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 further 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 understanding 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 specific 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 argument about the importance of a micro-sociology (1997 [1907]: 109) he focused on, as he puts it, ‘the meanings that mutual sensory perception and influencing have for the social life of human beings, their coexistence, cooperation and opposition’ (1997 [1907]: 110). He suggested that our sensory perception of others plays two key roles in human interaction. First, our ‘sensory impression’ 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 consider 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, some 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 significance 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]: 119). 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 identity’ (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 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 demonstrates 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 developments in sociology have continued to focus on social interactions, but rather than focusing on one sensory modality or category, have stressed the multisensoriality 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).
Innovative approaches to the senses in sociology
However, of most interest for the development of a sensory ethnography are projects 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 phenomenology 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 multisensorial 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 part of her method of participant observation. She argued that in a context where patients tended to pass through the radiology department rapidly