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ETHNOGRAPHY
EOl110N
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C/t).
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 Contents

Acknowledgements vii
About the author ix
Introduction: About Doing Sensory Ethnography xi

Part I Rethinking ethnography through the senses 1

1 Situating sensory ethnography: from academia to intervention 3
2 Principies far sensory ethnography: perception, place, knowing,
memory and imagination 25
3 Preparing far sensory research: practical and orientation issues 51

Part II Sensory ethnography in practice 71

4 The sensoriality of the interview: rethinking personal encounters
through the senses 73
5 Sensory research through participation: from observation to
intervention 95
6 Mediated sensory ethnography: doing and recording sensory
ethnography in a digital world 117

Part 111 Interpreting and representing sensory knowing 139

7 Interpreting multisensory research: organising, analysing
and meaning making 141
8 Representing sensory ethnography: communicating, arguing and
the non-representational 163

Afterword: Imagining sensory futures: ethnography, design and

future studies 189
References 195
lndex 209
 Acknowledgements

Doing Sensory Ethnography is the outcome of several years of research projects,

reflections, discussions and readings and experiences of the work of other academ­
ics and artists. Without the people who have participated in my research projects,
institutions, audiences, authors and practitioners who have supported my work,
commented on presentations and articles, and worked as scholars and practition­
ers in this field, this book would have been impossible to write. Sorne research
participants are mentioned in this book, others have chosen to remain anony­
mous, but to all I am enormously grateful for their enthusiasm to be involved in
my work.
My sensory ethnography research emerged from two projects developed with
Unilever Research in 1999-2000, a collaboration that led to my book Home Truths
(2004) which outlines the notion of the sensory home. My The Future of Visual
Anthropology (2006) consolidated sorne of my ideas about the senses in anthro­
pology and began to shape sorne of the ideas expanded on here. My subsequent
publications about Slow Cities in the UK, Spain and Australia all engage (with) the
senses for thinking through questions relating to research environments and par­
ticipants and to understanding the approach of the movement itself. This research
was during different stages of its development funded by the Faculty of Social
Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University, a Nuffield Foundation
small grant and RMIT University in Australia and hosted by the IN3 at the Open
University of Catatonia in Barcelona. Other research discussed in this book has
been undertaken with colleagues through my CI roles in the 'Lower Effort Energy
Demand Reduction' project (LEEDR), based at Loughborough University, funded
by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK) through the UK
Research Councils' Digital Economy and Energy programmes (grant number EP/
1000267/1), and the 'Management of OSH in Networked Systems of Production
or Service Delivery: Comparisons between Healthcare, Construction and Logistic'
project funded by the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH), UK.
For further information about the LEEDR project, collaborating research groups
and industrial partners, please visit www.leedr-project.co.uk.
viii doing sensory ethnography

I have collaborated, talked and corresponded with many colleagues and

co-researchers and corresponded with people about sensory ethnography. I thank
everyone who has engaged with me in this field and am especially grateful to
colleagues and co-authors who have joined me in projects, including: LEEDR
colleagues, in particular Kerstin Leder Mackley, Roxana Morosanu, Val Mitchell,
Tracy Bhamra and Richard Buswell; IOSH colleagues, in particular Jennie Morgan,
Andrew Dainty and Alistair Gibb; Yolande Strengers with whom I have developed
our standby consumption research at RMIT; and Lisa Servon and Tania Lewis who
have respectively joined me in two Slow City projects in Spain and Australia. I
am also especially grateful to the colleagues with whom it has been fantastic to
think and work over the last years, and who have definitely helped to shape my
thinking about the senses and to affirm that thinking about the senses is a good
idea, especially: Elisenda Ardevol and Debora Lanzeni at the IN3 in Barcelona; my
colleagues based in Sweden - Vaike Fors, Tom O'Dell, Martin Berg, Robert Willim
and Asa Backstrom - for the work we have done together and all the ideas we have
discussed over the last years. This second edition of Doing Sensory Ethnography has
also been influenced by my research focus on design and futures which has grown
since I moved to Australia in 2012, and has been nurtured by my collaborations
with Yoko Akama and Juan Francisco Salazar.
While this book is independently written, sorne of the ideas and examples have
been introduced in earlier articles. Earlier versions of the idea of ethnography as
place-making have been developed in 'Walking with video' published in Visual
Studies (Pink, 2007d) and 'An urban tour: the sensory sociality of ethnographic
place-making' published in Ethnography (Pink, 2008b); selected examples from
these articles are also discussed here.
 About the author

Sarah Pink is Professor of Design and Media Ethnography at RMIT University,

Australia. She has Visiting Professorships in Applied Cultural Analysis at Halmstad
University, Sweden, and in Social Sciences, in the Schools of Civil and Building
Engineering and Design at Loughborough University, UK. She is known inter­
nationally for her work relating to sensory, visual and digital methodology.
Her most recent works in this area include the Energy and Digital Living website
(2014) and the books Doing Visual Ethnography (201 3), Ethnographic Research in the
Construction Industry (co-ed., 201 3), Situating Everyday Life (201 2) and Advances in
Visual Methodology (ed. 201 2). Her research is usually interdisciplinary and is both
funded by research councils, and developed collaboratively with research partners.
 lntroduction

About Doinq Sensory Ethnoqraphy

In Doing Sensory Ethnography I outline a way of thinking about and doing

ethnography that takes as its starting point the multisensoriality of experience,
perception, knowing and practice. Sensory ethnography is used across scholarly,
practice-based and applied disciplines. It develops an approach to the world and
to research that accounts for how sensory ways of experiencing and knowing are
integral both to the Iives of people who participate in our research and to how we
ethnographers practise our craft.
Ethnographers, from a range of different disciplines, are increasingly account­
ing for and commenting on the multisensoriality of the ethnographic process. As
I wrote the first edition of this book in the first decade of the twenty-first century,
interdisciplinary academic conferences, seminars and arts events were simultane­
ously building on other recent explorations of the senses in relation to a plethora
of different aspects of individual social and cultural experiences. These and other
explorations are now being materialised into a new literature that accounts for the
senses across the social sciences and humanities. In the half decade between the
publication of that first edition of Doing Sensory Ethnography and this second edi­
tion there has been an explosion in scholarship and practice around the senses,
across social science, humanities and arts disciplines including human geography,
design, film and photography, anthropology, sociology and a range of interdiscipli­
nary fields including cultural and media studies, education studies and health stud­
ies. Indeed, a sensory approach can be applied to most projects that involve human
experience and practical activity. That does not mean that all ethnography should
be done explicitly through the senses, but that to be theoretically and methodo­
logically equipped to engage with the world sensorially is a key skill to own.
This book responds to the discussions and proposals that emerge from existing
literature and practice, and draws on examples from my own and other scholars'
and practitioners' experiences of doing ethnography with attention to the senses
across domestic, urban and organisational environments. The central theme and
xii doing sensory ethnography

