The key ingredients of sensory ethnography

Now that we know why we need it, we should reflect on what sensory ethnography is, precisely. For this, let us turn to Sarah Pink. In Doing sensory ethnography, Pink (2015) approaches ethnography from a genuinely ecumenical perspective. Rather than taking sides with certain theoretical perspectives or disciplinary traditions, or rather than emphasizing certain methods or even methodological characteristics over others, Pink (2015, p. 3) wisely uses the term “ethnography” to “refer to a range of qualitative research practices, employed, with varying levels of theoretical engagement, in academic and applied research contexts.” She continues:

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 (2015, p.3).  

She goes on to suggest that sensory ethnography “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” (Pink, 2015, p. 3). However, she is quick to note that sensory ethnography is not suited to producing “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, p. 35). 

As the editor of this handbook, I could not agree more with this approach, and believe that all the chapters included here are based on such ecumenical understanding of the scope and intent of sensory ethnography. Moreover, like Pink I firmly believe that sensory ethnography is not limited to any substantive agenda. While sensory ethnography is often practiced in the anthropology of the senses (e.g. Howes, 1991, 2003; Le Breton, 2017), the sociology of the senses (Gibson and Von Lehn, 2021; Vannini, Waskul, and Gottschalk, 2013), or the transdisciplinary field of sensory studies (Bull et al., 2006; Howes, 2018, 2022, 2023), it is not limited to any one discipline, field, or topic. Whether sensory ethnography is practiced in the field of sensuous geography, the history of the senses, social interaction, interpersonal communication, artistic practice, film, social and cultural history, tourism studies, human-animal interaction, medical practice, design, consumer studies, architecture, material culture studies, the sociology or anthropology of the body, multimodal communication, or any other field or subfield, simply does not matter. Sensory ethnography is a research strategy that anyone can utilize, regardless of their substantive focus.

But if sensory ethnography is so diverse in terms of approaches, so accepting of various styles, so open to different methods of data collection, so trans-disciplinary, and so deeply rooted in the very core foundations and assumptions of ethnographic ways of knowing and practice writ large, what is distinctive about it? To settle this question once and for all I wish to return for a moment to what earlier I have cheekily called “zombie ethnography”—and in general to what one might call zombie qualitative research. According to popular culture and folklore a zombie is a being that is neither alive nor dead, but something in between. Usually a reawakened corpse, a zombie is strong, insensitive, and ravenously hungry. In fact, typically a zombie’s only mission is to feed. After being bitten by a zombie a person typically turns into a zombie. 

Along these lines, zombie ethnography is research that is neither positivistic and quantitative nor interpretive and qualitative, but somehow both at the same time. Zombie ethnography is inspired by ethnography and the qualitative tradition but bitten by the powerful jaws of realism. As a result, it is research that loses its soul, becoming passive, uninspired, dispassionate, impersonal, and uncaring. Unable to empathize with live beings, its main goals are to accumulate data for the sake of accumulating data, to produce bias-free “results,” and to use de-sensitized analyses and writing that feels like it was produced by no one in particular. Its only mission is to feed the hunger of zombie thesis supervisors, zombie journal editors, and zombie tenure committees who do not care about the actual taste of what they are eating. 

In contrast, sensory ethnography is alive. Sensory ethnographers are alive to the richness and the nuances of the lifeworlds in which they live. They are sensitive to the needs of the communities of which they are permanent or temporary members. They are susceptible to the pain and anger, joy and relief, commitment and hope of the people they strive to relate to. They are alert to the sensations that keep their bodies open to the world, on and off the field. They are unafraid to reflect on their feelings, moods, visceral impulses and carnal desires. They are invested in the pursuit of creative and critical insight as a way of alerting their audiences to injustice, as a way of inspiring them to think and feel differently, and as a way of re-imagining how the world could be. Above all, sensory ethnographers are resolutely committed to apprehend the vibrancy of the matter that makes our existence meaningful and to communicate about such matters in the most vivid and compelling ways possible. A sensory ethnography done through the senses, about the senses, and for the senses is a way of knowing and sharing knowledge that is above everything else awake, conscious, animate, and spirited: the complete opposite of its zombie counterpart.

Unwilling to provide a systematic definition of sensory ethnography, because such definitions always tend to be prescriptive and ultimately exclusionary, in this introduction I have resolved instead to identify qualities that are typical of sensory ethnography. In what follows I have listed fifteen. Drawn from this handbook’s chapters, and obviously from the broader practice of sensory ethnography, these fifteen qualities are not all necessarily exclusive to sensory ethnography. Taken as a whole, however, I believe they serve as a fitting description of what sets sensory ethnographers apart. And while I do not mean to suggest that every sensory ethnography is characterized by all these fifteen qualities, I do believe that most sensory ethnographies display at least a few of these qualities explicitly, and few more implicitly. As I describe in what follows, sensory ethnography is reflexive, embodied, relational, more-than-human, affective, multi-sensory, situated, critical, emplaced, narrative, sensuous, multi-modal, more-than-representational, atmospheric, and imaginative. For the sake of organization, I divide these qualities in three groups, focusing on how they inform the practice of an ethnography that is done through the senses, about the senses, and for the senses.    

Through the senses

Sensory ethnography is done through the senses. This means that researchers need to think of themselves as “apprentices” (see Pink, 2015; Barker and Jewitt, this volume) who are learning to sense and make sense of the lifeworlds they are investigating. A sensory apprentice must understand that the world in which they are immersed does not give itself openly, free of mediation, to one’s perception. Therefore, for a sensory apprentice there is no such thing as “data.” Data, the plural of datum, is a Latin word that means “given.” But nothing is simply “given” to a sensory apprentice. To speak of data as if the world were truly and simply “given” is to view elements of the lifeworld as a set of objective stimuli that the human sensory apparatus merely registers. Apprentices, instead, typically work with materials and learn along the way (see Ingold, 2013). They learn the affordances of materials, their compositions, their feels, their qualities, and their behaviors. Above all apprentices learn to make sense of what they can do with materials, and they do so only after they have understood how different materials relate to one another, and how they themselves relate to materials. There is nothing “given” about this process.

