Can These Dry Bones Live? An Anthropological Approach to the History of the Senses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Eighteen years ago the eminent French social historian Alain Corbin, author of The Foul and the Fragrant (1986), generously agreed to contribute to a journal issue I was editing on the anthropology of the senses. Corbin's article in that issue, “Histoire et anthropologie sensorielle” (1990), discussed the role played by “the organization of the sensory regime” in the formation of the social imagination.1 The moment is now ripe for me to repay that favor by making my own anthropological contribution to the history of the senses in this round table in the Journal of American History. It is gratifying to see that what has been called the “sensorial revolution in the humanities and social sciences” has now come to the field of American history.2 In what follows, I would like to offer an overview of how the senses are studied in anthropology and how that anthropological approach might be relevant to the historical study of the social life of the senses in America and elsewhere. This account will be interspersed with references to the companion essays in this round table by my colleagues in American history, all of which point to the fruitfulness of a sensorial approach to the interpretation of the past. Those references also underscore the mutually enriching association between the disciplines of history and anthropology that has emerged from their overlapping focus on the sensate.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".