task of the book is to establish a methodology for Doing Sensory Ethnography. lt differs
from other books that account for the senses in ethnography, in a number of ways,
notably because it is interdisciplinary. It moreover goes beyond simply playing the
role of advocate for a sensory approach, demonstrating how we can learn through
attending to the senses or showing how we might study the senses. Doing Sensory
Ethnography instead offers an approach to doing and representing research. It proposes
a way of thinking about doing ethnography through the senses.
A focus on methodology leads to the question of what 'bigger picture' is emerg­
ing that takes sensory ethnography beyond just studying the senses or using our
own senses to study other people's worlds. It is important that we understand
how knowledge and ways of knowing are produced, what particular qualities and
types of knowledge are currently emerging and the implications of this for how
researchers, artists, designers or policy makers comprehend the world and inter­
vene in it, and how futures are imagined and made. To do this we need to under­
stand the implications of particular research methodologies for how we research,
account for and potentially participate in change-making. By drawing together
contemporary scholarship and practice concerned with the senses in ethnogra­
phy I show how what has been called the 'sensory turn' is part of a wider shift in
how we might understand the world, and that this has implications for how we
might intervene in the world - as designers, artists, activists, by influencing policy,
as educators or through other forms of action. These turns are also increasingly
orienting scholarship towards the future, in impulses towards the development of
ethnography that along with design is change-making.
While most of the earlier 'sensory ethnographies', as well as much of my own
work, were rooted in social anthropology, the reach and relevance of Doing Sensory
Ethnography reflects the growing interest in the senses across disciplines. Its theo­
retical commitments to concepts of place, memory, imagination, improvisation
and intervention reach out to ideas and practices developed across the social sci­
ences and humanities. Moreover, these theoretical themes consistently resonate
though the work of researchers concerned with the senses across scholarly and
practice-based disciplines. Indeed, my research for this book has traversed diverse
'ethnographic' scholarly and practice-based disciplines and interdisciplinary areas
of study. It has also introduced me to new academic, applied and arts practices.
The work of sorne scholars has emerged as outstanding illustrations of how sensory
ethnography might be done, and I return to their examples across the chapters.
In writing the second edition of this book I encountered a much deeper wealth of
literature and practice around the senses than was available for its 2009 edition.
Yet, still many ethnographers (whose work demonstrates so well the significance
of the senses in culture and society) have neglected to write about the processes
through which they carne to these understandings. In this vein I would urge con­
temporary ethnographers, artists and designers who engage with the senses to be
more explicit about the ways of experiencing and knowing that become central
to their ethnographies, to share with others the senses of place they felt as they
 introduction xiii

sought to occupy similar places to those of their research participants, and to

acknowledge the processes through which their sensory knowing has become part
of their scholarship or practice. This is not a call for an excess of reflexivity above
the need for ethnographers to represent the findings of their research. Rather, in
a context where interest in the senses is increasing across disciplines, it is more a
question of sharing knowledge about practice.
When preparing this book I was faced with a choice. I could either approach
sensory ethnography through an exploration of practical activity conceived as
multisensorial and emplaced, or I could examine in turn how different sensory
modalities might be engaged and/or attended to in the ethnographic process. The
book is structured through a series of chapters that each address issues and ques­
tions relating to ethnographic approaches, practices and methods, rather than
by discussing sensory categories chapter by chapter. The decision to develop the
narrative in this way is based on both a theoretical commitment to understanding
the senses as interconnected and not always possible to understand as if separate
categories, and a methodological focus on the role of subjectivity and experience
in ethnography. This is in contrast to many recent ethnographic discussions of
sensory experience (including my own - Pink, 2004), the use of the senses in
ethnography (Atkinson et al., 2007) and even a book series (Sensory Formations,
Berg Publishers), where discussions are structured through reference to different
sensory modalities or categories.
Because researchers often focus on one or another sensory modality or category
in their analyses, I discuss plenty of examples of sensory ethnography practice
concerned with mainly smell, taste, touch or vision. Indeed, in particular research
contexts one sensory modality might be verbalised or otherwise referred to more
frequently than others, and might serve as a prism through which to understand
multisensory experiences (Fors et al., 2013). Nevertheless, this does not mean
that the experience the ethnographer is attending to is only related to that one
category or to just one sense organ. Rather, the idea of a sensory ethnography
advanced here is based on an understanding of the senses as interconnected and
interrelated.
Doing Sensory Ethnography is presented through this Introduction, eight chap­
ters and an Afterword. Chapter 1 both defines sensory ethnography, situates it in
relation to debates about how ethnography 'should' be done, and sets the inter­
disciplinary scene for the book. I explore the historical development of the focus
on the senses in the key academic and applied disciplines where it is represented.
This discussion identifies key debates, themes and convergences within and across
these areas, providing a necessary backdrop against which to understand the
developments discussed in later chapters, and in particular through which to situ­
ate ethnographic examples in relation to historical and disciplinary trajectories.
Chapter 2 establishes the principies of a sensory ethnography and the theoreti­
cal commitments of the book. It examines a set of key concepts that inform the
idea of a sensory ethnography though a consideration of existing thought and
xiv doing sensory ethnography

debates concerning sensory experience, perception and knowing. These funda­

mental questions, which are embedded in debates that are themselves not totally
resolved, inform not only how ethnographers comprehend the lives of others, but
also how they understand their own research practices. Here I also propose under­
standing sensory ethnography through a theory of place and place-making, and
outline the significance of memory and imagination in the ethnographic process.
The conceptual tools presented in Chapter 2 inform the analytical strand of the
following chapters.
Chapter 3 takes a necessarily more practical approach to the doing of sensory
ethnography. Here I identify and discuss how ethnographers might prepare for
and anticípate sorne of the issues and practices that are particular to an approach
to ethnography that both seeks out knowledge about the senses and uses the
senses as a route to knowledge. In doing so I explore the reflexivity demanded by
this approach and argue for an appreciation of the subjectivity and intersubjectiv­
ity of the sensory ethnography process.
Chapters 4 and 5 follow conventional ethnographic methodology texts in that
they are dedicated to 'ethnographic interviewing' and 'participant observation'
respectively. However, the purpose of these chapters is to challenge, revise and
rethink both of these established ethnographic practices through the senses.
In doing so I draw from my own work and a series of examples from the work
of other ethnographers who attend to the senses to both review the theoretical
and practical concerns that have grown around these methods and to suggest
re-conceptualising them through sensory methodologies. Chapter 6 continues in
this revisionary vein. Here I examine the role digital technologies might play in
a multisensory approach to ethnography. First, I outline how we might go about
understanding the sensory affordances and qualities of digital media as part of
the very digital-material-sensory worlds in which we research. I then discuss how
we might harness them for sensory ethnography practice. I discuss how digital
visual and audio methods and media are being used to research sensory experi­
ence, knowledge and practice across the social sciences and humanities, as well
as potential uses of locative and body-monitoring technologies in ethnography.
Chapters 4, 5 and 6 also respond to and develop further the understanding of the
relationship between ethnography and place introduced in Chapter 2.
Chapter 7 approaches the issue of analysis in sensory ethnography. This is a
question that (given the messiness of the ethnographic process and the frequent
impossibility of distinguishing analysis as a separate stage from research or repre­
sentation) sorne would be forgiven for thinking might be redundant. Accounting
for this problem I suggest thinking of analysis as a way of making ethnographic
places. Analysis might be variously situated in the ethnographic process and not
always distinguishable from other activities. It is indeed as sensorial a process as
the research itself: a context where sensory memories and imaginaries are at their
full force as the ethnographer draws relationships between the experiential field
of the research and the scholarly practices of academia.
 introduction xv

