One might argue that sensory experience and perception has ‘always’ been central to the ethnographic encounter, and thus also to ethnographers’ engagements 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 sensory experience, new understandings might be developed (see Howes, 2003). To some readers these dual arguments – that ethnography is already necessarily sensory 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, 1999) 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, 2011). In doing so it draws from theories of human perception and place to propose 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 Donovan, 2012; Gunn et al., 2013) a sensory ethnography also takes a critical 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.
The anthropology of the senses and its critics
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 critical 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 implications 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 some semiotic approaches to media studies. They moreover raise critical issues for the principles of a sensory ethnography, as developed in Chapter 2.
The anthropology of the senses was to some extent a revisionary movement, calling for a re-thinking of the discipline through attention to the senses. Howes’ edited volume The Varieties of Sensory 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 emphasis 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 expression’ (1991a: 3). This approach was focused on comparing how different cultures map out the senses. Based on the assumption that in all 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 sensory 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’ (Ingold, 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 people’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 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 individuals’ 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,