Doing Sensory Ethnography. Sarah Pink

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 all 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 all 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 challenged 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 representations 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 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, 2011a, 2011b; Ingold, 2011a, 2011b; 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 emotions, 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 suggested 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 anthropological 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 critical response to this literature. 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 criticised ‘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 engagements 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 approaches 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), apprenticeship (e.g. Grasseni, 2004b; Downey, 2005, 2007; Marchand, 2007), memory and the senses (Sutton, 2001; Desjarlais, 2003), and commitment to reflexive interrogation. These later works also took the anthropology of the senses in important new directions. While the earlier sensory ethnographies focused almost exclusively 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 ethnographies both attend to and interpret the experiential, individual, idiosyncratic and contextual nature of research participants’ sensory practices and also seek to comprehend the culturally specific categories, conventions, moralities and knowledge that inform how people understand their experiences. Moving into the second decade of the twenty-first century, accounting for the senses is becoming increasingly connected with ethnographic