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andrew j.

rotter

Empires of the Senses: How Seeing, Hearing,


Smelling, Tasting, and Touching Shaped
Imperial Encounters*
I generally dislike essays that apologize for their limitationsthey offer merely
preliminary ndings, or a rst take on an issue, or they move toward
something, as if actually getting to the point is impossible. So, with humility, Ill
begin by saying that this essay is based on preliminary ndings, a rst take on a
subject new to me and probably to most readers of this journal, and a gesture
toward what I hope will some day be a more complete understanding of my
subject. In anthropologists terms, these are eld notes on my research thus
far. I hope the essay will make up in interest and curiosity value whatever it lacks
in the certainty of its conclusions.
Herewith two recollections of imperial life, offered by a European and an
American. The rst is from Deborah Dring, an Englishwoman who grew up in
India:
Our parents always thought wed catch something if we went down to the
bazaar. But my brothers and I always looked upon the bazaar as being too
exciting. All those lovely stalls covered with sticky sweets and silver paper and
piles of fruit and those little ares they lit, the old boys sitting stitching clothes
or boiling things in huge dekshis. Ill never forget the smellpartly a very strong
spice, an incensy smelland all that heat and the movements and the people and
the colour. There was a little temple which had rows and rows of little brass bells
all round. If you were a good Hindu you jingled all the bells as you passed, and
I remember thinking, Now thats marvelous! If only I could go past and jingle
a few bells. But . . . the bazaar was a forbidden land when I was a child.1
The second recollection is that of Mary Fee, an American who came to teach
in the Philippines in the rst decade of the twentieth century. She arrived at
Manila, and took a horse-drawn cart, a carromato, into the city: The carromato
wheels were iron-tired, and jolted. . . . We rattled up [the] street. They pulled
up at a church, just at noon: Instantly there burst out such a clamor of bells as
*My thanks to Frank Costigliola, Carl Guarneri, Max Johnson, Padma Kaimal, Melanie
Kiechle, Rob Nemes, Kathy Peiss, Mark M. Smith, and Mary Talusan for their suggestions and
encouragement.
1. Charles Allen, ed., Plain Tales from the Raj (New York, 1985 [1975]), 13.
Diplomatic History, Vol. 35, No. 1 (January 2011). 2010 The Society for Historians of
American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street,
Malden, MA 02148, USA and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.

diph_909

3..20

4 : diplomatic history

we had never before heardbig bells and little bells, brass bells and broken
bellsand brass bands lurking in unknown spots seemed to be assisting. I do not
know whether the Filipinos were originally fond of noise or whether the Spaniards taught them to be so. At any rate, they both love it equally well now.
Then, to lunch: We entered a stone-agged lower hall where several shrouded
carriages would have betrayed the use to which it was put had not a stable odor
rst betrayed it. . . . It was a bare, cheerless apartment, hot in the unshaded light
of a tropical noonday. The tables were not alluring. The waiters were American
negroes. A Filipino youth, dressed in a white suit, and wearing his black hair in
a pompadour, was beating out rag time at a cracked piano. As for the food,
the vegetables were canned, the milk was canned, the butter was canned. Only
the dessert was locally sourcedan acid, avorless banana and . . . gummy,
sticky [guava] jelly.2
The signicance of these passages? Both mention stimuli to all ve human
senses.
Empire was many things. One of them was an encounter between authorities
and subjects, an everyday process of social intercourse, political negotiation,
policing and schooling and healing. It meant the imposition of control and
accommodation or resistance to it. All of these interactions were on some level
intellectual, having to do with what people thought about each other. But they
were also in signicant ways mediated by the senses, perceptions of others
formed through seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. My subject
here is the sensory history of the British in India from the formal imposition of
their rule to its end (18571947) and the Americans in the Philippines from
annexation to independence (18981946). My premise is that all human relationships, including imperial ones, are shaped by all ve senses; how we understand others, even more how we feel about them, emotionally, and thus how we
act toward them, have a good deal to do with how we apprehend them through
every sense. We have long assumed that how we see others, literally, and how we
read the texts we generate about them, tell us all we need to know about our
relations with them. To believe that, however, is to privilege sight above the
other senses, as if our hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching of others and their
cultures have no importance. The project of imperialism. . . . could not be
effected by sight alone, as Mark M. Smith has written. The entire human
sensorium was engaged in the acts of making and accommodating and resisting
empire.3
This work falls within the realm of the social and cultural history of empire;
it is unapologetically interested in life on empires quotidian ground. In part, it
hopes to gure out how the senses helped to create mutual impressions of the
agents of imperialism and their subjects. People in imperial India and the
2. Mary H. Fee, A Womans Impressions of the Philippines (Chicago, 1910), 4650.
3. Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in
History (Berkeley, CA, 2007), 18.

