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Uses of the term ‘ethnography’ refer to a range of qualitative research practices, employed, with varying levels of theoretical engagement, in academic and applied research contexts. Ethnographic practice tends to include participant observation, ethnographic interviewing and a range of other collaborative research techniques that are often developed and adapted in context and as appropriate to the needs and possibilities afforded by specific research projects. There is now no standard way of doing ethnography that is universally practised. In this context Paul Atkinson, Sara Delamont and William Housley have suggested that there has been a shift from the ‘classic’ emphasis on ‘holism, context and similar ideas’ to the increasing fragmentation of ethnographic research. They moreover claim this has led to a situation where ‘different authors adopt and promote specific approaches to the collection and analysis of data’ and ‘particular kinds of data become celebrated in the process’ (2007: 33).

Sensory ethnography as proposed in this book is certainly not just another route in an increasingly fragmented map of approaches to ethnographic practice. Rather, it is a critical methodology which, like my existing work on visual ethnography (Pink, 2013), departs from the classic observational approach promoted by Atkinson et al. (2007) to insist that ethnography is a reflexive and experiential process through which academic and applied understanding, knowing and knowledge are produced. Indeed, as Regina Bendix argued, to research ‘sensory perception and reception’ requires methods that ‘are capable of grasping “the most profound type of knowledge [which] is not spoken of at all and thus inaccessible to ethnographic observation or interview” (Bloch, 1998: 46)’ (Bendix, 2000: 41). Thus sensory ethnography discussed in this book does not privilege any one type of data or research method. Rather, it is open to multiple ways of knowing and to the exploration of and reflection on new routes to knowledge. Indeed, it would be erroneous to see sensory ethnography as a method for data collection at all: in this book I do not use the term ‘data’ to refer to the ways of knowing and understanding that are produced through ethnographic practice.

To reiterate the definition of ethnography I have suggested elsewhere:

as a process of creating and representing knowledge or ways of knowing that are based on ethnographers’ own experiences and the ways these intersect with the persons, places and things encountered during that process. Therefore visual ethnography, as I interpret it, does not claim to produce an objective or truthful account of reality, but should aim to offer versions of ethnographers’ experiences of reality that are as loyal as possible to the context, the embodied, sensory and affective experiences, and the negotiations and intersubjectivities through which the knowledge was produced. (Pink, 2013: 35)

Atkinson et al. have suggested that what they term ‘post-modern’ approaches to ethnography have ‘devalued systematic analysis of action and representations, while privileging rather vague ideas of experience, evocation and personal engagement’ (2007: 35). In my view, an acknowledgment of the importance of these experiential and evocative elements of ethnography is in fact essential, but a lack of attention to the practices and material cultures of research participants is not its automatic corollary. Moreover, while the concept of experience has unquestionably become central to ethnographic practice, recent methodological approaches to experience in ethnography are far from vague. Rather, they have begun to interrogate this concept (see Throop, 2003; Pink, 2006; Pickering, 2008; Pink, 2008c) to consider its relevance in social anthropology and cultural studies. These points are taken further in Chapter 2.

What ethnography actually entails in a more practical sense is best discerned by asking what ethnographers do. This means defining ethnography through its very practice rather than in prescriptive terms. For example, Karen O’Reilly, reviewing definitions of ethnography across different disciplines, has suggested a minimum definition as:

iterative-inductive research (that evolves in design through the study), drawing on a family of methods, involving direct and sustained contact with human agents, within the context of their daily lives (and cultures), watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions, and producing a richly written account that respects the irreducibility of human experience, that acknowledges the role of theory as well as the researcher’s own role and that views humans as part object/part subject. (2005: 3)

While in this book I will go beyond this definition to re-think ethnography through the senses, the principle of O’Reilly’s approach is important. Her definition provides a basic sense of what an ethnographer might do, without prescribing exactly how this has to be done. Delamont, in contrast, is more prescriptive in her definition of ‘proper ethnography’ as being ‘participant observation during fieldwork’ (2007: 206) – something that she proposes is ‘done by living with the people being studied, watching them work and play, thinking carefully about what is seen, interpreting it and talking to the actors to check the emerging interpretations’ (2007: 206). Delamont’s interpretation reflects what might be seen as the classic approach to ethnography as developed in social anthropology in the twentieth century.