Chapter 8 discusses how the multisensory realities of ethnographers' and

research participants' Uves might be represented. Here I explore how representa­
tions might be developed to communicate something of both the ethnographer's
own experiences and those of the people participating in the research, to their
audiences, while simultaneously making a contribution to scholarship. This inves­
tigation both reviews existing sensory representation within academic contexts
and goes beyond academia to explore sensory arts practice.
This edition of the book ends with a brief Afterword, where I draw together sorne
of the themes of Doing Sensory Ethnography to reflect on the implications of design,
intervention and future-focused research and practice for sensory ethnography.
This book is programmatic in that it argues for, and indeed undertakes, a sys­
tematic thinking through of the theoretical, methodological and practical ele­
ments that a sensory approach to ethnography might engage. Nevertheless, Doing
Sensory Ethnography is not intended to be prescriptive. Rather, I suggest how a
sensory ethnographic process might be understood and how it might be achieved
and in doing so discuss a wide range of examples of existing practice. I do not
propose a 'how to' account of doing ethnography with the senses in mind, but a
framework for a sensory ethnography that can serve as a reference point for future
developments and creativity. Like any 'type' of ethnography, ultimately a sensory
approach cannot simply be learnt from a book, but will be developed through the
ethnographer's engagement with her or his environment. Therefore, at the end
of this journey through the chapters the reader should not expect to have learnt
how to do sensory ethnography. Rather, I hope that she or he will feel inspired to
build on the exciting and innovative practice of others. The existing literature
now offers a strong basis from which to reflect on the possibilities and opportu­
nities afforded by an ethnographic methodology that attends to the senses in its
epistemology and its practices of research, analysis and representation.
 1
Rethinkinq ethnoqraphy
throuqh the senses
 ONE
Situating sensory ethnography
From academia to intervention

n this chapter I situate sensory ethnography as a field of scholarship and practice. 1

irst outline the characteristics of sensory ethnography. 1 discuss its relationship to an
rowth out of other inflections in ethnographic practice, and identify its continuitie
nd departures from existing ethnographic methodologies. 1 then locate it in relation t
he intellectual and practica! trajectories of discipline-specific scholarship and applie
esearch. 1 focus on the disciplines of anthropology, human geography and sociolog
nd on the practice of applied ethnography, art and design. f"inally, 1 consider the poten
ial of sensory ethnography in interdisciplinary scholarship and practice.

INTRODUCTION: SENSORIALITY
Doing Sensory Ethnography investigates the possibilities afforded by attending to the
senses in ethnographic research and representation. An acknowledgement that
sensoriality is fundamental to how we learn about, understand and represent other
people's lives is increasingly central to academic and applied practice in the social
sciences and humanities. It is part of how we understand our past, how we engage
with our present and how we imagine our futures. This appreciation, which David
Howes has referred to as a 'sensorial turn' (2003: xii), has been couched in terms
of an anthropology of the senses (Howes, 1991a), sensuous scholarship (Stoller,
1997), sensuous geography (Rodaway, 1994), sociology of the senses (Simmel,
1997 [1907]; Low, 2005; Back, 2009; Lyon and Back, 2012; Vannini et al., 2012),
the senses in communication and interaction (Finnegan, 2002), the sensorium and
arts practice Qones, 2006a; Zardini, 2005), the sensoriality of film (MacDougall,
1998, 2005; Marks, 2000), a cultural history of the senses (Classen, 1993, 1998),
4 doing sensory ethnography

the sensuous nature of the 'tourist encounter' (Crouch and Desforges, 2003) or
of medical practice (Edvardsson and Street, 2007; Hindmarsh and Pilnick, 2007;
Lammer, 2007), sensory design and architecture (Malnar and Vodvarka, 2004;
Pallasmaa, 2005 (1999]), attention to the senses in material culture studies (e.g.
Tilley, 2006) and in performance studies (Hahn, 2007), in branding (Lindstrom,
2005), the 'multi-modality' paradigm (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001), archaeology
(e.g. Levy et al., 2004; Witmore, 2004), history (Classen, 1998; Cowan and Steward,
2007) and within the notion of 'complex ethnography' (Atkinson et al., 2007).
The approach to sensory ethnography advocated here does not need to be owned
by any one academic discipline. Instead, across these fields of study scholars are
creating new paths in academic debate through the theoretical exploration of sen­
sory experience, perception, sociality, knowing, knowledge, practice and culture
(e.g. Ingold, 2000; Thrift, 2004; Howes, 2005a; Pink and Howes, 2010; Ingold and
Howes, 2011). The debates and arguments inspired by these literatures are shaping
academic scholarship, empirical studies, interventions and futures across a broad
range of substantive areas. They inform how researchers represent their findings
in conventional written and audiovisual texts and in innovative forms designed
to communicate about sensory experience. They also have implications for ethno­
graphic methodology.

WHAT IS SENSORY ETHNOGRAPHY?

Uses of the term 'ethnography' refer to a range of qualitative research practices,
employed, with varying levels of theoretical engagement, in academic and applied
research contexts. Ethnographic practice tends to include participant observation,
ethnographic interviewing and a range of other collaborative research techniques
that are often developed and adapted in context and as appropriate to the needs
and possibilities afforded by specific research projects. There is now no stand­
ard way of doing ethnography that is universally practised. In this context Paul
Atkinson, Sara Delamont and William Housley have suggested that there has been
a shift from the 'classic' emphasis on 'holism, context and similar ideas' to the
increasing fragmentation of ethnographic research. They moreover claim this has
led to a situation where 'different authors adopt and promote specific approaches
to the collection and analysis of data' and 'particular kinds of data become cel­
ebrated in the process' (2007: 33).
Sensory ethnography as proposed in this book is certainly not just another
route in an increasingly fragmented map of approaches to ethnographic practice.
Rather, it is a critical methodology which, like my existing work on visual eth­
nography (Pink, 2013), departs from the classic observational approach promoted
by Atkinson et al. (2007) to insist that ethnography is a reflexive and experien­
tial process through which academic and applied understanding, knowing and
 situating sensory ethnography 5

knowledge are produced. Indeed, as Regina Bendix argued, to research 'sensory

perception and reception' requires methods that 'are capable of grasping "the
most profound type of knowledge [which] is not spoken of at all and thus inacces­
sible to ethnographic observation or interview" (Bloch, 1998: 46)' (Bendix, 2000:
41). Thus sensory ethnography discussed in this book does not privilege any one
type of data or research method. Rather, it is open to multiple ways of knowing
and to the exploration of and reflection on new routes to knowledge. Indeed, it
would be erroneous to see sensory ethnography as a method for data collection at
all: in this book I do not use the term 'data' to refer to the ways of knowing and
understanding that are produced through ethnographic practice.
To reiterate the definition of ethnography I have suggested elsewhere:

as a process of creating and representing knowledge or ways of knowing that are based
on ethnographers' own experiences and the ways these intersect with the persons, places
and things encountered during that process. Therefore visual ethnography, as I interpret
it, does not claim to produce an objective or truthful account of reality, but should aim
to offer versions of ethnographers' experiences of reality that are as loyal as possible to
the context, the embodied, sensory and affective experiences, and the negotiations and
intersubjectivities through which the knowledge was produced. (Pink, 2013: 35)

Atkinson et al. have suggested that what they term 'post-modern' approaches to
ethnography have 'devalued systematic analysis of action and representations,
while privileging rather vague ideas of experience, evocation and personal engage­
ment' (2007: 35). In my view, an acknowledgment of the importance of these
experiential and evocative elements of ethnography is in fact essential, but a lack
of attention to the practices and material cultures of research participants is not its
automatic corollary. Moreover, while the concept of experience has unquestion­
ably become central to ethnographic practice, recent methodological approaches
to experience in ethnography are far from vague. Rather, they have begun to inter­
rogate this concept (see Throop, 2003; Pink, 2006; Pickering, 2008; Pink, 2008c)
to consider its relevance in social anthropology and cultural studies. These points
are taken further in Chapter 2.
What ethnography actually entails in a more practical sense is best discerned by
asking what ethnographers do. This means defining ethnography through its very
practice rather than in prescriptive terms. For example, Karen O'Reilly, reviewing
definitions of ethnography across different disciplines, has suggested a minimum
definition as:

iterative-inductive research (that evolves in design through the study), drawing on a

family of methods, involving direct and sustained contact with human agents, within
the context of their daily lives (and cultures), watching what happens, listening to
what is said, asking questions, and producing a richly written account that respects the
irreducibility of human experience, that acknowledges the role of theory as well as the
researcher's own role and that views humans as part object/part subject. (2005: 3)
6 doing sensory ethnography

