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In the first decade of the twenty-first century several book-length anthropological ‘sensory ethnographies’, as well as an increasing number of articles (e.g. in the journal The Senses and Society) and book chapters, were published. The legacy of the earlier anthropology of the senses is evident in these ethnographies with their foci on, for instance, cross-cultural comparison (Geurts, 2002; Pink, 2004), apprenticeship (e.g. Grasseni, 2004b; Downey, 2005, 2007; Marchand, 2007), memory and the senses (Sutton, 2001; Desjarlais, 2003), and commitment to reflexive interrogation. These later works also took the anthropology of the senses in important new directions. While the earlier sensory ethnographies focused almost exclusively on cultures that were strikingly different from that which the ethnographer had originated from, this group of anthropological studies also attended to the senses ‘at home’, or at least in modern western cultures. This has included a focus on everyday practices such as housework (Pink, 2004, 2012) and laundry (Pink, 2005b, 2012; Pink et al., 2013), gardening (Tilley, 2006), leisure practices such as walking and climbing (e.g. Lund, 2006), clinical work practices (e.g. Rice, 2008), food (see Sutton, 2010) and homelessness (Desjarlais, 2005). Such sensory ethnographies both attend to and interpret the experiential, individual, idiosyncratic and contextual nature of research participants’ sensory practices and also seek to comprehend the culturally specific categories, conventions, moralities and knowledge that inform how people understand their experiences. Moving into the second decade of the twenty-first century, accounting for the senses is becoming increasingly connected with ethnographic practice. In my own work it has become part of an approach, rather than being the central strand of a study. This I believe is a shift that needs to happen, so that attention to the senses becomes part of ethnographic practice, rather than the object of ethnographic study. As I develop below in relation to the discussion of future-oriented design ethnography, in recent years design anthropology publications (Gunn and Donovan, 2012; Gunn et al., 2013) also make explicit connections to sensory approaches, offering ways for us to begin to consider the role of sensory ways of knowing in change-making processes and applied uses of ethnography.

To sum up, the anthropology of the senses is characterised by three main issues/debates. It explores the question of the relationship between sensory perception and culture, engages with questions concerning the status of vision and its relationship to the other senses, and demands a form of reflexivity that goes beyond the interrogation of how culture is ‘written’ to examine the sites of embodied knowing. Drawing from these debates, I suggest that while ethnographers need to attempt to establish sets of reference points regarding collective or shared culturally specific knowledge about sensory categories and meanings, such categories should be understood in terms of a model of culture as constantly being produced and thus as contingent. This, however, cannot be built independently of the study and analysis of actual sensory practices and experienced realities. To undertake this, a sensory ethnography must be informed by a theory of sensory perception. I expand on this in Chapter 2.