While classic observational methods certainly produce valuable in-depth and often detailed descriptions of other people’s lives, this type of fieldwork is often not viable in contemporary contexts. This might be because the research is focused in environments where it would be impractical and inappropriate for researchers to go and live for long periods with research participants – for instance, in a modern western home (see Pink, 2004, 2013; Pink and Leder Mackley, 2012, 2014) or in a workplace to which the researcher has limited access (see Bust et al., 2007; Pink and Morgan, 2013). Limitations might also be related to the types of practices the researcher seeks to understand, due to constraints of time and other practical issues impacting on the working lives of ethnographers as well as those of research participants. In applied research other constraints can influence the amount of time available to spend on a project (see Pink, 2005a; Pink and Morgan, 2013). This has meant that innovative methods have been developed by ethnographers to provide routes into understanding other people’s lives, experiences, values, social worlds and more that go beyond the classic observational approach. These are not short cuts to the same materials that would be produced through the classic approach (see Pink, 2007e; Pink and Morgan, 2013). Indeed, they involve ‘direct and sustained contact with human agents, within the context of their daily lives’ (O’Reilly, 2005: 3). Nevertheless, they are alternative, and ultimately valid, ways of seeking to understand and engage with other people’s worlds through sharing activities and practices and inviting new forms of expression. It is these emergent methods that are defining the new sensory ethnography as it is practised. The mission of this book is not to argue for a single model of sensory ethnography. Rather, I understand sensory ethnography as a developing field of practice.

As the definitions discussed above indicate, a set of existing methods are already associated with ethnography, and usually covered in ethnographic methodology books. These include participant observation, interviewing and other participatory methods. Ethnography frequently involves the use of digital visual and audio technologies in the practice of such methods (Pink, 2007a; Pink et al., 2004) and might also be conducted, at least in part, virtually or online (see Hine, 2000; Kozinets, 2010; Postill and Pink, 2012), in addition to the ethnographer’s physical engagements with the materiality and sensoriality of everyday and other contexts (see Pink et al., forthcoming). Whereas participatory methods often entail ethnographers participating in, observing (or sensing) and learning how to do what the people participating in their research are already engaged in (and presumably would have been doing anyway), interviewing normally involves a collaborative process of exploring specific themes and topics with an interviewee. Other less conventional methods may entail more intentional interventions on the part of the researcher. For instance, these could include collaborations such as producing a film, writing a song or inventing a new recipe with one’s research participants. Moving into the design research field, it might involve co-designing prototypes of objects or services for everyday use (Halse, 2013) and usually has a future orientation that differs from the conventional focus on ethnographic writing on the ethnographic past. Doing sensory ethnography entails taking a series of conceptual and practical steps that allow the researcher to re-think both established and new participatory and collaborative ethnographic research techniques in terms of sensory perception, categories, meanings and values, ways of knowing and practices. It involves the researcher self-consciously and reflexively attending to the senses throughout the research process: that is, during the planning, reviewing, fieldwork, analysis and representational processes of a project. It also invites us, through growing connections between sensory ethnography and design ethnography (Pink, 2014; Pink et al., 2013), to re-think the temporalities of ethnography.

One might argue that sensory experience and perception has ‘always’ been central to the ethnographic encounter, and thus also to ethnographers’ engagements with the sociality and materiality of research. This makes it all the more necessary to re-think ethnography to explicitly account for the senses. Indeed, when classic ethnographic examples are reinterpreted through attention to sensory experience, new understandings might be developed (see Howes, 2003). To some readers these dual arguments – that ethnography is already necessarily sensory and the call to re-think ethnography as sensory – may be reminiscent of earlier revisions. Around the end of the twentieth century it was proposed that all ethnographic practice should be reflexive, and is gendered (e.g. Bell et al., 1993), embodied (e.g. Coffey, 1999) and visual (e.g. Banks, 2001; Pink, 2007a). Another contemporary wave of technology and practice makes for online (e.g. Hine, 2000; Boellstorf, 2009; Kozinets, 2010) and digital ethnography (e.g. Pink et al., forthcoming). These perspectives were and are accompanied by powerful arguments for understanding ethnographic practice through new paradigms. A sensory ethnography methodology, as originally developed in the 2009 edition of this book, accounts for and expands this existing scholarship that re-thought ethnography as gendered, embodied and more. It also connects with the need to understand the experiential and sensory affordances and possibilities of digital technologies (Pink, 2015; Richardson, 2010, 2011). In doing so it draws from theories of human perception and place to propose a framework for understanding the ethnographic process and the ethnographer’s practice (this is developed in Chapter 2). By connecting with recent developments in design anthropology (Gunn and Donovan, 2012; Gunn et al., 2013) a sensory ethnography also takes a critical perspective on the temporalities of the ethnographic place, to enable researchers to develop ethnographic work with a future orientation (Pink et al., 2013; Pink, 2014). Thus the idea of a sensory ethnography involves not only attending to the senses in ethnographic research and representation, but reaches out towards an altogether more sophisticated set of ideas through which to understand what ethnography itself entails.

The proposal for a sensory ethnography presented in this book draws from and responds to a series of existing discipline-specific intellectual and practice-oriented trajectories that already attend to the senses through theoretical, empirical or applied engagements. In the remainder of this chapter I identify a set of themes and debates in the existing literature in relation to which a sensory ethnographic methodology is situated.