Empires of the Senses : 5

Philippines apprehended each othersaw doesnt work as a verb here


through their sense organs and their skins. They did not necessarily agree on the
relative importance of their senses. They had different ideas from the start about
what looked, sounded, smelled, tasted, and felt good or bad. Moreover, the
senses themselves were not stable or static things: to echo the tiresome but
nevertheless valid dictum, the senses are socially constructed and historically
contingent. The senses are not strictly biological but are, according to
Anthony Seeger, given different emphases and different meanings in different
societies. To some extent, then, what I am proposing here is a departure from
what historians of foreign relations or empire normally do.4
Yet I am unwilling to depart completely from the practices of our eld. I take
the senses not as my subject but as my methodology, and I remain interested in
understanding the deployment of state power and the response to it. While a
portion of this essay will describe sense perception and human interaction in
imperial India and the Philippines, the piece will end up hinting at grander
claims about the ways in which studying the senses helps us understand how
empire functioned, or did not, and especially how it came to an end. My
argument is that both the British and the Americans saw themselves, among
other things, as the civilizers of backward societies, and believed that a vital part
of the civilizing process was to put the senses in the right order of priority
and to ensure them against offense or affront. People without manners who
respected the senses were unt for self-government. Societies that looked
shabby, were noisy and smelly, consumed unwholesome food, and (literally) felt
wrong, were not prepared to stand on their own. It was the duty of more
sensorily advanced Westerners to put the senses right before withdrawing the
most obvious manifestations of their power. Perhaps needless to say, Indians and
Filipinos had different ideas of what constituted sensory civilization, and they
pushed back against Anglo-American efforts to impose their version of sense
order. In the end, a synthesis of sorts would emerge that involved compromises
between these nations sensory regimes. I will have more to say about this
presently.
The senses have a vigorous historiography. I wont belabor it, but there is one
element of debate worth noting. In his book The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962),
Marshall McLuhan made the claim that, with the invention of moveable type
and the advent of the Enlightenment, vision emerged as the sense without peer,
the sole authenticator of truth, as hearing and especially the other three senses
lost importance in text-based societies. McLuhans binary distinction between
sight and the four other senses, known as The Great Divide theory, has been

4. Seeger quoted in David Howes, To Summon All the Senses, in David Howes, The
Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook on the Anthropology of the Senses (Toronto, 1991), 3.
Or, as Robert Jtte has written, There can be no such thing as a natural history of the senses,
only a social history of human sense perception. Robert Jtte, A History of the Senses from
Antiquity to Cyberspace, trans. James Lynn (Cambridge, England, 2005), 9.

6 : diplomatic history

challenged by scholars, for various reasons, of which I would mention two. First,
far from abandoning hearing and the rest in favor exclusively of sight, humans
everywhere have continued to rely on all their senses, working together, to
make, well, sense of their surroundings. This is called intersensoriality, and it
suggests the relatedness of the senses to each other. Second, to rank seeing over
all other senses is implicitly to demean other ways of evaluating the world. As
Mark Smith has put it, framing the history of the senses according the great
divide theory runs the risk of using the senses to other the very people in the
past we seek to understand and, in fact, were frequently the victims of othering,
courtesy of the aggressive deployment of sensory stereotypes, by their more
powerful contemporaries. Far better to attend to context, culture, and to the
balance or ratio of the senses through time and space. Yet what McLuhan
theorized was precisely the process by which the Western empires sought to
reorder the sense ratios of others who had not by themselves proved capable of
doing so.5
The renement of the senses and the sense organs was part of the modernization, or civilization, of the West. As Norbert Elias has written, a civilized
people had good manners and knew to avoid offending the senses. It was
particularly important not to disgust others. In his treatise On civility in
children (1530), Desiderius Erasmus insisted on proper care of the nose and its
contents. There should be no mucous showing in the nostrils. Only peasants and
sausage makers wiped their noses on their clothing or their caps; civilized people
blew their noses into a cloth. It was acceptable to blow with ones ngers, but if
the discharge hit the ground, it must be immediately trodden away with the
foot. Antoine de Courtin (1672), advised, You should avoid yawning, blowing
your nose, and spitting. If you are obliged to do so in places that are kept clean,
do it in your handkerchief, . . . and do not look into your handkerchief afterward. Advice on decorum in seeing and smelling came from Giovanni Della
Casa: It does not bet a modest, honorable man to prepare to relieve nature in
the presence of other people; nor to do up his clothes afterward in their
presence. . . . For the same reason, it is not a rened habit, when coming across
something disgusting in the street, as sometimes happens, to turn at once to
ones companion and point it out to him. It is far less proper to hold out the
stinking thing for the other to smell, as some are wont, who even urge the other
to do so, lifting the foul-smelling thing to his nostrils and saying, I should like
to know how much that stinks, where it would be better to say, Because it stinks
do not smell it though evidently Della Casa has not yet reached the point of
refusing to touch the thing. Scrupulousness came also to the taking of food.
5. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto, 1962); Walter J. Ong, The Presence
of the Word (New Haven, CT, 1967); David Howes, Can These Dry Bones Live? An Anthropological Approach to the History of the Senses, Journal of American History, 95, no. 2
(September 2008): 44251 at 448; Smith, Sensing the Past, 118; David Howes and Constance
Classen, Conclusion: Sounding Sensory Proles, in Howes, Varieties of Sensory Experience,
25788.

Empires of the Senses : 7

Civilized people washed their hands before eating. It is not very decorous to
offer something half-eaten to another, wrote Erasmus, and it shows little
elegance to remove chewed food from the mouth and put it back on the [platter].
If you cannot swallow a piece of food, turn round discreetly and throw it
somewhere. In 1859, an anonymous author prescribed the use of a fork, since
to eat with the ngers was cannibal. These and other manners would be
invoked by the British and Americans in their empires, where they viewed, with
disgust, their violation by their allegedly less civilized subjects.6
Before exploring further the sensory encounters of empire, I would offer a
brief explanation for a comparative approach to the subject. Comparing the
British in India to the Americans in the Philippines has several virtues. First,
comparison is part of de-provincializing national narratives; we must not assume
that the story of any single nation, or empire, is unique. Second, comparing
imperial experiences allows us to test the hypothesis that civilizing others by
reordering their senses was in fact a Western project, or at least an Anglo-Saxon
one. There was a trans-imperial exchange of information between imperialists
and nationalists alike, concerning, in the rst case, public works and public
health and, in the second, anti-imperialist political organizing. Comparing
empires might also reveal critical differences between them. Note, for example,
the arrival of the British in India and the Americans in the Philippines in
different centuries, by different means, and for different reasonsthe British
through the frank prot seeking of the East India Company, the Americans as
the result of war with Spain and with hopes about what they might make of the
newly acquired islands. Britons encountered dark-skinned others in India, while
white Americans came to the Philippines having spent years drawing the color
line at home, and thus they mapped onto their efforts abroad attitudes and
policies previously adopted toward Native and African Americans. And the
British tended to embrace their imperial role, at least after the Sepoy Rebellion
in 185758. Most Americans were uneasy imagining that they were imperialists
like the Europeans.7
Sense perception is bound up with the history of the body and the emotions,
and with the constructs race, gender, and class, the iron triangle of social history.
Race thinking is shaped by all the senses, especially when there is a felt need to
justify discrimination where vision cannot reliably discern race. This was
increasingly the case, Mark Smith argues, in the late nineteenth-century American South, where light-skinned African Americans like Homer Plessy could fool
streetcar conductors by appearing to be white but could not, according to the
courts, escape smelling or sounding black. Similarly, it was impossible by vision
alone to distinguish friend from foe in India and the Philippines. If, for example,

6. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott
(New York, 1978), 5359, 12627, 131, 135, 146.
7. Peter W. Stanley, A Nation in the Making: The Philippines and the United States, 18991921
(Cambridge, MA, 1974), 99100.

8 : diplomatic history

some Filipinos were more rened than others, Americans might know them by
looking at their lipsthinner than those of most, and thus said to be indicative
of more rened tasteand at the texture of their skinssupposedly less coarse
than the skins of their more primitive, rural adversaries.8
Senses are also gendered. The so-called lower senses, taste, touch, and smell,
are often associated with women, seeing and hearing with men. Men see
reason, while women sniff things out. Constance Classen argues that the
practice of medicine in the West became over time primarily based on seeing,
thus abandoning use of lower senses associated with women and ceding the
eld to men. And the tropical climate of India and the Philippines, the feel of
both places, was (men claimed) especially hard on Western women. John Clark
thought that European womens lively bloom and ruddy complexions were
soon converted into a languid paleness; they become supine and enervated, and
suffer many circumstances, peculiar to the sex, from mere heat of climate and
relaxation of the system.9
Class, too, was associated with the senses. That was what we were taught
the lower classes smell, wrote George Orwell. By the nineteenth century,
according to Western elites, disease, minimal amounts of dry grooming, and
unwashed rags and underlinen meant that the bodies of the poorest smelled
intensely, with strong animal odours, compared to the washed or scented population. The very poorest, writes Valerie Smith, were sometimes described by
fearful people as savages, brutes, or animalstraditional terms describing
those beyond the boundaries of society, the untouchables, the impure. So very
long it took me, wrote Iris Macfarlane, to shake off my . . . assumptions that
the lower classes and the coloured races didnt feel things the same way, having
simple nervous systems, like lobsters. Insofar as the British and Americans
could distinguish, or cared to distinguish, between revulsion for others based on
race or class, they regarded the poorest of their imperial chargesbeggars, for
8. On the body, see Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford,
CA, 1990 [1980]); Marcel Mauss, Body Techniques, in Marcel Mauss, Sociology and Psychology:
Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (Boston, 1979), 95123. On emotion, see David Howes, Forming
Perceptions, in Howes, ed., Empire of the Senses: A Sensual Culture Reader (Oxford, 2005), 399;
Frank Costigliola, I Have Come as a Friend: Emotion, Culture, and Ambiguity, 19431945,
Cold War History, 1 (August 2000): 10328; Richard Immerman, Psychology, in Michael J.
Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson, eds., Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd
ed. (New York, 2004), 10322. On race and the senses, see Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made:
Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), 6676; Paul A. Kramer, Blood of
Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003), 23. The
nineteenth century natural historian Lorenz Oken ranked people, ethnically and racially, on a
ladder of sensation: at the bottom was the African skin-man, then came Australian aboriginal
tongue-man, Native American nose-man, Asian ear-man, and, at the top, European
eye-man; David Howes, Empires of the Senses, in Howes, Empire of the Senses, 11.
9. Smith, Sensing the Past, 76; Constance Classen, The Witchs Senses: Sensory Ideologies
and Transgressive Femininities from the Renaissance to Modernity, in Howes, Empire of the
Senses, 70, 80, 8788; Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and
Across Cultures (London, 1993), 31; David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and
Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley, CA, 1993), 255.

Empires of the Senses : 9

instanceas lesser men and women, and consigned them to the lowest places
in the sensorium. They smelled bad. They looked frightening or repulsive,
sounded loud, ate noxious food and drank foul beverages, and spread disease by
contact. They were offensive in their apparent enthusiasm for spitting, belching,
and defecating in public.10
Keeping in mind that no single sense is ever on its own in the work of
interpreting ones surroundings, let us nevertheless take the senses one by one
and show how each was deployed and each affected in these imperial settings.
We begin with vision. One need not adopt the Great Divide theory to acknowledge the importance of seeing others and measuring them by what is seen;
empire was a vision of imperial dreamers, a venue for the unfolding of the scopic
regime. Thousands of documents were generated by colonial agents, and
administrators of empire formed their impressions of how it was all working by
reading them, even while residing in ofces far from where they could hear,
smell, taste, or feel India or the Philippines. Photographs of imperial subjects
ensured that the disempowering gaze extended well beyond the chance actually
to stare at others, though this happened, too, in the hospitals, schools, and
prisons of empire. The modern Western eye was easily embarrassed, disgusted,
or scandalized. The deepest feelings of shame in Europe and the United States
involved visual violations of the rules of civilization: a pants-front unbuttoned,
the wrong skin exposed. These visual lapses were suggestive of sexuality, inappropriate in polite society, and revealed a laxity of control over the self, as
Erving Goffman has written. Westerners found them common among the
Asians over whom they tried to rule. British women especially were appalled at
the seminakedness of their household servants. The Filipinos are half civilized, wrote infantryman Preston Moore to his hometown newspaper. They
go half naked; having a cloth tied about their body to hide their shame, and all
the rest exposed.11
Sometimes imperial subjects showed too much. Paradoxically, they often
failed to reveal enough. Nature itself befuddled the Western eye. The bright
tropical sun could blind Westerners and drove some of them mad: Anna Maus
found sightless and demented soldiers in the psychopathic ward of the army
hospital on Corregidor. Because the eye moved with purpose and deliberation,

10. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (San Diego, CA, 1958), 128; Virginia Smith,
Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity (Oxford, 2007), 280; Iris Macfarlane, Daughters
of the Empire: A Memoir of Life and Times in the British Raj (Oxford, 2006), 125.
11. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought
(Berkeley, CA, 1993), 10; Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical
Perception (New York, 1994); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1978); Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the
Social Organization of Gatherings (New York, 1963), 2627; Bernard S. Cohn, Cloth, Clothes,
and Colonialism: India in the Nineteenth Century, in Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider,
eds., Cloth and Human Experience (Washington, DC, 1989), 331; Willard B. Gatewood, Jr.,
Smoked Yankees and the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro Soldiers, 18981902 (Urbana,
IL, 1971), 289.

10 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y

Indians and Filipinos found it easier to anticipate and resist the gaze than to
contest, for example, olfactory and sonic regimes. Indians and Filipinos could
hide. Indian women hid from prying eyes in zenana, a separate part of their
residences. The Filipinos who between 1899 and 1902 resisted the imposition of
American control over their country hid in the jungle, from whence they
conducted guerrilla war. Indian and Filipino servants masked their feelings by
appearing to their employers impassive or inscrutable. Indians and Filipinos
seemed to play visual tricks on their would-be masters. British observers were
beguiled by the Indian rope trick, in which a magician apparently managed to
raise and then climb a rope, by means unclear. Determined to debunk the stunt,
the British tried to explain it scientically, attributed it to the use of drugs or
hypnosis on the conjurers audience, or denied that it happened at all. Indian
jugglers practiced Asian deceit; they represented a country full of visual
tricksters. Americans accused Filipinos of confounding the gaze by making what
they called gu-gu eyes, the origin of which may have been a slippery (or
elusive) coconut oil shampoo and which became the source of the racist term
gook. Experience taught, wrote Emily Conger, that the most guileless in
looks were the worst desperadoes of all.12
The British and Americans registered their revulsion at the visible deformities of some Indians and Filipinos, especially the poorest in both places. Far
more sinister were potentially contagious diseases hidden within seemingly
healthy people, the most treacherous trick of concealment. Malaria, smallpox,
amoebic dysentery, and syphilis were contained within native bodies, becoming
manifest only when symptoms appearedand by then it was frequently too
late. Refusing to grasp the causes of their illness, refusing then to seek medical
treatment from proper doctors (not native healers, whom the British came to
mistrust), Indians seethed with unseen diseases that could quickly blossom into
mass epidemics, affecting Indians and Britons alike. J. K. Spence, the divisional
commissioner at Pune in 1897, concluded, Conservation and sanitation, as we
understand them, are not congenial to the native temperament which prefers
to regard the results of insanitation rather as visitations of God than as the
inevitable consequence of dirt and lth being inadequately dealt with in thickly
populated places. Warwick Anderson notes that, by early in the twentieth
century, the Americans had come to regard all Filipinos as dangerous, carriers
of hidden infection. They were natural hosts and carriers of the microbes
with which they had evolved, never free from contagious diseases of one
form or another, and thus never to be trusted, even if they appeared healthy.
A U.S. Navy surgeon estimated in 1908 that no fewer than ve million

12. Old Army Days: Reminiscences by the Wife of an Army Surgeon, Halstead-Maus
Family Papers, box 2, United States Military History Institute (USMHI), Carlisle, Pennsylvania; Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 256; Peter Lamont, The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a
Spectacular Hoax Became History (New York, 2004); Kramer, Blood of Government, 127; Emily
Bronson Conger, An Ohio Woman in the Philippines (Cleveland, OH, 1904), 131.

Empires of the Senses : 11

Filipinos were carrying intestinal parasites, unseen by the naked eye. Concerning malaria, Major Charles Woodruff directed his men: You are . . . to consider all apparently healthy native soldiers as possible sources of fatal infection
to whites.13
The British and Americans also sought to create their own auditory regimes
in the outposts of empire. From the moment European powers rst stepped
foot in the New World, Sarah Keyes has written, they wielded sound to
establish territorial dominion and cultural control. . . . transforming the
howling wilderness into a civilized soundscape. This happened in India and
the Philippines too. Part of Progressivisms project in Britain and the United
States was to impose quiet on city streets, which rang with the noise of ethnicity and the cacophony of the lower classesor, if not to silence others, then
at least to substitute respectable, mannerly sound for that which threatened
their reformist plans. As the Nations editor E. L. Godkin put it, the progress
of a race in civilization may be marked by a steady reduction in the volume of
sound which it produces. Westerners accordingly complained about the
tumult in their empires. Judges in Ceylon were attended . . . by a host of
tom-tom beaters, who drum away with all their might, and by a set of fellows
blowing, as loudly and discordantly as possible, the most horridly squeaking
pipes imaginable. Dawn calls to prayer from mosques and loud music at
Hindu temples disturbed the sleep of the British housed nearby. In the Philippines, an American soldier threatened to shoot a couple of boys who kept
trying to ring bells in the belfry of their village church. Lieutenant Laurence
Halstead put a stop to the threats, but only after hearing with sympathy the
soldiers objection: those damn kids are ringing them damn bells at all hours
of the day and it jest has got on my nerves. It is odd to me that there are no
soft noises here, wrote Ruth Hunt in her journal while in upcountry Luzon.
The birds, locusts, bees, lizards, geckos, cats, dogs, and children sound like a
shrieking New York tenement. Emily Conger was impressed with the energy
of Filipino brass bands, brought into being by the Spaniards and xtures of
local estas, but she insisted that none of them ever produced correct music.
Indeed, she heard a Filipino band play the song Hot Time in the Old Town
Tonight on the way to the cemetery for a funeralnot at all appropriate, in
her view, for the gravity of the occasion.14
13. Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 60, 22728; Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC, 2006), 59, 91, 94;
Editorial, Philippine Journal of Science, 3B, no. 3 ( July 1908): 26164 t 264.
14. Sarah Keyes, Like a Roaring Lion: The Overland Trail as Sonic Conquest, Journal
of American History, 96, no.1 ( January 2009): 2021; Raymond W. Smilor, Cacophony at 34th
and 6th: The Noise Problem in America, 19001930, American Studies, 18 (1977): 2338 at 27;
Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening
in America, 19001933 (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 11532; Alain Corbin, Village Bells, trans.
Martin Thom (New York, 1998) 299; E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience
of the Raj, c. 18001947 (Cambridge, England, 2001), 16; Laurence Halstead Memoir,
Halstead-Maus Family Papers, box 1, USMHI; Ruth H. B. Hunt Travel Journals, box 1, Special

