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Doing Sensory Ethnography investigates the possibilities afforded by attending to the senses in ethnographic research and representation. An acknowledgement that sensoriality is fundamental to how we learn about, understand and represent other people’s lives is increasingly central to academic and applied practice in the social sciences and humanities. It is part of how we understand our past, how we engage with our present and how we imagine our futures. This appreciation, which David Howes has referred to as a ‘sensorial turn’ (2003: xii), has been couched in terms of an anthropology of the senses (Howes, 1991a), sensuous scholarship (Stoller, 1997), sensuous geography (Rodaway, 1994), sociology of the senses (Simmel, 1997 [1907]; Low, 2005; Back, 2009; Lyon and Back, 2012; Vannini et al., 2012), the senses in communication and interaction (Finnegan, 2002), the sensorium and arts practice (Jones, 2006a; Zardini, 2005), the sensoriality of film (MacDougall, 1998, 2005; Marks, 2000), a cultural history of the senses (Classen, 1993, 1998), the sensuous nature of the ‘tourist encounter’ (Crouch and Desforges, 2003) or of medical practice (Edvardsson and Street, 2007; Hindmarsh and Pilnick, 2007; Lammer, 2007), sensory design and architecture (Malnar and Vodvarka, 2004; Pallasmaa, 2005 [1999]), attention to the senses in material culture studies (e.g. Tilley, 2006) and in performance studies (Hahn, 2007), in branding (Lindstrom, 2005), the ‘multi-modality’ paradigm (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001), archaeology (e.g. Levy et al., 2004; Witmore, 2004), history (Classen, 1998; Cowan and Steward, 2007) and within the notion of ‘complex ethnography’ (Atkinson et al., 2007).

The approach to sensory ethnography advocated here does not need to be owned by any one academic discipline. Instead, across these fields of study scholars are creating new paths in academic debate through the theoretical exploration of sensory experience, perception, sociality, knowing, knowledge, practice and culture (e.g. Ingold, 2000; Thrift, 2004; Howes, 2005a; Pink and Howes, 2010; Ingold and Howes, 2011). The debates and arguments inspired by these literatures are shaping academic scholarship, empirical studies, interventions and futures across a broad range of substantive areas. They inform how researchers represent their findings in conventional written and audiovisual texts and in innovative forms designed to communicate about sensory experience. They also have implications for ethnographic methodology.