Doing Sensory Ethnography

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Sarah Pink. Doing Sensory Ethnography

Doing Sensory Ethnography

Contents

Acknowledgments

About the author

Introduction About Doing Sensory Ethnography

One Situating sensory ethnography From academia to intervention

Introduction: sensoriality

What is sensory ethnography?

The anthropology of the senses and its critics. The history of anthropology and the senses

Debates over anthropology and the senses

Reflexivity in the anthropology of the senses

New approaches in the anthropology of the senses

Sensuous geographies, ethnography and spatial theory. A history of the senses in geography

New approaches to the senses in geography

Sociology of the senses: interaction and corporeality. A history of the sociology of the senses

Departures from the early sociology of the senses

Innovative approaches to the senses in sociology

Sensory ethnography and applied research

Sensory ethnography for design research and practice

Sensory ethnography and arts practice

An interdisciplinary context for sensory ethnography

Summing up

Recommended further reading

Two Principles for sensory ethnography Perception, place, knowing, memory and imagination

Introduction: ethnography, sensory experience and the body. Experience

Embodiment

Embodied ethnography

Multisensoriality and the interconnected senses. Phenomenological approaches to the senses

Ecological psychology and the senses

Debates about perception

Place, space and ethnography. Thinking through place and space

The ‘gathering power’ of place (Edward Casey)

Place as ‘open’ (Doreen Massey)

‘Entanglement’ and ‘meshwork’ (Tim Ingold)

Place for sensory ethnography

Learning about other people’s emplacement: sensory embodied knowing, knowledge and its ‘transmission’ The ‘transmission’ of knowledge

Learning and knowing

Examples of learning, knowing and transmission

Transmission, knowing, learning: issues for sensory ethnography

Sensory memories

Sensory imaginations

Scholarly knowing and not knowing

Ethnographic places

Summing up

Recommended further reading

Three Preparing for sensory research Practical and orientation issues

Introduction: preparing in an unpredictable world

The research question: What is the sensory ethnographer trying to find out?

Reviewing the existing literature and audiovisual materials with particular attention to the senses

Choosing the right methods

Reflexivity in sensory ethnography

From sensory bias to sensory subjectivity

Other people’s sensory categories and sensory intersubjectivity

Sensory intersubjectivity

The sensory intersubjectivity of the research encounter

Media, methods and sensory knowledge

Ethics in sensory ethnography

Summing up

Recommended further reading

Four The sensoriality of the interview Rethinking personal encounters through the senses

Introduction: defining the interview

The sensoriality of the ethnographic interview

Situating the interview

The interview, participation and place

The interview as a route to understanding other people’s sensory categories

Sitting and talking: spoken narratives in sensory ethnography interviews

Talking about dirt, cleanliness and ‘freshness’

Sensory elicitation: the interview as a response to sensory stimuli. Elicitation as a method

Sensory image elicitation

Sound in sensory elicitation

Olfaction in sensory elicitation

Sensory elicitation and the interconnected senses

Summing up

Recommended further reading

Five Sensory research through participation From observation to intervention

Introduction: beyond ‘participant observation’ ‘Classic’ participant observation

A phenomenological approach to participation

Learning through emplaced sensory participation

Auto-ethnography as sensory participation

The serendipitous sensory learning of ‘being there’

Visiting other people’s sensory environments

The ethnographer as sensory apprentice

Intentionally joining others in (near) universal embodied activities

Eating together or commensality

Walking with others

Summing up: emplaced and active participation

Recommended further reading

Six Mediated sensory ethnography Doing and recording sensory ethnography in a digital world

Introduction: digital media and sensory experience

Digital media and sensory environments

Sensory digital media and the interconnected senses

Audiovisual media as sensory media

Multisensory media: the example of digital video

Video ethnography and the ethnographic place

Multisensory screens: thinking beyond video

Digital technologies and researching through environments

Digital video for researching the sensory home

Walking with video and the experience of place

Audio recording to research the experience of place

Digital sensory ethnography for researching movement

Moving bodies and digital technologies

Monitoring and measurement in sensory ethnography research

Summing up

Recommended further reading

Seven Interpreting multisensory research Organising, analysing and meaning making

Introduction: analysis in sensory ethnography research

Situating analysis: a practical perspective

Research materials as sensory texts

Working with sensory categories

Audio recordings and transcriptions in the analytical process

Interpreting and sharing sensory ethnography in research teams

Interpreting and connecting research experiences, materials and texts

Summing up

Recommended further reading

Eight Representing sensory ethnography Communicating, arguing and the non-representational

Introduction: approaches to representing sensory ethnography

Thinking about sensory dissemination: intimacy, media and place

Printed text: sensual words and images

Writing sensory ethnography texts

Words and images in sensory ethnography texts

Integrating action and experience in sensory ethnography writing

The book beyond writing and images

Audiovisual media and aesthetic evocation

The sound of ethnography

Soundscape composition and sensory intimacy

Audio in mixed media sensory ethnography

Olfaction, art and potential lessons for ethnographers

Olfactory experience and cinema

Scent and art: lessons from olfactory arts practice

Olfaction and text: the scented book

The participating audience: walking ethnographic representation

Thinking about sensory audiences

Summing up

Recommended further reading

Afterword Imagining sensory futures Ethnography, design and future studies

Sensory ethnography and future-oriented research

Ethnographic sensibility and moral responsibility

How might we think of the future?

Sensory ethnography for future-making

The future of sensory ethnography

References

Index

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2nd Edition

My sensory ethnography research emerged from two projects developed with Unilever Research in 1999–2000, a collaboration that led to my book Home Truths (2004) which outlines the notion of the sensory home. My The Future of Visual Anthropology (2006) consolidated some of my ideas about the senses in anthropology and began to shape some of the ideas expanded on here. My subsequent publications about Slow Cities in the UK, Spain and Australia all engage (with) the senses for thinking through questions relating to research environments and participants and to understanding the approach of the movement itself. This research was during different stages of its development funded by the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University, a Nuffield Foundation small grant and RMIT University in Australia and hosted by the IN3 at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona. Other research discussed in this book has been undertaken with colleagues through my CI roles in the ‘Lower Effort Energy Demand Reduction’ project (LEEDR), based at Loughborough University, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK) through the UK Research Councils’ Digital Economy and Energy programmes (grant number EP/I000267/1), and the ‘Management of OSH in Networked Systems of Production or Service Delivery: Comparisons between Healthcare, Construction and Logistic’ project funded by the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH), UK. For further information about the LEEDR project, collaborating research groups and industrial partners, please visit www.leedr-project.co.uk.

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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 to a fully minded-body (as used by McWhorter 1999) that is capable of judgment’ (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2008: 462). In their work, which focuses on the visceral nature of food experiences, they connect the politics of everyday life to the way it is experienced, therefore seeing the study of the sensory experience of food as being a route through which to understand how power relations are embedded in everyday life. Their view of what they refer to as ‘visceral politics’ moves away from the idea of ‘individualistic forms of being-political’ and instead they profess to ‘move towards a radically relational view of the world, in which structural modes of critique are brought together with an appreciation of chaotic, unstructured ways in which bodily intensities unfold in the production of everyday life’ (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2008: 462). In their later work they move beyond the focus on food experiences and argue for a wider application of a visceral approach in geography; indeed, suggesting that

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)

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