12 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y

In both India and the Philippines, native schools failed to impose sonic
discipline. The American sociologist Edward Shils found that the lecture halls
attended by Indian undergraduates and aspirants for the M.A. and LL.B. are
often scenes of . . . the random individual disorder of shufing feet, audible
conversation, note-passing, and gestures of fearful bravado. Conger heard in
Filipino schools pandemonium let loose; all the pupils studying together,
making a deafening, rasping noise. The British and the Americans started
schools for their charges, trying to quiet them down, hoping to teach them
English, wishing to change what was said out loud and heard, trying to make
Asians sound less strange and more like civilized people. (From Leyte in
November 1901, the American English teacher Harry Cole complained, I nd
this work very monotonous, trying to teach these monkeys to talk.) Schools also
taught sonic manners, such as the impoliteness of farting or belching in public
both, according to Westerners, abiding problems in Asia.15
Odor, unlike stimuli to the so-called higher senses, is unmediated: while
signals of things seen and heard are processed in the thalamus before arriving
at the interpretive portion of the brain, smells go straight to the olfactory
cortex, where they are instantly processed and thereby linked, more readily
than other sensory stimuli, to emotion and memory. Rudyard Kipling put this
more succinctly in his poem Lichtenberg: Smells are surer than sights and
sounds to make your heart-strings crack. As Kipling knew, India had for the
British a strong association with odors, smells vile, foul, penetrating, bodyand soul-destroying according to John Beames, a close-faint, dead smell of
drugs and spices (Sir Richard Francis Burton), or the smell of fresh blood
pouring down the streets of Delhi, the sweetish odor of human esh decayed
(Sydney Greenbie)all from the place the old India hands called the land of
shit and shankers. In the Philippines, complained one traveler, it does not
matter which way you turn you see hundreds of natives at their toilet, and the
smell of that activity caused Americans to turn away, appalled. The market at
Dansalan, Mindanao, featured dirt and smells that were indescribable and
thus made up, according to Grace Paulding, by far the most barbaric and
picturesque scene one could ever hope to encounter. Even if Westerners
occasionally admitted that Asian body odors were not altogether unpleasant
(Indians bathed far more often than Britons in the nineteenth century), they

Collections, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, New York; Mary Talusan, Music, Race,
and Imperialism: the Philippines Constabulary Band at the 1904 St. Louis Worlds Fair,
Philippine Studies, 52, no. 4 (2004): 499526 at 507; Conger, Ohio Woman, 107, 151. Apparently,
every Philippine band had Hot Time in its repertoire. As Benjamin Neal recorded in his
diary, it was the favorite piece for weddings, funerals, dances, baptisms. Natives think it
national Air of America. Benjamin E. Neal Diaries, entry for February 28, 1902, Benjamin E.
Neal Papers, box 1, Special Collections, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, New York.
15. Shils quoted in Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, 201; Conger, Ohio Woman, 61;
Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: Americas Empire in the Philippines (New York, 1989), 205.

Empires of the Senses : 13

suspected that, as with vision, the sweet scent of a native body suggested
concealment and duplicity.16
When the British rst came to India, most scientists subscribed to an environmentalist, or miasmatic, theory of disease, whereby the smell (and feel) of
the place itself caused illness. By the time American soldiers clashed with
Filipino ghters in early 1899, the germ theory of disease, implicating microorganisms in such prevalent tropical ailments as cholera, malaria, and smallpox,
had started to displace environmentalism. Yet germs were still associated with
bad smells, and the eradication (or at least the masking) of odor would, the
British and Americans felt, help in the effort to combat illness. One apparent
remedy was to build latrines or toilets and put sewers underground, thus moving
waste farther away from human noses. Sanitation was civilization, said Florence Nightingale, and India, a place of domestic lth, where plague and
pestilence were the ordinary state of things, needed cleaning up. Margery
Hall, living with her husband in remote Rajasthan, followed [her] nose to the
servants latrine. The stench was unbelievable, she noted, and the whole pot
seethed and bubbled with life. The Spaniards had started to build underground
sewers in Manila in the 1850s, but the city remained noisome; in the early
twentieth century, H. L. Needler wrote that the lack of sewers in Manila meant
that noxious odors and gases were being constantly liberated. The Philippine
countryside was, said the Americans, even worse. Thomas Jackson found it hard
to break Filipinos of habits that included public defecation, urination, expectoration, and eating with the ngers, and Ruth Hunt, in northern Luzon,
noted, The smells are pretty bad, and the sewers are all open and covered with
a lthy green slime. But odor was racialized, so the people themselves remained
odoriferous, thought William Paulding, due likely to the rancid coconut oil
they used on their bodies.17
Speaking of eating, the sense of taste gured heavily in what the British and
Americans perceived as the strangeness and unruliness of India and the Philippines. Westerners metaphorically devoured or swallowed their empires. Yet
they generally resisted eating the foods they found there. Generally, because,
as Lizzie Collingham argues, the British ofcials of the East India Company at

