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While there was intermittent anthropological interest in the senses earlier in the twentieth century (see Howes, 2003; Pink, 2006; Robben, 2007; Porcello et al., 2010), the subdiscipline known as ‘the anthropology of the senses’ became established in the 1980s and 1990s, preceded by and related to existing work on embodiment (see Howes, 2003: 29–32). Led by the work of scholars including David Howes (1991a), Paul Stoller (1989, 1997), Nadia Seremetakis (1994), Steven Feld (1982) and Feld and Keith Basso (1996a) this has involved the exploration of both the sensory experiences and classification systems of ‘others’ and of the ethnographer her- or himself (see also Herzfeld, 2001). These scholars played a key role in agenda-setting for anthropological studies of sensory experience, and their ideas continue to shape the work of contemporary ethnographers and theorists of the senses (e.g. Geurts, 2002: 17; Hahn, 2007: 3–4; see Porcello et al., 2010). However, at the turn of the century, Tim Ingold (2000) proposed a critical and influential departure from the anthropology of the senses developed by Howes, Classen, Stoller, Feld and others. These debates have played an important role in framing subsequent treatments of the senses in anthropology and have implications for how the senses are understood in other disciplines. For example, Howes’ approach had connections to the branch of communication studies developed by Marshall McLuhan (Porcello et al., 2010) and, as I outline elsewhere (Pink, 2015), therefore has synergies to some semiotic approaches to media studies. They moreover raise critical issues for the principles of a sensory ethnography, as developed in Chapter 2.

The anthropology of the senses was to some extent a revisionary movement, calling for a re-thinking of the discipline through attention to the senses. Howes’ edited volume The Varieties of Sensory Experience (1991a) laid out a programme for the sub-discipline. This was a project in cross-cultural comparison that Howes described as ‘primarily concerned with how the patterning of sense experience varies from one culture to the next in accordance with the meaning and emphasis attached to each of the modalities of perception’ (1991a: 3). These concerns proposed an analytical route that sought to identify the role of the senses in producing different configurations across culture, as Howes put it, to trace ‘the influence such variations have on forms of social organization, conceptions of self and cosmos, the regulation of the emotions, and other domains of cultural expression’ (1991a: 3). This approach was focused on comparing how different cultures map out the senses. Based on the assumption that in all cultures the senses are organised hierarchically, one of the tasks of the sensory researcher would be to determine the ‘sensory profile’ (Howes and Classen, 1991: 257) or sensory ‘order’ of the culture being studied. A good example of how this approach is put into practice can be found in Howes’ (2003) work concerning Melanesian peoples.