The cognitive scientist Asifa Majid has found that the senses have no fixed ranking in human language. Speakers of English find colours easy to name and smells very hard, but the Jahai, hunter-gatherers of the Malay Peninsula, name smells as easily as colours, and in a study of twenty languages English was the only one whose ranking of the senses came close to the traditional Western order of sight first and smell last. Therapeutic Shamanism also holds that the senses modern people neglect are there to be woken.
Who is Asifa Majid? #
A cognitive scientist who studies how language, culture and thinking fit together. She trained in psychology at the University of Glasgow, worked for over a decade at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, became a professor at Radboud University in 2012 and at the University of York in 2018, and moved to the University of Oxford in 2022, where she is Professor of Cognitive Science and a fellow of St Hugh’s College.1 Her research ranges over how people talk and think about space, events and perception. Her laboratory sets out to find “which aspects of cognition are fundamentally shared, and which are language- or culture-specific”, with a special interest in smell.2 She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2024.1
Why does it matter how languages name smells? #
Because Western thought has long ranked the senses. Since Aristotle it has been supposed that sight comes first, followed by hearing, with smell, touch and taste below, and later thinkers pushed smell further down still, pointing to how much of the human brain is given to vision and how little to smell. Many scholars held that no language would ever have a developed vocabulary for smell, and that this told us something about how the human mind is built.3 If that is true, everyone everywhere should find smells hard to put into words.
What did she find among the Jahai? #
That smells can be named precisely. The Jahai are a hunter-gatherer community living in the rainforests of the Malay Peninsula, and they find smells just as easy to express as things they can see.4 In a study published in 2014 with the linguist Niclas Burenhult, Majid compared Jahai speakers with English speakers; as the Lund University Humanities Lab reported the study, “Speakers of Jahai have no difficulty expressing many and abstract olfactory concepts which English speakers cannot express.” English speakers, given a smell, mostly describe what it comes from, such as vanilla or banana, whereas the Jahai use words for the smell itself, much as English uses words like red and blue for colours.5
Was it the Jahai language, or the Jahai way of life? In 2018 Majid and the linguist Nicole Kruspe tested two more peoples of the Malay Peninsula: the Semaq Beri, who are hunter-gatherers, and the Semelai, who are traditionally farmers. The Semaq Beri named smells as easily as colours, just as the Jahai do. The Semelai found smells hard to name, much as English speakers do. “Hunter-gatherers’ olfaction is superior, while settled peoples’ olfactory cognition is diminished,” Majid said, and the two researchers concluded that the low importance of smell in some cultures is a recent result of cultural change.6
Is there a universal hierarchy of the senses? #
Her largest study says no. Majid led a team of field linguists who tested twenty languages from fifteen language families on every major landmass, including three unrelated sign languages, from English, Farsi and Cantonese to languages spoken by small communities in Papua New Guinea, Mexico, Ghana and Australia. Speakers were given colours, shapes, sounds, textures, tastes and smells and asked, in their own language, what each one was, and the team measured how far each community agreed on its answers.7
The twenty languages gave thirteen different rankings of the senses, and none of them matched the Aristotelian order. English came closest, and it was the only language closer to that order than chance would predict. In Malay, shape was the easiest sense to name and smell the hardest; in Umpila, spoken by the one hunter-gatherer community in the study, in Australia, it was exactly the other way round, smell easiest and shape hardest.7 So the old Western ranking of the senses describes English fairly well, and most other languages badly.
The team’s conclusion was that the faculty of language does not, by its own built-in design, decide which senses get named well. Despite the great differences in the brain tissue given to each sense, “no single hierarchy of the senses imposes itself upon language”; instead, “either by cultural tradition or by ecological adaptation, each language has come to concentrate its efforts on particular sensory domains.”7 See What is the ‘myth of language universals’?
What do the findings not show? #
The researchers set out the limits themselves. Smell was poorly coded in most of the communities, a pattern that fits the long-held idea of a weak link between smell and language; it could also reflect the choice of test smells, though the same smells had been used reliably in earlier studies across cultures. The finding that hunter-gatherers name smells about three times as consistently as everyone else rested, in this study, on a single hunter-gatherer community, and the authors write that there were too few examples of each way of life to say for certain what part particular cultural practices play.8 The studies also measure how people name what they sense, not how well they sense it, and the authors note that perception is partly independent of language.8
Her findings are often read as support for a weak form of linguistic relativity, the idea that language and culture influence thinking to a limited degree.9 See What did Sapir and Whorf actually claim about language and thought?
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In the senses a person brings to a journey. Humans are primates, and sight is the sense we most habitually inhabit, so many people expect shamanic journeying to be visual, and some who think they cannot journey are in fact journeying without noticing, because they dismiss what comes through the other senses. A journey can come through smell, taste, sound, touch, or simply sensing or intuiting what is there, and turning the attention to another sense often starts a stuck journey moving again. Finding some senses harder than others is perfectly normal, and journeys can be used to practise the ones that are difficult.10 Majid’s work suggests that how hard a sense is to put into words owes a lot to culture, and little to fixed human limits.
Finding Your Deep Soul has an exercise that invites the reader to imagine living as a hunter-gatherer in a landscape from before agriculture: fully present, not distracted by work, shopping, headphones or a phone, noticing broken twigs and the change of the wind, noticing different smells, knowing the scents of the animals that are food, clothing and teachers, with all the senses heightened and finely attuned.11 The Jahai and the Semaq Beri, naming smells as easily as colours, give that picture a living example. See What was hunter-gatherer life really like?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see further? #
In what the difference means. Majid and Kruspe concluded that the low place of smell in some cultures, the Semelai among them, is a recent result of cultural change. In Therapeutic Shamanism the move from hunter-gathering to agriculture, from around 11,000 BC, was the beginning of our own domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this.12 Domestication and the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer changed not only the world around us but us too, even the way our brains are wired, and yet we can train ourselves to perceive the world in a more animist way again.13 Read that way, the Semelai finding smells hard to name, like English speakers, is a small, measurable trace of a much larger loss, and the senses the dominant culture ranks lowest may be less weak by nature than out of practice. See What does domestication do to us? and What are the Wild Mind and the Domesticated Mind?