16. Natalie Angier, The Nose, An Emotional Time Machine, New York Times, August 5,
2008; Rudyard Kipling, Lichtenberg, The Collected Verse of Rudyard Kipling (Garden City, NY,
1916), 356; Collingham, Imperial Bodies, 1; Andrew J. Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States
and India, 19471964 (Ithaca, NY, 2000), 9; Conger, Ohio Woman, 70; Grace Paulding Memoirs,
n.d. [early 1908], William and Grace Paulding Papers, 18731956, box 1, USMHI; Classen,
Worlds of Sense, 10.
17. William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA, 1997) 10; Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 9798; Papers of Margery Hall, Private Papers, MSS Eur F226/11, India Ofce
Records (IOR), British Library (BL), London, England; Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, 101,
10405, 11415, 18889;. Hunt Travel Journals, box 1 Special Collections, Syracuse University
Library, Syracuse, New York; William Paulding Memoirs, Grace and William Paulding Papers,
box 1, USMHI;. Victor G. Heiser, Unsolved Health Problems Peculiar to the Philippines,
Philippine Journal of Science, 5B, no. 2 ( July 1910): 17178 at 177.

14 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y

rst allowed themselves some of the pleasures of consuming Indian curries. The
earliest nabobs, lonely and outnumbered, achieved a kind of hybridity through
their eating habits. James Johnson, whose 1813 book on living in the tropics
was widely consulted by Britons in India, suggested that rice and curry was a
salutary dish for the sick. That vegetable food, he concluded, is better
adapted to a tropical climate than animal, I think we may admit; and particularly
among unseasoned Europeans. Britons who returned home from India often
missed the savor of its food, and not infrequently brought with them Indian
cooks to prepare their favorite meals. Still, the British in India hardly abandoned
their own miserable foods, loading their tables to groaning with meat, poultry,
and heavy sauces. And after the Sepoy Rebellion, according to Collingham, the
British demoted curry and rice. Reviewing a cookbook in Calcutta in 1879, a
British writer noted that the molten curries and orid oriental compositions of
the olden time . . . have been gradually banished from our dinner tables. The
British came to fear pollutants in Indian foods, passed along by the Indians who
prepared them. British ofcials were not in India to run the country for a
money-grubbing trading company but to bring its backward and impoverished
people the benets of civilization, Collingham writes, The men to carry out
this program needed to be ne upstanding representatives of Englishness. So
they stuck to their hard bottled peas, tough roasts, and slightly metallic pt de
foie gras because it was a daily demonstration of their ability to remain civilized
and to uphold British standards.18
Fear and contempt often characterized American attitudes toward Filipino
food. If we eat like natives, declared an American ofcer, we will become as
stupid, frail, and worthless as they are. Filipinos ate little rice cakes, thin, hard,
and indigestible as bits of slate, or grasshoppers, fried and sold by the bushel in
the marketall unsuitable for American palates. At the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Americans watched uncivilized Igorots engage
in what Paul Kramer has called scripted dog-eating. On board a Spanish
steamer from Manila to Iloilo, Emily Conger was offered a Filipino meal. She
recalled, There was a well prepared chicken with plenty of rice but made so hot
with pepper that I threw it into the sea; next, some sort of salad oating in oil
and smelling of garlic; it went overboard. Eggs cooked in oil followed the salad;
last the dulce, a composition of rice and custard perfumed with anise seed oil,
made the menu of the shes complete. She preferred the security of eating what
she imagined as American food: I now gladly opened my box of crackers and
cheese, oranges, gs and dates. On July 4, 1900, Conger made for U.S. soldiers
eighty-three pumpkin pies, fty-two chickens, three hams, forty cakes, ginger18. Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerers (Oxford, 2006), 15859,
16364, 16768; James Johnson, The Inuence of Tropical Climates, More Especially the Climate of
India on European Constitutions; The Principal Effects and Diseases Thereby Induced (London, 1813),
31415, 433. In Thackerays Vanity Fair, Jos Sedley torments Becky Sharp with an especially
spicy curry that he has taught his mother to make. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair,
ed. Peter L. Shillingsburg (New York, 1994 [1848]), 29.

Empires of the Senses : 15

bread, and more. Filipinos worried about just this sort of rejection. Anticipating
a visit to her province by Governor Francis Burton Harrison in the fall of 1913,
teacher Paz Marquez wrote to her anc of a discussion by the womens committee formed to host the event: Someone proposed a typically Filipino lunch.
But no! The idea is ridiculous. We wish to convince the Americans that we are
civilized enough to be independent, and we shall be refused if we eat off banana
leaves. (Yet, she wondered, is it very uncivilized to eat from banana
leaves?)19
Finally, some words about feeling and touchingtogether, hapticity. Touch
is usually relegated to the realm of the lower senses, beneath even smell and
taste. But there is much to say about it. You know the old saying seeing is
believing, but few recognize that the original then went on, but touching is the
truth. Like other senses, touch was racialized, and pollution taboos were most
powerful concerning, rst, indirect contact with others, such as might be threatened by Indian or Filipino cooks or sharing swimming pools with the natives,
or, second, by touching others directly: rubbing against what one traveler
described as oily, black bodies in Bombay harbor and another called the
throng of half-naked creatures that were squatting in front of a Manila church.
The feel of the frequently hot, humid climate in India and the Philippines
enervated British and American residents and was blamed for making them sick.
The skin of darker Asians fascinated and repelled white Westerners. Its very
darkness suggested to them dirt that might be washed away. An 1898 cartoon,
titled Cares of a Growing Family, depicted President William McKinley,
looking vexed as he contemplates sullen and dark-skinned representatives of
Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines while seated on a box marked Soap:
Have You Tried It? When Governor Harrison visited a group of Igorots, he
reportedly washed himself with a cake of carbolic soap after he shook their
hands. Not just the color but the texture of dark skin captured white curiosity
and enabled white cruelty. As Mark Smith has argued, whites believed that dark
skin was thicker and coarser than white. In nineteenth-century Europe and the
United States, the middle classes wore white, linen underwear, to be changed
daily, to protect and purify their delicate skin. In India, people frequently
donned rough homespun, or khadi, especially once Gandhi made it a symbol of
nationalism. Filipino clothing seemed coarsely woven, and according to one
observer, it was starched with rice and stands out rigidly against the skin. And
thick skin was allegedly insensitive skin, impervious to the tropical sun or an
occasional beating.20
19. Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, 43; Conger, Ohio Woman, 56, 75, 83, 9697; Kramer,
Blood of Government, 266; Karnow, In Our Image, 246.
20. David Howes, Sensorial Anthropology, in Howes, Varieties of Sensory Experience, 169;
Rotter, Comrades, 150; Conger, Ohio Woman, 68; Servando D. Halili, Jr., Iconography of the New
Empire: Race and Gender Images and the American Colonization of the Philippines (Quezon City,
Phillipines, 2006), 6163; Stanley, A Nation in the Making, 20203; Smith, How Race is Made, 23;
Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, CT, 2009), 237, 362.

