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Theories of space, place and the experience of the environment are central concerns to human geographers. These theoretical strands, as well as recent ethnographic studies in human geography, are particularly relevant to a sensory ethnography that attends to both social and physical/material practices and relations.

As for social anthropology, a notable interest in sensory experience became evident in the latter part of the twentieth century. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan stressed the role of the senses in his earlier work, proposing that ‘An object or place achieves concrete reality when our experience of it is total, that is through all the senses as well as with the active and reflective mind’ (1977: 18). Nevertheless, it was around the same time as the emergence of the anthropology of the senses, that geographical approaches to the senses were articulated more fully. However, in contrast to the anthropological literature, this work did not explore sensory experience ethnographically, or cross-culturally, but tended to draw from existing social science studies, philosophy or literature. Also, in common with the anthropology of the senses, in part this literature proposed a revision of dominant concepts in the discipline, through the senses. Thus in Landscapes of the Mind (1990) Douglas Porteous called for a rethinking of the centrality of landscape in geography through a focus on ‘non-visual sensory modes’ (1990: 5) resonating with contemporary work in anthropology (e.g. Howes, 1991a). Indeed, in accord with the approaches of his time, Porteous took an accusatory stance against vision. He proposed that ‘vision drives out the other senses’ and defined it as ‘the ideal sense for an intellectualised, information-crazed species that has withdrawn from many areas of direct sensation’ (1990: 5). In response he set out notions of ‘smellscape’ and ‘soundscape’ (1990: 23) to examine how these different modalities of sensory experience figure in the way people experience their environments. While Porteous’ scapes tend to separate out different sensory modalities, Tuan stressed multisensoriality in his (1993) volume Passing Strange and Wonderful. Within his wider task of exploring ‘the importance of the aesthetic in our lives’ (1993: 1) Tuan suggested understanding our experience of ‘natural’ or built environments as multisensory.

In Sensuous Geographies (1994) Paul Rodaway sought to take a sensory geography in another direction. Rodaway aligned his work with a revival of humanistic geography and links between humanistic and postmodern geography that developed in the 1990s (e.g. in the work of Tuan) and phenomenological approaches (1994: 6–9). Rather than separating the ‘physical, social, cultural and aesthetic dimensions of human experience’ as Porteous and Tuan had, Rodaway, influenced by Gibson’s ecological theory of perception (Rodaway, 1994: ix), sought ‘to offer a more integrated view of the role of the senses in geographical understanding: the sense both as a relationship to a world and the senses as themselves a kind of structuring of space and defining of place’ (Rodaway, 1994: 4, original italics). Of particular interest are the common threads his work shares with social anthropologists. Like his contemporary anthropologists Rodaway noted that ‘Everyday experience is multisensual, though one or more sense may be dominant in a given situation’ (1994: 5). These earlier calls for attention to the senses sought to theorise key geographical concepts in relation to the multisensoriality of human experience, focusing on space, place and landscape. However, although they have undoubtedly been inspiring texts, neither individually nor collectively do they offer a satisfactory or complete framework for sensory analysis. While Porteous took the important step of turning academic attention to the non-visual elements of landscape, by situating his work as a response to visualism he limited its scope. The critiques of the anti-visualism thesis as it developed in anthropology (e.g. by Ingold, 2000; Grasseni, 2007a, 2007c), discussed in the previous section, can equally be applied to this body of work in human geography.