Making Sense of Social History Author(s): Mark M. Smith Source: Journal of Social History, Vol. 37, No. 1, Special Issue (Autumn, 2003), pp. 165-186 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3790322 . Accessed: 08/10/2014 13:51 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Social History. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 210.212.93.44 on Wed, 8 Oct 2014 13:51:46 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL HISTORY By Mark M. Smith University of South Carolina [M]an is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, but with all his senses_The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present. Karl Marx1 I Eric Hobsbawm was in ebullient mood in 1970. "It is a good moment to be a social historian," he concluded his influential essay, "From Social History to the History of Society." For reasons he'd understand but because of developments in the writing of the history of the senses that he probably didn't anticipate, Hobsbawm might well sound a similar note of optimism were he to write the essay today.2 I'd like to suggest why Hobsbawm's understanding of social history seems to have been important to relatively recent work on the history of the senses? most of which is on the history of aurality?even if that influence is not always acknowledged explicitly by some ofthe authors concerned. Part ofthe difficulty in determining the influence of social history, especially as opposed to cultural history, is that for many historians generally, including several of those whose work is examined here, there has been a merging of the terms of "cultural" and "social" history so that the two have become virtually synonymous. While there are some methodological differences in the writing of cultural and social history, I see the two as, in fact, having fused, not least because what is commonly identified as cultural history is pretty much within the definition of social history offered by Hobsbawm. I do not mean to suggest that all recent work on the history of the senses has been shaped exclusively by social history methodology and concerns, nor do I wish to suggest that these works are of one piece. Plainly, some ofthe techniques of cultural history?especially the emphasis on linguistic analysis?have been important to writing on the history ofthe senses. Moreover, some intellectual historians and scholars ofthe history of medicine have offered penetrating observations on the history of the senses, observations that should prove helpful to future work on sensory history.3 What I do argue is that the history ofthe senses?possibly one ofthe most significant advances in the writing of history in recent years?owes something to the contributions of social history, particularly as Hobsbawm defined it. For Hobsbawm, social history's principal promise and strength resided in its expressed desire to examine and reveal the interplay among economics, poli? tics, and culture, a desire reflected in a methodology and a style of historical investigation characterized by a resolute eclecticism, a refusal to be hedged by artificial boundaries, and a drive to contextualize what those working on, say, This content downloaded from 210.212.93.44 on Wed, 8 Oct 2014 13:51:46 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 166 journal of social history fall 2003 purely economic, intellectual, or political history tended to isolate. With that main strength in mind, Hobsbawm ventured that the most interesting and rel? evant work by social historians would flourish in the fields of urban history, the historical examination of classes, social groups, mentalities and cultures, and in work on the rise of modernity, industrialization, and nationalism.4 A good deal of work on the history of the senses?much of it very recent? has been informed by the main epistemologies, ontologies, and habits of think? ing about the past inspired by social history.5 Social history's impetus toward a braided analysis, one in part influenced by the Annaks school, has a way of alerting historians to the role that senses beside vision?the preponderant way historians still tend to "view" the past?have played in human affairs. Certainly, as George H. Roeder, Jr. has shown, U.S. history textbooks, thanks principally to the influence of social history, are "more likely than those written before 1970 to address seriously the historical role of sensory experience." It is nevertheless the case that the vast majority of historians still work from the assumption that the past is best seen rather than, say, heard or smelled. Indeed, even the examples of the inclusion ofthe senses in textbooks and some monographs offered by Roeder tend to remain incidental to the main narrative, their presence and function to flesh and excite the writing rather than explore explicitly the roles of all the senses in any systematic way. The social historians' tendency to consider the breadth, depth, and interlaced aspects ofthe human experience has helped create a frame of mind and nurse an investigative temper and way of understanding that has prompted some of them to go beyond an unwittingly visualist representation ofthe past. Thanks in part to this habit, some social historians no longer simply assess past experience through the eyes of historical actors but now also consider hearing, smell, touch, and taste in informing matters concerning urban, religious, political, and economic history and specific questions concerning technology, national identity, and modernity.7 Of course, it could be argued that recent work that treats explicitly seeing, visuality, and ocularity is itself refreshing because it unpackages and explains the way that visuality become so dominant in the West by detailing the rise of print culture, the advent of scientific and technological instruments that empowered the eye, and Enlightenment quests for visualist perspective and balance. Judging by Martin Jay's pioneering work?Jay is an intellectual historian who is careful to distance himself from the exaggerated claims for the primacy ofthe eye made by Marshali McLuhan and Walter Ong and who understands that the hegemony of vision didn't mean that there was just one way of seeing?the effect of scholarship on seeing tends, nevertheless, to east sight as the predominant sense in the modern world. While such work has been helpful in explicitly identifying seeing as one sense among many, it has also tended to stress the hegemony of the eye and, by implication (though hardly by design) has privileged sight to the exclusion of other, related, ways of understanding the past.8 In light of this visualist emphasis, historians ofthe (other) senses have had to make their case by showing, for example, the importance ofthe sense of hearing and its embeddedness in all sorts of historical social relations, economic arrange? ments, and political contests. In effect, then, they have had to become social historians, even if it is to show the importance of their topic to all walks of life, which is precisely what Hobsbawm meant when he spoke of the interrelated- This content downloaded from 210.212.93.44 on Wed, 8 Oct 2014 13:51:46 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL HISTORY 167 ness of social history's epistemology. Naturally, advances in the writing of cultural history have affected how historians of the senses conceptualize, narrate, and explicate their projects. But, for reasons that Hobsbawm made clear in 1970,1 think the methodological, intellectual, and conceptual touchstones influencing many of the recent books on the histories of the senses are as indebted to the conceptual apparatus of social history as to the innovations of cultural history and linguistic analysis.9 A brief disclaimer of sorts is in order. My own interest in the history of the senses derives principally from my reading of now classic social history, especially work by Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson. Although my recent work on listening and aurality in nineteenth-century America has been tagged a style of "cultural" history?a label to which I have no visceral reaction or objection?it was, in fact, E. P. Thompson's social history of work-discipline and time and Hobsbawm's call for an integrated historical approach that alerted me to the fact that the past was not simply mediated through the eyes of historical actors but also through their ears. Thompson's groundbreaking work on time consciousness, how time was communicated through sound as well as sight, led me to inquire further into how individuals experienced, understood, made sense of, and invented their environments and themselves in ways beyond mere seeing.10 My aim in this essay is not to shoehorn others who have worked on the senses into my own intellectual trajectory, but, rather, to assess to what extent the basic components of social history seem to have shaped their topics and analytic and narrative strategies. As with my own work, which attempted to listen to the meaning of economic, political, and military sounds (and silences) in an effort to convey the flavor of a broadly construed "society" and thereby add depth to our understanding of antebellum sectional identities among a variety of classes and constituents, some of the work under consideration here is equally ambitious inasmuch as it often attends to questions of group mentalities, modernity, national identity, and the relationship between technology and society using not just detailed analyses of texts and language but, more often, the kind of concrete empirical data that Hobsbawm thought characteristic of social history.