While in this book I will go beyond this definition to re-think ethnography

through the senses, the principie of O'Reilly's approach is important. Her defini­
tion provides a basic sense of what an ethnographer might do, without prescribing
exactly how this has to be done. Delamont, in contrast, is more prescriptive in her
definition of 'proper ethnography' as being 'participant observation during field­
work' (2007: 206) - something that she proposes is 'done by living with the people
being studied, watching them work and play, thinking carefully about what is
seen, interpreting it and talking to the actors to check the emerging interpreta­
tions' (2007: 206). Delamont's interpretation reflects what might be seen as the
classic approach to ethnography as developed in social anthropology in the twen­
tieth century.
While classic observational methods certainly produce valuable in-depth and
often detailed descriptions of other people's lives, this type of fieldwork is often
not viable in contemporary contexts. This might be because the research is focused
in environments where it would be impractical and inappropriate for researchers
to go and live for long periods with research participants - for instance, in a mod­
ern western home (see Pink, 2004, 2013; Pink and Leder Mackley, 2012, 2014) or
in a workplace to which the researcher has limited access (see Bust et al., 2007;
Pink and Morgan, 2013). Limitations might also be related to the types of practices
the researcher seeks to understand, due to constraints of time and other practical
issues impacting on the working lives of ethnographers as well as those of research
participants. In applied research other constraints can influence the amount of
time available to spend on a project (see Pink, 2005a; Pink and Morgan, 2013).
This has meant that innovative methods have been developed by ethnographers to
provide routes into understanding other people's lives, experiences, values, social
worlds and more that go beyond the classic observational approach. These are
not short cuts to the same materials that would be produced through the classic
approach (see Pink, 2007e; Pink and Morgan, 2013). Indeed, they involve 'direct
and sustained contact with human agents, within the context of their daily lives'
(O'Reilly, 2005: 3). Nevertheless, they are alternative, and ultimately valid, ways
of seeking to understand and engage with other people's worlds through sharing
activities and practices and inviting new forms of expression. It is these emergent
methods that are defining the new sensory ethnography as it is practised. The mis­
sion of this book is not to argue for a single model of sensory ethnography. Rather,
I understand sensory ethnography as a developing field of practice.
As the definitions discussed above indicate, a set of existing methods are already
associated with ethnography, and usually covered in ethnographic methodology
books. These include participant observation, interviewing and other partici­
patory methods. Ethnography frequently involves the use of digital visual and
audio technologies in the practice of such methods (Pink, 2007a; Pink et al., 2004)
and might also be conducted, at least in part, virtually or online (see Hine, 2000;
Kozinets, 2010; Postill and Pink, 2012), in addition to the ethnographer's
physical engagements with the materiality and sensoriality of everyday and other
 situating sensory ethnography 7

contexts (see Pink et al., forthcoming) . Whereas participatory methods often entail
ethnographers participating in, observing (or sensing) and learning how to do
what the people participating in their research are already engaged in (and pre­
sumably would have been doing anyway), interviewing normally involves a
collaborative process of exploring specific themes and tapies with an interviewee.
Other less conventional methods may entail more intentional interventions on
the part of the researcher. For instance, these could include collaborations such
as producing a film, writing a song or inventing a new recipe with one's research
participants. Moving into the design research field, it might involve co-designing
prototypes of objects or services for everyday use (Halse, 201 3) and usually has a
future orientation that differs from the conventional focus on ethnographic writ­
ing on the ethnographic past. Doing sensory ethnography entails taking a series
of conceptual and practica! steps that allow the researcher to re-think both estab­
lished and new participatory and collaborative ethnographic research techniques
in terms of sensory perception, categories, meanings and values, ways of knowing
and practices. It involves the researcher self-consciously and reflexively attending
to the senses throughout the research process: that is, during the planning, review­
ing, fieldwork, analysis and representational processes of a project. It also invites us,
through growing connections between sensory ethnography and design ethnog­
raphy (Pink, 2014; Pink et al., 201 3), to re-think the temporalities of ethnography.
One might argue that sensory experience and perception has 'always' been
central to the ethnographic encounter, and thus also to ethnographers' engage­
ments with the sociality and materiality of research. This makes it all the more
necessary to re-think ethnography to explicitly account for the senses. Indeed,
when classic ethnographic examples are reinterpreted through attention to sen­
sory experience, new understandings might be developed (see Howes, 2003). To
sorne readers these dual arguments - that ethnography is already necessarily sen­
sory and the call to re-think ethnography as sensory - may be reminiscent of
earlier revisions. Around the end of the twentieth century it was proposed that
all ethnographic practice should be reflexive, and is gendered (e.g. Bell et al.,
1993), embodied (e.g. Coffey, 1 999) and visual (e.g. Banks, 2001; Pink, 2007a).
Another contemporary wave of technology and practice makes for online (e.g.
Hine, 2000; Boellstorf, 2009; Kozinets, 2010) and digital ethnography (e.g. Pink
et al., forthcoming). These perspectives were and are accompanied by powerful
arguments for understanding ethnographic practice through new paradigms. A
sensory ethnography methodology, as originally developed in the 2009 edition
of this book, accounts for and expands this existing scholarship that re-thought
ethnography as gendered, embodied and more. It also connects with the need to
understand the experiential and sensory affordances and possibilities of digital
technologies (Pink, 2015; Richardson, 2010, 201 1). In doing so it draws from the­
ories of human perception and place to propase a framework for understanding the
ethnographic process and the ethnographer's practice (this is developed in Chapter 2).
By connecting with recent developments in design anthropology (Gunn and
8 1 doing sensory ethnography

Donovan, 2012; Gunn et al., 2013) a sensory ethnography also takes a critica!
perspective on the temporalities of the ethnographic place, to enable researchers
to develop ethnographic work with a future orientation (Pink et al., 2013; Pink,
2014). Thus the idea of a sensory ethnography involves not only attending to
the senses in ethnographic research and representation, but reaches out towards
an altogether more sophisticated set of ideas through which to understand what
ethnography itself entails.
The proposal for a sensory ethnography presented in this book draws from and
responds to a series of existing discipline-specific intellectual and practice-oriented
trajectories that already attend to the senses through theoretical, empirical or
applied engagements. In the remainder of this chapter I identify a set of themes
and debates in the existing literature in relation to which a sensory ethnographic
methodology is situated.

