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 anticipate some 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 intersubjectivity 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 experience, 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 representation) some 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.
Chapter 8 discusses how the multisensory realities of ethnographers’ and research participants’ lives might be represented. Here I explore how representations 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 investigation 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 some 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 systematic thinking through of the theoretical, methodological and practical elements 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 opportunities afforded by an ethnographic methodology that attends to the senses in its epistemology and its practices of research, analysis and representation.
One Situating sensory ethnography From academia to intervention
In this chapter I situate sensory ethnography as a field of scholarship and practice. I first outline the characteristics of sensory ethnography. I discuss its relationship to and growth out of other inflections in ethnographic practice, and identify its continuities and departures from existing ethnographic methodologies. I then locate it in relation to the intellectual and practical trajectories of discipline-specific scholarship and applied research. I focus on the disciplines of anthropology, human geography and sociology and on the practice of applied ethnography, art and design. Finally, I consider the potential 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 (Jones, 2006a; Zardini, 2005), the sensoriality of film (MacDougall, 1998, 2005; Marks, 2000), a cultural history of the senses (Classen, 1993, 1998), 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 sensory 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 ethnographic methodology.