Intersensorial Race Science and Exploration in the Age of Jackson

Abstract

This essay examines the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842 through the methodological lenses of sensory history and phenomenology. This expedition included naval personnel as well as a scientific corps and represents the overlapping interests of the United States Armed Forces and academic organizations like the Smithsonian Institution in the Age of Jackson. Applying a phenomenological approach to the Ex. Ex. clarifies the role of the senses in making race in the period spanning Indian removal and Manifest Destiny. Using a corpus of published accounts, diaries, letters, artworks, and artifacts, I contend that the Ex. Ex. used olfactory disgust, sonic boundaries, and attitudes surrounding touch and gustation to categorize Pacific Islanders as racialized others through the sensorium. Such racial scientific work laid the foundations for later racial scientific ideas in psychophysics and anthropology in the twentieth century.