T H E ANTHROPO LOGY OF T H E SENSES A N O I TS C R I T I CS

The history of anthropology and the senses
While there was intermittent anthropological interest in the senses earlier in
the twentieth century (see Howes, 2003; Pink, 2006; Robben, 2007; Porcello
et al., 2010), the subdiscipline known as 'the anthropology of the senses' became
established in the 1980s and 1990s, preceded by and related to existing work on
embodiment (see Howes, 2003: 29-32). Led by the work of scholars including
David Howes (1991a), Paul Stoller (1989, 1997), Nadia Seremetakis (1994), Steven
Feld (1982) and Feld and Keith Basso (1996a) this has involved the exploration
of both the sensory experiences and classification systems of 'others' and of the
ethnographer her- or himself (see also Herzfeld, 2001). These scholars played a key
role in agenda-setting for anthropological studies of sensory experience, and their
ideas continue to shape the work of contemporary ethnographers and theorists
of the senses (e.g. Geurts, 2002: 17; Hahn, 2007: 3-4; see Porcello et al., 2010).
However, at the turn of the century, Tim Ingold (2000) proposed a critica! and
influential departure from the anthropology of the senses developed by Howes,
Classen, Stoller, Feld and others. These debates have played an important role in
framing subsequent treatments of the senses in anthropology and have implica­
tions for how the senses are understood in other disciplines. For example, Howes'
approach had connections to the branch of communication studies developed by
Marshall McLuhan (Porcello et al., 2010) and, as I outline elsewhere (Pink, 2015),
therefore has synergies to sorne semiotic approaches to media studies. They more­
over raise critica! issues for the principies of a sensory ethnography, as developed
in Chapter 2.
The anthropology of the senses was to sorne extent a revisionary movement,
calling for a re-thinking of the discipline through attention to the senses.
 situating sensory ethnography 9

Howes' edited volume The Varieties ofSensory Experience (1991a) laid out a programme
for the sub-discipline. This was a project in cross-cultural comparison that Howes
described as 'primarily concerned with how the patterning of sense experience
varies from one culture to the next in accordance with the meaning and empha­
sis attached to each of the modalities of perception' (1991a: 3). These concerns
proposed an analytical route that sought to identify the role of the senses in
producing different configurations across culture, as Howes put it, to trace 'the
influence such variations have on forms of social organization, conceptions of self
and cosmos, the regulation of the emotions, and other domains of cultural expres­
sion' (1991a: 3). This approach was focused on comparing how different cultures
map out the senses. Based on the assumption that in ali cultures the senses are
organised hierarchically, one of the tasks of the sensory researcher would be to
determine the 'sensory profile' (Howes and Classen, 1991: 257) or sensory 'order'
of the culture being studied. A good example of how this approach is put into
practice can be found in Howes' (2003) work concerning Melanesian peoples.

Debates over anthropology and the senses

While Howes' approach opened up new avenues of investigation and scholarship,
it did not escape criticism. The ethnographic evidence certainly demonstrated
that different cultures could be associated with the use of different sets of sen­
sory categories and meanings (e.g. Geurts, 2002; Pink, 2004). Indeed, as I have
argued elsewhere, the comparison of how sensory categories and moralities and
practices associated with them are articulated and engaged across cultures is a
viable proposition and can offer useful insights (Pink, 2004, 2006). Nevertheless,
taking cultural difference as the unit of comparison can be problematic when
it shifts attention away from the immediacy of sensory experience as lived, and
abstracts it into representational categories. Ingold's critique of this dimension of
Howes' approach was that its focus on the 'incorporeal "ideas" and "beliefs" of a
culture' treated 'sensory experience as but a vehicle for the expression of extra­
sensory, cultural values' (2000: 156). This, Ingold wrote, 'reduces the body to a
locus of objectified and enumerable sense whose one and only role is to carry the
semantic load projected onto them by a collective, supersensory subject - namely
society - and whose balance or ratio may be calculated according to the load borne
by each' (lngold, 2000: 284). Instead, Ingold proposed a re-focusing of research in
the anthropology of the senses, away from 'the collective sensory consciousness
of society' and towards the 'creative interweaving of experience in discourse and
to the ways in which the resulting discursive constructions in turn affect peo­
ple's perceptions of the world around them' (2000: 285). Howes responded to the
critique with a further insistence on the importance of undertaking 'an in-depth
examination' of the 'social significance' of the 'sensory features of a society' (2003:
49). The disagreement between Howes and Ingold is based both in their different
10 doing sensory ethnography

theoretical commitments and in their agendas for approaching the senses in

culture and society. While Howes has recognised the importance of perception
(2003: 40), he nevertheless seems to be calling for anthropologists of the senses
to take cultural models as their starting point. This, like the classic approach to
ethnography discussed above, focuses attention away from the specificity of indi­
viduals' practices and the experiential (see also Pink, 2004). In contrast Ingold
places human perception at the centre of his analysis (see also Chapter 2 of this book).
A second strand in the work of Howes (1991a) and Stoller (1989) emphasised the
commonly assumed dominance of vision, or occularcentrism, in modern western
culture. Through cross-cultural comparison a body of work emerged that sug­
gested how in other cultures non-visual senses may play a more dominant role.
A particularly striking example is presented in Constance Classen's, Howes' and
Anthony Synnott's work on smell, through their discussion of Pandaya's work on
the Ongee people in the Andaman Islands. They describe how for the Ongee 'the
identifying characteristic and life force of ali living beings is thought to reside
in their smell'. Indeed, they write: 'it is through catching a whiff of oneself, and
being able to distinguish that scent from ali the other odours that surround one,
that one arrives at a sense of one's own identity in Ongee society' (Classen et al.,
1994: 113). This and other ethnographic studies (see also Classen et al., 1994)
leave little doubt that in different cultures notions of self and more might be
attributed verbally and/or gesturally to different sensory categories. Yet it does
not follow from this that the embodied experience of the self, for instance, is
necessarily perceived simply through one sensory modality. To deconstruct the
argument that in different cultures different sensory modalities are dominant we
need to separate out the idea of there being a hierarchically dominant sense on the
one hand, and on the other, the ethnographic evidence that in specific cultural
contexts people tend to use particular sensory categories to conceptualise aspects
of their lives and identities. While the latter is well supported, the former is chal­
lenged in recent literature. This argument can be expanded with reference to the
status of vision in modern western societies. Ingold argues that the assumption
that vision is necessarily a dominant and objectifying sense is incorrect (2000:
287). He suggests this assumption was brought about because instead of asking,
'How do we see the environment around us?' (Gibson, 1979: 1, cited by Ingold,
2000: 286), 'philosophical critics of visualism' presuppose that 'to see is to reduce
the environment to objects that are to be grasped and appropriated as representa­
tions in the mind' (2000: 286). Based on theories that understand perception as
multisensory, in that the senses are not separated out at the point of perception,
but culturally defined, Ingold thus suggests understanding vision in terms of its
interrelationship with other senses (in his own discussion through an analysis of
the relationship between vision and hearing). As noted above, the debate between
Ingold and Howes is ongoing, and has since been played out in the context of a
written debate in four parts in the journal Social Anthropology. In this 2011 debate
between Ingold and Howes it becomes clear how, while Howes' approach can be
 situating sensory ethnography 11

aligned with a culturalist and representational trajectory, Ingold's is aligned with

the non-representational or more-than-representational accounts associated with
human geography (Howes, 201 la, 201 lb; Ingold, 201 la, 201 lb; see also Howes,
2010a, 2010b and Pink, 2010a, 2010b, 2015).
Following Ingold's (2000) critiques, others took up questions related to vision
and sensory experience (e.g. Grasseni, 2007a, 2007c; Willerslev, 2007). Cristina
Grasseni proposed a 'rehabilitation of vision' not 'as an isolated given but within
its interplay with the other senses' (2007a: 1). Grasseni argued that vision is 'not
necessarily identifiable with "detached observation" and should not be opposed by
definition to "the immediacy of fleeting sounds. Ineffable odours, confused emo­
tions, and the flow of Time passing" (Fabian 1983: 108)'. Rather, she proposed the
idea of 'skilled visions [which] are embedded in multi-sensory practices, where look
is coordinated with skilled movement, with rapidly changing points of view, or
with other senses such as touch' (2007a: 4). Tom Rice, whose research has focused
on sound, also questions the usefulness of what he calls 'anti-visualism'. Rice sug­
gested that in the case of sound the effect of the anti-visualist argument is in
're-re-establishing the visual/auditory dichotomy that has pervaded anthropologi­
cal thought on sensory experience' (2005: 201, original italics; and see also Rice,
2008). My own research about the modern western 'sensory home' (Pink, 2004),
through a focus on categories of sound, vision, smell and touch likewise suggested
that no sensory modality necessarily dominates how domestic environments or
practices are experienced in any one culture. Rather, the home is an environment
that is constituted, experienced, understood, evaluated and maintained through
all the senses. For example, British and Spanish research participants decided
whether or not they would clean their homes based on multisensory evaluations
and knowledge that they verbalised in terms of how clothes, or sinks or floors
look, smell or feel under foot. The sensory modalities research participants cited as
being those that mattered when they evaluated their homes varied both culturally
and individually. However, this was not because their perceptions of cleanliness
were dominated by one sensory modality. Rather, they used sensory modalities as
expressive categories through which to communicate about both cleanliness and
self-identity (see Pink, 2004).

Reflexivity in the anthropology of the senses

The 'reflexive turn' in social and cultural anthropology is usually attributed to
the 'writing culture' debate and the emergence of a dialogical anthropology (e.g.
Clifford and Marcus, 1986; James et al., 1997). This highlighted amongst other
things the constructedness of ethnographic texts, the importance of attending
to the processes by which ethnographic knowledge is produced and the need
to bring local voices into academic representations. The reflexivity that emerged
from discussions in sensory anthropology was a critica} response to this literature.
12 doing sensory ethnography

Howes argued that the 'verbo-centric' approach of dialogical anthropology was

limited as it failed to account for the senses (1991b: 7-8) and Regina Bendix criti­
cised 'its focus on the authorial self [which] shies away from seeking to understand
the role of the senses and affect within as well as outside of the researcher-and­
researched dynamic' (2000: 34). In the late 1980s reflexive accounts of the roles
played by the senses in anthropological fieldwork began to emerge in connection
with both the issues raised by the 'writing culture' shift and the contemporary
emphasis on embodiment. These works stressed the need for reflexive engage­
ments with how ethnographic knowledge was produced and an acknowledgement
of the importance of the body in human experience and in academic practice.
Paul Stoller's The Taste of Ethnographic Things (1989), followed almost a decade
later by his Sensuous Scholarship (1997), pushed this 'reflexive' and 'embodied'
turn in social theory further. Stoller's work shows how anthropological practice
is a corporeal process that involves the ethnographer engaging not only in the
ideas of others, but in learning about their understandings through her or his own
physical and sensorial experiences, such as tastes (e.g. 1989) or pain and illness
(e.g. 1997, 2007c). Likewise, Nadia Seremetakis (1994) and Judith Okely (1994)
both used their own experiences as the basis for discussions that placed the
ethnographer's sensing body at the centre of the analysis. As for any ethnographic
process, reflexivity is central to sensory ethnography practice. In Chapter 3 I build
on these existing works to outline how a sensory reflexivity and intersubjectivity
might be understood and practised.

New a pproaches in the anthropology of the senses

In the first decade of the twenty-first century several book-length anthropological
'sensory ethnographies', as well as an increasing number of articles (e.g. in the
journal The Senses and Society) and book chapters, were published. The legacy of the
earlier anthropology of the senses is evident in these ethnographies with their foci
on, for instance, cross-cultural comparison (Geurts, 2002; Pink, 2004), apprentice­
ship (e.g. Grasseni, 2004b; Downey, 2005, 2007; Marchand, 2007), memory and
the senses (Sutton, 2001; Desjarlais, 2003), and commitment to reflexive inter­
rogation. These later works also took the anthropology of the senses in important
new directions. While the earlier sensory ethnographies focused almost exclu­
sively on cultures that were strikingly different from that which the ethnographer
had originated from, this group of anthropological studies also attended to the
senses 'at home', or at least in modern western cultures. This has included a focus
on everyday practices such as housework (Pink, 2004, 2012) and laundry (Pink,
2005b, 2012; Pink et al., 2013), gardening (Tilley, 2006), leisure practices such as
walking and climbing (e.g. Lund, 2006), clinical work practices (e.g. Rice, 2008),
food (see Sutton, 2010) and homelessness (Desjarlais, 2005). Such sensory ethnog­
raphies both attend to and interpret the experiential, individual, idiosyncratic and
 situating sensory ethnography 13

contextual nature of research participants' sensory practices and also seek to

comprehend the culturally specific categories, conventions, moralities and knowl­
edge that inform how people understand their experiences. Moving into the
second decade of the twenty-first century, accounting for the senses is becom­
ing increasingly connected with ethnographic practice. In my own work it has
become part of an approach, rather than being the central strand of a study. This
I believe is a shift that needs to happen, so that attention to the senses becomes
part of ethnographic practice, rather than the object of ethnographic study. As I
develop below in relation to the discussion of future-oriented design ethnography,
in recent years design anthropology publications (Gunn and Donovan, 2012; Gunn
et al., 2013) also make explicit connections to sensory approaches, offering ways
for us to begin to consider the role of sensory ways of knowing in change-making
processes and applied uses of ethnography.
To sum up, the anthropology of the senses is characterised by three main issues/
debates. It explores the question of the relationship between sensory perception
and culture, engages with questions concerning the status of vision and its rela­
tionship to the other senses, and demands a form of reflexivity that goes beyond
the interrogation of how culture is 'written' to examine the sites of embodied
knowing. Drawing from these debates, I suggest that while ethnographers need to
attempt to establish sets of reference points regarding collective or shared cultur­
ally specific knowledge about sensory categories and meanings, such categories
should be understood in terms of a model of culture as constantly being produced
and thus as contingent. This, however, cannot be built independently of the study
and analysis of actual sensory practices and experienced realities. To undertake
this, a sensory ethnography must be informed by a theory of sensory perception.
I expand on this in Chapter 2.

SENSUOUS GEOGRAPHIES, ETHNOGRAPHY AND

SPATIA L THEORY
A history of the senses in geography
Theories of space, place and the experience of the environment are central concerns
to human geographers. These theoretical strands, as well as recent ethnographic
studies in human geography, are particularly relevant to a sensory ethnography
that attends to both social and physical/material practices and relations.
As for social anthropology, a notable interest in sensory experience became
evident in the latter part of the twentieth century. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan
stressed the role of the senses in his earlier work, proposing that 'An object or place
achieves concrete reality when our experience of it is total, that is through all the
senses as well as with the active and reflective mind' (1977: 18). Nevertheless, it
was around the same time as the emergence of the anthropology of the senses,
14 doing sensory ethnography

