Making sense of social history - New Topics And Historians

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2003 by Mark M. Smith

Work by Alain Corbin, the French historian of the senses, is even more redolent of the practice of social history, as Hobsbawm defined it. But the connection isn't necessarily straightforward. Corbin is quite critical of Lucien Febvre's notion of "mental equipment," the modalities of perception in his conception of a history of the sensibilities. For Corbin, it is a "rigid concept which revealed the excessive reification for which the founder of Annales is today justifiably reproached." But Schmidt is surely right when he suggests that Corbin's work, while "richer and more nuanced" that the adumbrated framework offered by the early Annales school, seems to be a refinement of an a priori insight, not least because, as Corbin himself has written, "The attention paid to the regime of sensory values and to the hierarchy of the representations and uses of the senses within a culture owes something to the intuitions of Lucien Febvre, imprecise though he may have been." Corbin's mild impatience with these early, tentative, and sweeping histories of the senses--histories that paid little attention to sensorial hierarchies--is based principally on his worries about the quality and nature of their evidence. In particular, Corbin strives for "the adoption of a more comprehensive viewpoint," one that involves the compilation of data on the senses coupled with the need to historicize that same data--which sounds, for example, existed when and how they were produced and heard at certain moments in time--that is reminiscent of social history's quest. In The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, Corbin examined the changing perceptions of the French, 1750-1880, toward smells. Like early social historians, he framed his questions along class lines and the attendant perceptual authorities which were rooted in concrete illustrations: the creation of social and physical distance between "dangerous" smells/smelling people, the arrangement of public and private spaces, and the trumpeting of class authority reflected in "the bourgeois control of the sense of smell" to score social others, usually the criminal and working poor. Corbin also examined the seeming capitulation to that marking by those same lower orders by considering their use of cologne and disinfectants, exactly the kind of balanced analysis that Hobsbawm called for when he argued that we need to examine the conservative, not just the revolutionary, aspects of working class culture. (21)

In fact, Corbin marked himself as a social historian by echoing Hobsbawm's call for the need to examine both the lower orders and elites, a tendency that at the time he wrote The Foul and the Fragrant distinguished him from cultural historians, especially those influenced by postmodernism. As David Howes pointed out in his perceptive review of Corbin's book: "it is this emphasis on writing history 'from below' as well as 'from above' (i.e. from the perspective of those subject to administrative regulations as well as those who create and enforce such regulations) that distinguishes Corbin's work from that of most of his contemporaries, particularly the Foucauldians." Corbin also used his class analysis to further and refine social history by considering the impact of smelling on notions of the self. The arrangement of private space and the use of personal, often individuated fragrances entailed delimiting and isolating odors and so inaugurated among individuals a new encounter with their own body and even a new narcissism. This topic speaks to an issue noted by Hobsbawm as important to the social historian's discipline--modernization--in a form that in no way figured in Hobsbawm's essay--the rise of notions of the self. For, as Corbin makes clear, the emergence of the self was itself part and parcel of the coming of modernity. (22)