SENSIS is organizing a panel at the 2019 MESA meeting (Thursday, 14 November, 5:30pm), entitled “Towards a Sensory History of Middle Eastern Societies: Paradigms and Emerging Trends”. The panel summary reads: “While, as some have claimed, a ‘sensorial revolution’ is long underway in the humanities and social sciences at large (Howes 2005: 39), Middle East scholars have been slow to put the human sensorium on their research agenda. The sensory history of the Middle East remains largely unstudied and unknown, in spite of important single contributions, such as the pioneering work of Khaled Fahmy on 19th-century Cairo smellscapes (2002), Anya King’s transregional study of the history of musk in the Islamic world (2017), or the work of several anthropologists of Islam (e.g., Hirschkind 2006). Most recently, Khaled Fahmy’s monograph on the history of criminal justice and forensic medicine in 19th-century Egypt (2018) loosely constructs its chapters around the five senses, while also acknowledging the continued desideratum of more fully developed, multi-sensory studies of the senses in Muslim societies. This panel aims to take stock of these diverse scholarly investigations of the history of the senses in the Middle East, make some theoretical and methodological advances in this emerging branch of historical scholarship, and showcase new ways of studying the topic: reflecting about the question of sensory formations in the context of Islam’s formative, early period; tracing the sensory habits and etiquettes of the Islamic Middle Periods, whether law-based, mystical or literary; and analyzing changes in the sensory regime of Muslim societies in the transition to modernity. In Western historiography, the history of the senses is closely entangled with that of modernity, while how Islam relates to notions of modernity remains a fulcrum of debate. Famously, Marshall MacLuhan (1962) and Walter Ong (1982) linked the European enlightenment to the primacy bestowed on the eye over and against the other sense organs, while theorizing that, by contrast, Oriental societies privilege the ear, as well as the other non-visual senses. Such sweeping and polarizing narratives, influential though they may be, rarely stand the test of closer inspection, and this panel offers a forum for reflection on how Middle East scholars can meaningfully open up a broader and more nuanced vision (as well as sound, smell, taste, and touch) of Middle East history.”

The four papers that will be presented are: