Doing Sensory Ethnography. Sarah Pink
that takes as its starting point the multisensoriality of experience, perception, knowing and practice. Sensory ethnography is used across scholarly, practice-based and applied disciplines. It develops an approach to the world and to research that accounts for how sensory ways of experiencing and knowing are integral both to the lives of people who participate in our research and to how we ethnographers practise our craft.
Ethnographers, from a range of different disciplines, are increasingly accounting for and commenting on the multisensoriality of the ethnographic process. As I wrote the first edition of this book in the first decade of the twenty-first century, interdisciplinary academic conferences, seminars and arts events were simultaneously building on other recent explorations of the senses in relation to a plethora of different aspects of individual social and cultural experiences. These and other explorations are now being materialised into a new literature that accounts for the senses across the social sciences and humanities. In the half decade between the publication of that first edition of Doing Sensory Ethnography and this second edition there has been an explosion in scholarship and practice around the senses, across social science, humanities and arts disciplines including human geography, design, film and photography, anthropology, sociology and a range of interdisciplinary fields including cultural and media studies, education studies and health studies. Indeed, a sensory approach can be applied to most projects that involve human experience and practical activity. That does not mean that all ethnography should be done explicitly through the senses, but that to be theoretically and methodologically equipped to engage with the world sensorially is a key skill to own.
This book responds to the discussions and proposals that emerge from existing literature and practice, and draws on examples from my own and other scholars’ and practitioners’ experiences of doing ethnography with attention to the senses across domestic, urban and organisational environments. The central theme and task of the book is to establish a methodology for Doing Sensory Ethnography. It differs from other books that account for the senses in ethnography, in a number of ways, notably because it is interdisciplinary. It moreover goes beyond simply playing the role of advocate for a sensory approach, demonstrating how we can learn through attending to the senses or showing how we might study the senses. Doing Sensory Ethnography instead offers an approach to doing and representing research. It proposes a way of thinking about doing ethnography through the senses.
A focus on methodology leads to the question of what ‘bigger picture’ is emerging that takes sensory ethnography beyond just studying the senses or using our own senses to study other people’s worlds. It is important that we understand how knowledge and ways of knowing are produced, what particular qualities and types of knowledge are currently emerging and the implications of this for how researchers, artists, designers or policy makers comprehend the world and intervene in it, and how futures are imagined and made. To do this we need to understand the implications of particular research methodologies for how we research, account for and potentially participate in change-making. By drawing together contemporary scholarship and practice concerned with the senses in ethnography I show how what has been called the ‘sensory turn’ is part of a wider shift in how we might understand the world, and that this has implications for how we might intervene in the world – as designers, artists, activists, by influencing policy, as educators or through other forms of action. These turns are also increasingly orienting scholarship towards the future, in impulses towards the development of ethnography that along with design is change-making.
While most of the earlier ‘sensory ethnographies’, as well as much of my own work, were rooted in social anthropology, the reach and relevance of Doing Sensory Ethnography reflects the growing interest in the senses across disciplines. Its theoretical commitments to concepts of place, memory, imagination, improvisation and intervention reach out to ideas and practices developed across the social sciences and humanities. Moreover, these theoretical themes consistently resonate though the work of researchers concerned with the senses across scholarly and practice-based disciplines. Indeed, my research for this book has traversed diverse ‘ethnographic’ scholarly and practice-based disciplines and interdisciplinary areas of study. It has also introduced me to new academic, applied and arts practices. The work of some scholars has emerged as outstanding illustrations of how sensory ethnography might be done, and I return to their examples across the chapters. In writing the second edition of this book I encountered a much deeper wealth of literature and practice around the senses than was available for its 2009 edition. Yet, still many ethnographers (whose work demonstrates so well the significance of the senses in culture and society) have neglected to write about the processes through which they came to these understandings. In this vein I would urge contemporary ethnographers, artists and designers who engage with the senses to be more explicit about the ways of experiencing and knowing that become central to their ethnographies, to share with others the senses of place they felt as they sought to occupy similar places to those of their research participants, and to acknowledge the processes through which their sensory knowing has become part of their scholarship or practice. This is not a call for an excess of reflexivity above the need for ethnographers to represent the findings of their research. Rather, in a context where interest in the senses is increasing across disciplines, it is more a question of sharing knowledge about practice.
When preparing this book I was faced with a choice. I could either approach sensory ethnography through an exploration of practical activity conceived as multisensorial and emplaced, or I could examine in turn how different sensory modalities might be engaged and/or attended to in the ethnographic process. The book is structured through a series of chapters that each address issues and questions relating to ethnographic approaches, practices and methods, rather than by discussing sensory categories chapter by chapter. The decision to develop the narrative in this way is based on both a theoretical commitment to understanding the senses as interconnected and not always possible to understand as if separate categories, and a methodological focus on the role of subjectivity and experience in ethnography. This is in contrast to many recent ethnographic discussions of sensory experience (including my own – Pink, 2004), the use of the senses in ethnography (Atkinson et al., 2007) and even a book series (Sensory Formations, Berg Publishers), where discussions are structured through reference to different sensory modalities or categories.
Because researchers often focus on one or another sensory modality or category in their analyses, I discuss plenty of examples of sensory ethnography practice concerned with mainly smell, taste, touch or vision. Indeed, in particular research contexts one sensory modality might be verbalised or otherwise referred to more frequently than others, and might serve as a prism through which to understand multisensory experiences (Fors et al., 2013). Nevertheless, this does not mean that the experience the ethnographer is attending to is only related to that one category or to just one sense organ. Rather, the idea of a sensory ethnography advanced here is based on an understanding of the senses as interconnected and interrelated.
Doing Sensory Ethnography is presented through this Introduction, eight chapters and an Afterword. Chapter 1 both defines sensory ethnography, situates it in relation to debates about how ethnography ‘should’ be done, and sets the interdisciplinary scene for the book. I explore the historical development of the focus on the senses in the key academic and applied disciplines where it is represented. This discussion identifies key debates, themes and convergences within and across these areas, providing a necessary backdrop against which to understand the developments discussed in later chapters, and in particular through which to situate ethnographic examples in relation to historical and disciplinary trajectories.
Chapter 2 establishes the principles of a sensory ethnography and the theoretical commitments of the book. It examines a set of key concepts that inform the idea of a sensory ethnography though a consideration of existing thought and debates concerning sensory experience, perception and knowing. These fundamental questions, which are embedded in debates that are themselves not totally resolved, inform not only how ethnographers comprehend the lives of others, but also how they understand their own research practices. Here I also propose understanding sensory ethnography through a theory of place and place-making, and outline the significance of memory and imagination in the ethnographic process. The conceptual