that geographical approaches to the senses were articulated more fully. However,
in contrast to the anthropological literature, this work did not explore sensory
experience ethnographically, or cross-culturally, but tended to draw from exist­
ing social science studies, philosophy or literature. Also, in common with the
anthropology of the senses, in part this literature proposed a revision of dominant
concepts in the discipline, through the senses. Thus in Landscapes of the Mind
(1990) Douglas Porteous called for a rethinking of the centrality of landscape in
geography through a focus on 'non-visual sensory modes' ( 1990: 5) resonating
with contemporary work in anthropology (e.g. Howes, 199 1 a) . Indeed, in accord
with the approaches of his time, Porteous took an accusatory stance against vision.
He proposed that 'vision drives out the other senses' and defined it as 'the ideal
sense for an intellectualised, information-crazed species that has withdrawn from
many areas of direct sensation' (1990: 5). In response he set out notions of 'smell­
scape' and 'soundscape' ( 1990: 23) to examine how these different modalities of
sensory experience figure in the way people experience their environments. While
Porteous' scapes tend to separate out different sensory modalities, Tuan stressed
multisensoriality in his (1993) volume Passing Strange and Wonderful. Within his
wider task of exploring 'the importance of the aesthetic in our lives' (1993: 1)
Tuan suggested understanding our experience of 'natural' or built environments
as multisensory.
In Sensuous Geographies ( 1994) Paul Rodaway sought to take a sensory geography
in another direction. Rodaway aligned his work with a revival of humanistic geog­
raphy and links between humanistic and postmodern geography that developed
in the 1990s (e.g. in the work of Tuan) and phenomenological approaches (1994:
6-9). Rather than separating the 'physical, social, cultural and aesthetic dimen­
sions of human experience' as Porteous and Tuan had, Rodaway, influenced by
Gibson's ecological theory of perception (Rodaway, 1994: ix), sought 'to offer a
more integrated view of the role of the senses in geographical understanding: the
sense both as a relationship to a world and the senses as themselves a kind of structuring
of space and defining ofplace' (Rodaway, 1994: 4, original italics) . Of particular inter­
est are the common threads his work shares with social anthropologists. Like his
contemporary anthropologists Rodaway noted that 'Everyday experience is multi­
sensual, though one or more sense may be dominant in a given situation' (1994:
5). These earlier calls for attention to the senses sought to theorise key geographi­
cal concepts in relation to the multisensoriality of human experience, focusing
on space, place and landscape. However, although they have undoubtedly been
inspiring texts, neither individually nor collectively do they offer a satisfactory
or complete framework for sensory analysis. While Porteous took the important
step of turning academic attention to the non-visual elements of landscape, by
situating his work as a response to visualism he limited its scope. The critiques
of the anti-visualism thesis as it developed in anthropology (e.g. by Ingold, 2000;
Grasseni, 2007a, 2007c), discussed in the previous section, can equally be applied
to this body of work in human geography.
 situating sensory ethnography 15

New approaches to the senses in geography

More recently, geographers have continued to develop these core theoretical
themes, of space, place and landscape with attention to the senses. For example,
Nigel Thrift has conceptualised space through a paradigm that recognises its sen­
sual and affective dimensions (e.g. Thrift, 2006). Other developments include the­
oretical discussions in the context of urban geography and future geographies. For
instance, discussing collective culture and urban public space, Ash Amin discusses
what he calls 'situated surplus' which is produced out of 'the entanglements of
bodies in motion and the environmental conditions and physical architecture of
a given space'. This, he suggests, drawing also from the work of other geographers
(citing Pile, 2005; Thrift, 2005) and resonating in several ways with the work of
contemporary anthropologists (e.g. Harris, 2007), is 'collectively experienced as a
form of tacit, neurological and sensory knowing' (Amin, 2008: 11, my italics). Thrift
has moreover speculated about how 'new kinds of sensorium' (2004: 582) might
develop in an emergent context of 'qualculative' space, where new ways of per­
ceiving space and time would develop and our senses of (for example) touch and
direction would be transformed.
Geographers who have recently taken ethnographic approaches to the senses
include Divya P. Tolia-Kelly's collaborative work concerning migrants' perceptions
of the Lake District in the UK (2007), Tim Edensor's writings on industrial ruins
(e.g. 2007), Justin Spinney's mobile (2008) ethnography of urban cyclists and Lisa
Law's (2005) analysis of how Filipina domestic workers negotiated their identities
in Hong Kong. Sorne of this ethnographic work examines the senses through the
geographical paradigm of landscape. For instance, Law shows how, amongst other
things, Filipina domestic workers produce their own sensory landscapes in public
spaces of the city on their days off. Through this she suggests that they evoke 'a
sense of home', which 'incorporates elements of history and memory, of past and
present times and spaces, helping to create a familiar place' (2005: 236). In the
context of an existing lack of 'a methodology for researching sensory landscapes'
Law suggests ethnographic research can make an important contribution (2005:
227). This and other work, such as the innovative collaborative arts practice-based
methodologies developed by Tolia-Kelly in her work on migrants' experiences
of landscape (2007) demonstrate the potential for ethnographic methodologies
in human geography. By focusing the sensory experiencing body and explor­
ing its interdependency with landscape (see Casey, 2001) a sensory ethnography
can reveal important insights into the constitution of self and the articulation of
power relations.
A particularly important influence in the way the senses have been discussed in
human geography has been through the notion of the 'visceral'. For the geogra­
phers Allison Hayes-Conroy and Jessica Hayes-Conroy 'visceral refers to the realm of
internally-felt sensations, moods and states of being, which are born from sensory
engagement with the material world' including that of 'the cognitive mind', since
16 doing sensory ethnography

they stress: 'visceral refers to a fully minded-body (as used by McWhorter 1999) that
is capable of judgment' (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2008: 462). In their work,
which focuses on the visceral nature of food experiences, they connect the politics
of everyday life to the way it is experienced, therefore seeing the study of the sen­
sory experience of food as being a route through which to understand how power
relations are embedded in everyday life. Their view of what they refer to as 'visceral
politics' moves away from the idea of 'individualistic forms of being-political' and
instead they profess to 'move towards a radically relational view of the world, in
which structural modes of critique are brought together with an appreciation of
chaotic, unstructured ways in which bodily intensities unfold in the production of
everyday life' (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2008: 462). In their later work they
move beyond the focus on food experiences and argue for a wider application of a
visceral approach in geography; indeed, suggesting that

geographic work demands attentiveness to the visceral realm, a realm where social
structures and bodily sensations come together and exude each other, where dispositions
and discourses seem to relate as organic-synthetic plasma, and where categories and
incarnations defy themselves, daring to be understood. (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes­
Conroy, 2010: 1281)

The interests in spatial theory, the senses and the 'visceral' that have converged in
the work of human geographers create a fertile intellectual trajectory for a sensory
approach to ethnography to draw from. In Chapter 2 I take these connections fur­
ther to suggest how geographical theories of place and space (Massey, 2005) might,
in combination with philosophical (Casey, 1996) and anthropological (Ingold, 2007,
2008) work on place and the phenomenology of perception, inform our understand­
ing of sensory ethnography practice. The attention that human geographers tend to
pay to the political and the power relations that are embedded in the everyday, the
way it is experienced and the spatial relations that it is implicated in, sheds a spedfic
light on the questions that we might ask through sensory ethnography practice.