16 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y

New systems of transportation, roads, and railroads designed by builders of


empire were intended to smooth the rough terrain of backward Asian lands. The
roads in India were cratered and pitted and strewn with rocks. An English visitor
who rode the train throughout India recalled by contrast that he had been able
to travel over this immense distance with comparatively little fatiguesleeping
at night on a comfortable little bed, and walking up and down in my carriage
during the day. W. Cameron Forbes, governor in the Philippines 190913,
specialized in road building. The difference between American and native
administration is nowhere more evident than on the roads, he wrote. In the
center of towns, where the municipal presidentes [mayors] are supposed to
maintain the roads, and where they are most used, there were puddles and holes,
no ditches, and generally a mess. We had to slow up and still got jolted towards
the sky. Upon reaching the outskirts of town, the fair, white-crowned, and
ditched road would begin . . . and jolting and jarring ceased, and the world ew
or owed by.21
Sexual contact between colonizers and subjects was an issue much fraught.
British and American authorities were sometimes embarrassed and inevitably
worried about sex in their empires, for liaisons between (usually) white men and
dark-skinned women ran afoul of metropolitan mores, angered local societies,
and threatened to debilitate soldiers especially with venereal diseases, which
they believed to be endemic in Asian women. Yet both civilian and military
ofcers tended to assume that men would be men, and that the realistic alternatives to sex with Asian womenmasturbation (lead[ing] to disorders of both
body and mind) and homosexuality (subversive of morale)were even less
acceptable. In the absence of women from home, authorities tolerated sex
between Anglo-American men and Asian women. When, for example, Vere
Ogilvies grandmother arrived from England at her husbands station in Punjab,
she found the compound full of native women with whom he had solaced his
solitude, and several suspiciously pale-faced children running about. Her presence put a stop to it. In a number of instances, and in remote outposts of the Raj,
British men took Indian women into their homes, to look after them and their
houses, as the tea planter J. L. H. Williams recalled. These Old Women, as
they were known, were considered socially presentable in small British enclaves
well into the 20th century. Not so prostitutes. As Philippa Levine has argued,
the illegitimacy of prostitution as a proper form of work, its tarnishing associations with spectacle, with unrespectability, with disease and with disorder,
rendered it something to be controlled and managed. The Indian Contagious
Diseases Act of 1868 required the registration, medical inspection, and, if

Freud called soap a yardstick of civilization. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents,
trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York, 1961), 46.
21. Anne Bremer Recollections, MSS Eur 226/4, Private Papers, IOR, BL; Michael Satow
and Ray Desmond, Railways of the Raj (New York, 1980), 37; H. W. Brands, Bound to Empire: The
United States and the Philippines (Oxford, 1992), 89.

Empires of the Senses : 17

necessary, isolation and treatment of prostitutes in lock hospitals and placed


certain areas off limits to them.In the Philippines, the U.S. Army quickly created
a system for inspection of brothels and their residents. British and American
authorities generally rejected routine medical examination of their soldiers and
residents. They assumed, as Paul Kramer has put it, that the prostitute was the
perpetual and exclusive source of contagion. Inspecting their own thus would
have been pointless and would have involved intrusive touching and subjection
to touching that was unworthy of civilized men.22
Contact played an important role in the treatment and transmission of
disease. Touch was the basis for Indian medicine, as practitioners felt for not one
but six of their patients pulses. What was required of Indian doctors was,
however, resented in Western ones: Indians strenuously resisted tactile examination by British medical staff, especially when men tried to treat women, but
even when British scientists proposed to autopsy the dead. Fearing contagion,
over the course of the nineteenth century, the British increasingly avoided
contact with Indians by retreating to cantonments and hill stations, and
attempted to insulate their bodies against Indias environment and its people,
donning heavy annel cholera belts around the abdomen (said to be vulnerable to sudden cooling), goggles, and sun topis. So too did Americans in the
Philippines hope that their stomach bandages, worn at night, would prevent
cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea. They were surprised to nd lepers walking
freely through streetsFriday was Lepers Day in the town of Cebu, when
those aficted were allowed to wander around at will, as Grace Paulding put
itand they put a stop to the practice by conning all those aficted to a colony
on Culion Island, where they might live out their lives without coming into
physical contact with healthier bodies. Filipinos, no less than Indians, resented
attempts by Westerners to touch them: the title of Jose Rizals famous novel of
the Philippine revolution was Noli Me Tangere, or Dont touch me. U.S.
soldiers in the Philippines were disgusted when they were spat upon, a deling
act by indirect touch, particularly alarming when done by those they considered
their inferiors, and possible carriers of disease, particularly tuberculosis.23
These were some of the ways in which the ve senses were involved in
imperial encounters. I suggested earlier that the making and unmaking of

