching. Differ from seeing, touching is the sense of invisible and historically tended to ignore. However, during the time of the Enlightenment, sense of touching started to consider important fact of history with perspectives of sex and disease. Smith analyzes that “Men of any rank, however, saw the female body as always open to touch and, therefore, possession.”[i] Since female body considered as male possession, clothing, which wear on female body, shows male power and class. Considering my wedding dresses, which designed with expensive materials and detailed ornament, those dresses not only shows women’s social status, but also her father’s and husband’s social status and power.

When I think about museum exhibitions, those five senses were used well to attract audiences in many cases. Last week, I visited Bacardi rum factory tour in Puerto Rico and consider how the tour became a part of museum exhibition and attraction. As seeing, we see beautifully build building within a factory, which seems not working as factory, and exhibit of history and process of creating Bacardi. During the tour, we hear explanation of the guide who is well trained to entertain audiences, and we can touch many exhibits of factory processes. Also there are exhibition of smell. They exhibit different kinds of rum to show different smells. In the end of tour, they provide rum to taste it. The main purpose of this factory tour is an advertisement of company, but to think about as a part of museum exhibition, it was interesting to see how they stimulate five senses to audiences and get interests from them. In clothing exhibition, those ideas of five senses could helpful to entertain audiences. It is difficult to touch real exhibit, but we can put material examples that can touch and audiences can feel. As we talked about in class, explain captions in audio also help to catch visitors’ interests. Smith explored class and race of American south associated with five senses, but his analysis could be adaptable for all material exhibitions.

---

[i] Smith M. Mark, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History, (California: University of California Press, 2007), 101.