SOCIOLOGY OF THE SENSES: INTERACTION AND

CORPOREALITY
A history of the sociology of the senses
An initial impulse towards a sociology of the senses was proposed by Georg Simmel
in his 1907 essay 'Sociology of the senses') (1997 [1907]). Simmel's agenda was not
to establish a subdiscipline of a sociology of the senses. Rather, as part of an argu­
ment about the importance of a micro-sociology (1997 [1907]: 109) he focused
on, as he puts it, 'the meanings that mutual sensory perception and influenc­
ing have for the social life of human beings, their coexistence, cooperation
 situating sensory ethnography 17

and opposition' (1997 [1907]: 110). He suggested that our sensory perception
of others plays two key roles in human interaction. First, our 'sensory impres­
sion' of another person invokes emotional or physical responses in us. Second,
'sense impression' becomes 'a route of knowledge of the other' (1997 [1907): 111).
Although Simmel concluded by proposing that 'One will no longer be able to con­
sider as unworthy of attention the delicate, invisible threads that are spun from
one person to another' (1997 [1907]: 120) it was a century later that sociologists
began to engage seriously with this question. In part Simmel's legacy encouraged
sociologists to focus on a sensory sociology of human interaction. When I wrote
the first edition of Doing Sensory Ethnography, published in 2009, coinciding with
my own rather frustrated search for sociological research about the senses, Kelvin
Low had recently confirmed the earlier assessment of Gail Largey and Rod Watson
(2006 [1972]: 39) in his observation that 'sociologists have seldom researched the
senses' (Low, 2005: 399). Nevertheless, sorne significant sociological work on the
senses has since emerged, including that of Low himself, discussed below.
Although Simmel saw the 'lower senses' to be of secondary sociological sig­
nificance to vision and hearing (1997 [1907]: 117), he suggested that 'smelling a
person's body odour is the most intimate perception of them' since 'they penetrate,
so to speak in a gaseous form into our most sensory inner being' (1997 [1907]:
1 19). This interest in smell and social interaction has continued in the sociology
of the senses. Largey and Watson's essay entitled 'The Sociology of Odors' (2006
[1972]) also extends the sociological interest in social interaction to propose that
'Much moral symbolism relevant to interaction is expressed in terms of olfactory
imagery' (2006 [1972]: 29). They stress the 'real' consequences that might follow
from this (2006 [1972]: 30). For instance, they note how 'odors are often referred
to as the insurmountable barrier to close interracial and/or interclass interaction'
(2006 [1972]: 32) as well as being associated with intimacy amongst an 'in-group'
(2006 [1972]: 34). Also, with reference to social interaction, Largey and Watson
see odour as a form of 'impression management' by which individuals try 'to
avoid moral stigmatization' and present an appropriate/approved 'olfactory iden­
tity' (2006 [1972]: 35). Low (who proposes that this approach might be extended
to other senses (2005: 411)) also examines the role of smell in social interaction.
He argues that

smell functions as a social medium employed by social actors towards formulating

constructions/judgements of race-d, class-ed and gender-ed others, operating on
polemic/categorical constructions (and also, other nuances between polarities) which
may involve a process of othering. (2005: 405)

As such he suggests that 'the differentiation of smell stands as that which involves
not only an identification of "us" vs "them" or "you" vs "me", but, also, processes
of judgement and ranking of social others' (2005: 405). Building on Simmel's ideas
Low's study of smell (which involved ethnographic research) 'attempts to move
18 doing sensory ethnography

beyond "absolutely supra-individual total structures" (Simmel, 1997: 110) towards

individual, lived experiences where smell may be utilized as a social medium in
the (re) construction of social realities' (Low, 2005: 398).

Departures from the early sociology of the senses

Other sociological studies that attend to the senses have departed from Simmel's
original impetus in two ways. On the one hand Michael Bull's (2000) study of
personal stereo users' experiences of urban environments takes the sociology
of the senses in a new direction. Noting how 'Sound has remained an invisible
presence in urban and media studies', Bull sets out 'an auditory epistemology of
everyday life' (2001: 180). Using a phenomenological methodology he demon­
strates how this focus on sound allows us to understand not simply how urban
soundscapes are experienced by personal stereo users, but also how practices and
experiences of looking are produced in relation to this (2001: 191). Other devel­
opments in sociology have continued to focus on social interactions, but rather
than focusing on one sensory modality or category, have stressed the multisenso­
riality and corporeality of these encounters. While not identified as a 'sociology
of the senses', use of the multi-modality paradigm (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001)
by sociologists has also allowed researchers undertaking observational studies of
interaction to acknowledge the sensoriality of these contexts and processes (e.g.
Dicks et al., 2006).

l nnovative approac hes to the senses in sociology

However, of most interest for the development of a sensory ethnography are pro­
jects such as the work of Christina Lammer (e.g. 2007) and of Jon Hindmarsh and
Alison Pilnick (2007) in clinical contexts and Les Back's, Dawn Lyon's and John
Hockey and Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson's calls for further attention to the phe­
nomenology of corporeal and sensory experiences in the sociology of work (e.g.
Hockey and Allen-Collinson, 2009; Lyon and Back, 2012) and community (Back,
2009). Hindmarsh and Pilnick's study of the interactions between members of the
pre-operative anaesthetic team in a teaching hospital shows how what they call
'intercorporeal knowing [ ... ] underpins the team's ability to seamlessly coordinate
emerging activities'. In this context they describe how 'The sights, sounds and feel
of colleagues are used to sense, anticipate, appreciate and respond to emerging
tasks and activities' (2007: 1413), thus indicating the importance of multisenso­
rial embodied ways of knowing in human interaction. Lammer's research about
'how radiological personnel perceive and define "contact" as it relates to their
interaction with patients' has similar implications. Lammer set out to explore the
'sensual realities ... at work in a radiology unit' (Lammer, 2007: 91), using video as
 situating sensory ethnography 19

part of her method of participant observation. She argued that in a context where
patients tended to pass through the radiology department rapidly 'a multisen­
sual approach would encourage empathy and create a deeper sensibility amongst
health professionals at a teaching hospital' (2007: 113).
More recently, the place of the senses in sociological research has become
increasingly established. Les Back and Nirmal Puwar (2012) have called for 'live
methods' in sociology. This approach puts the senses at the centre of their project
in that they write:

We are arguing for the cultivation of a sociological sensibility not confined to the
predominant lines of sight, the focal points of public concern. Rather, we are arguing
for paying attention to the social world within a wider range of senses and placing
critical evaluation and ethical judgement at the centre of research craft. (Back and
Puwar, 2012: 15)

As part of this, Back proposes that 'The first principie of live sociology is an atten­
tion to how a wider range of the senses changes the quality of data and makes other
kinds of critica} imagination possible' (Back, 2012: 29, original italics). Phillip
Vannini, Dennis Waskul and Simon Gottschalk (2012) have sought to write the
sociology of the senses through what they describe as a focus on the social, with a
commitment to the study of interaction and what they call 'somatic work'. There,
taking a distinctly sociological approach, they bring together sociological atten­
tion to the body, the senses and human interaction. Again, the authors' interest in
social interaction tends to define the sociological approach to the senses, making
this a distinctive element of what we might think of as a sociology of the senses,
which runs through the different works discussed in this section.
Collectively, these works draw our attention to the corporeality and multisenso­
riality of any social encounter or interaction - including not only the relationships
between research participants but those between ethnographer and research
participants. Building on this in Chapter 3 I suggest that understanding our inter­
actions with others as multisensorial encounters necessitates a reflexive awareness
of the sensory intersubjectivity that characterises such meetings. Thus we might
see the sociology of the senses as an important reminder that social interaction is
a fundamental unit of analysis for not only understanding what is happening in
the world, but also for part of the research process itself.

SENSORY ETHNOGRAPHY ANO APPLIED RESEARCH

The use of ethnographic methods in applied research - whether or not this is led by
academic practitioners - is widespread across a range of fields of applied research,
including consumer research, marketing, product development, health, education,
overseas development and more. In sorne of these fields sensory analysis is also
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