22. Allen, Plain Tales, 23; J. L. H. Williams Papers, Mss Eur C796/3, Private Papers, IOR,
BL; Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and
Their Critics, 17931905 (New York, 1980), 10, 44; Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and
Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2003), 7; Paul A. Kramer, The
Darkness That Enters the Home: The Politics of Prostitution during the Philippine-American
War, in Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American
History (Durham, NC, 2006), 373.
23. E. Valentine Daniel, The Pulse as an Icon in Siddha Medicine, in Howes, Varieties of
Sensory Experience, 10001; Collingham, Imperial Bodies, 8690; Neal Diaries, entry for August
28, [24] 1901, Neal Papers, box 1, Special Collections, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse,
New York; Grace Paulding Memoirs, William and Grace Paulding Papers 18731956, box 1,
USMHI; Kramer, Blood of Government, 103, 113.

18 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y

empire in India and the Philippines had something to do with the deployment
of the senses and sense organs according to a Western version of respect for
good manners and hygienic practices. I would like to return briey to that point
as I conclude. It would be false to claim that the relinquishing of empire in Asia
was mainly determined by British and American satisfaction that their charges
had become sensorily civilized enough to permit their political independence. In
the British case, the ravages of World War II made clear that a small island could
no longer hold in thrall a people increasingly determined to have their own
nation. The British were heavily in debt to India and militarily overstretched.
The Americans had promised the Philippines independence within ten years in
1933. Never comfortable with the label of imperial power, the United States
sought ways to maintain inuence over the Philippines without formal governance, and it was this model that the Americans embraced after their ag
descended in Manila in 1946. The United States retained, by treaty, military
bases on Philippine soil, and continued to exert economic dominance over the
islands.
But as Indians and Filipinos organized their governments, their recent
masters could take satisfaction in the improvements they claimed they had
brought to the senses in both countries. The British and the Americans had
encouraged in their empires classes of men and women to behave in civilized
ways through their senses. The leaders of Indias Congress party and Filipino
ilustrados seemed to see the world as Westerners did, dismissing as nonsense
conjurers tricks of vision, avoiding gugu eyes, looking at the world logically, if
not always in precisely the same ways as Britons and Americans did. They
sounded and heard things right because they spoke English, the ofcial language
in both India (as of 1835) and the Philippines (1913). Champions of sanitation,
enemies of foul odors, they urged their people to keep themselves clean and
continued campaigns on behalf of underground sewers and against public defecation. They ate with knives and forks, not ngers, and some were as happy
eating Western food as curries or adobos. Against their skin they placed Westernstyle clothes, and they endorsed efforts to isolate the diseased and the dead,
avoiding contact with the polluted others of their lower classes almost as strenuously as the British and Americans had once sought to avoid touching them.
Subalterns strove to learn western manners, hoping not to offend the senses. Iris
Macfarlane, the wife of an English tea planter in Assam, decided she would learn
Assamese. She hired a teacher, who brought as his textbook a book of etiquette,
which, when I could read it, I discovered to be full of instructions about which
hand to use for shaking and how to blow ones nose into a piece of cloth and put
it into ones pocket; a revolting idea to Indians, but white men did it.24

24. Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, 19293; Michael Brecher, Nehru: A Political Biography
(Boston, 1962 [1959]), 18788; Stanley, A Nation in the Making, 190; Macfarlane, Daughters of
the Empire, 139; Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American
Life (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 124. In the endorsement of body hygiene, Indian and Filipino

Empires of the Senses : 19

This does not mean that an entirely new sensory regime was imposed on
Indians and Filipinos. Just as the struggle for political control of their lands
involved resistance and accommodation and nally compromise, so were
Western efforts to enforce a particular order of the senses on Asians met, often
successfully, with a determination to do things differently, with the result that all
four sensory cultures were changed by the encounter. Britons and Americans
developed, for example, an appreciation for Indian and Filipino textiles. Local
healing practices that involved touching patients bodies came increasingly to
Western medical examinations; physicians were allowed to touch their white
patients in London or New York more frequently than those they tended in
Calcutta or Manila. Curry became Britains national dish; Americans in the
Philippines supplemented canned rations from home with mangoes, pineapples,
and bananas better than the one Mary Fee had forced down. Words derived
from Tagalog, among them boondocks, yo-yo, and cooties, appeared in
English, offering a modicum of linguistic hybridity to the soundscape shared by
the United States and the Philippines. So too did American-sponsored brass
bands, including that of the Philippine Constabulary, play Western music and
impress listeners in St. Louis in 1904 with their virtuosity. After returning from
India to England, Frances Smyth would close her eyes and smell wood smoke,
the most gorgeous smell in the world, while others recalled the spicy, peppery
smell of the shops in the bazaar or the smell of dust after a long drought when
the rst rain falls. With the end of the Raj, writes Collingham, Anglo-Indians
in Britain reversed their technique of creating little Englands in India and
tended to create little Anglo-Indias in their British homes. They attempted to
reproduce the distinctive curry and rice, and chutneys and pickles of AngloIndia, and collected around themselves the souvenirs of their past life in the form
of Indian carved furniture, hunting trophies, cloths, rugs and photographs. All
of these artifacts of material culture offered reminders of the Indian sensorium.
They suggest that, in the ongoing and vital effort to understand empire, the
deployment of power and resistance to it, there is much to be learned by coming
to our senses.25

elites followed Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee: Absolute cleanliness of the body has been
insisted upon from the rst. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: A Biography (Los
Angeles, 2009 [1901]), 125.
25. Allen, Plain Tales, 225; Matthew A. Batson to Florence Batson, May 28, 1899, Matthew
Batson Papers, box 2, USMHI; Talusan, Music, Race, and Imperialism, 51415; Collingham,
Imperial Bodies, 201.

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