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 relationship 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 culturally 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 spatial 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, 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 existing 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, 1991a). 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 ‘smellscape’ 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 geography 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 dimensions 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 of place’ (Rodaway, 1994: 4, original italics). Of particular interest are the common threads his work shares with social anthropologists. Like his contemporary anthropologists Rodaway noted that ‘Everyday experience is multisensual, 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 geographical 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.
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 sensual and affective dimensions (e.g. Thrift, 2006). Other developments include theoretical 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 perceiving 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. Some 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 exploring 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 geographers 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 they stress: ‘visceral refers