In light of the active roles they take in becoming sensory apprentices, sensory ethnographers must above all be reflexive. Reflexivity (for more see Davies, 2007) is the first (and arguably the most fundamental) of the fifteen qualities of sensory ethnography that I wish to highlight. As Drysdale and Wong (2019, pp. 3-4; also see Cox, Irving, and Wright, 2016) note:

reflexivity may be the core of the entire sensory ethnographic process. Sensory ethnography is often characterised by a shift away from solely observing participants and towards using researchers’ own experience and bodily sensation to gain insight into the lived relationship between people, practices, and places. This recognition is perhaps the major point of difference between traditional ethnography and sensory ethnography—whereas the former could be understood as a mix of participation and observation, the latter produces collaborative multisensorial and emplaced ways of knowing as part of the overall ethnographic encounter. In acknowledging the shifting dimensions of sensory experience, sensory cultures and researchers’ expression of them are intertwined. This critical reflexivity extends to the epistemological aspects of research: a reflexive discussion of sensory ethnographic practice that renders the processes of knowledge production open and transparent.

For John Hockey and Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson (this volume), reflexivity is “vital.” Understood as “the recognition that the researcher herself/himself cannot be detached from the research setting, or entirely independent of the research process, but rather is fundamentally part of these” (this volume), reflexivity forces researchers to come to terms with the inevitability of their influence on the lifeworlds they investigate, and that world’s influence on them. Unlike positivist researchers, but also realist ethnographers who might be naïve enough to think they are able to assume a neutral and detached perspective, reflexive sensory ethnographers fully understand how their socialization forms their subjectivity and their sensorium. “Engagement with reflexivity,” write Hockey and Allen-Collinson (this volume), “means we need to be aware of our positionality.” This entails recognizing how our values, ideas, assumptions, interpretations, perspectives, and worldviews are always with us, and therefore our ways of making sense of the world are never value-free. Being reflexive, therefore, requires that we strive to maintain a “critical perspective and analytic distance on our own situatedness in the research” (Hockey and Allen-Collinson, this volume).  

Sensory ethnography is also embodied. This might seem intuitive—after all, how can one be disembodied, dispossessed of one’s own body? Yet, disembodied research, even disembodied ethnography is not uncommon. In contrast, at the very least, embodied ethnography requires presence. Presence might seem like an obvious condition of research, but it is not. More and more researchers undertake research studies that allow them to depend on others, or tools, to do all the (field)work on their behalf. As faculty are kept increasingly busy with administrative demands, bureaucracy, and meetings, relying on human or non-human others (like big data banks) is growingly appealing. Yet, there are no substitutes for being present in the field. And beyond mere presence, embodiment refers to a self-consciousness of one’s presence in the field, a bodily presence marked by gender, race, sexuality, age, bodily skills, and physical abilities (for more see Hammer, 2019; Tantia, 2020). It is through the awareness of this physical presence, and the physical presence of others, that the sensory ethnographer learns to sense and make sense of the lifeworld. As Stoller (1997) has noted, ethnography is a corporeal process which involves the ethnographer in the physical and sensory experiences of oneself and others. Present, embodied ethnographers thus often learn by being led and guided by their research participants to places and through experiences that they would not have otherwise encountered on their own, and if they had not been present (Stevenson, 2017). 

Embodied research is hard work and embodied researchers are not afraid of sweat or sore limbs. Some of them, like Hockey and Allen-Collinson (this volume) and Larsen (this volume) love sweat and sore limbs so much that they are dedicated runners. Jonas Larsen, for example, is interested in understanding the role of marathons in tourism promotion, and in doing so he doesn’t just ZOOM in for a few interviews with runners, he actually runs marathons. In his chapter in this volume, Larsen teaches us how an embodied sociology of the lived and moving body entails a corporeal approach to knowledge acquisition. This is an approach that instructs runners how to feel: how to listen to one’s bodies, how to make sense of the countless bodily sensations of running, how to pace oneself, how to respond to terrain undulations, how to regulate speed, how to read one’s stopwatch, how to ignore (or be very attentive to) pain and soreness. An embodied sensory ethnography—of running or just about anything else—thus demands that the researcher be attuned the relation between the “external” senses (sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch) and the internal ones (nociception, proprioception, chronoception, thermoception, and equilibrioception) and the relation between one’s own sensations and other people’s. And this, ideally, ought to reveal the ways in which the human body is simultaneously biological, material, and social. 

What we humans sense and how we make sense of our sensations is a relational process and achievement, and so is sensory ethnography. To say that sensory ethnography is relational is to acknowledge the depth of the ties that bind people’s sensory activities together as well as the depth of the ties that bind ethnographers and their interlocutors in making sense of the world together (see Brill de Ramírez, 2015). Take for example the chapters by Michele Friedner and Andrew Irving, both focusing on hearing-impaired people and the relational experience of deafness. As Irving writes (this volume): 

people’s sensory lifeworlds are shaped by the radical contingency of the body one is born with, the land of one’s birth and the economic status of one’s parents. Put another way, the life someone lives, including their sensory experiences and embodied understandings of vision, sound, taste, touch, and other senses such as proprioception, emerges within a specific social, political, and material form of life. 

A form of life is a collective of practices and interactions that shape one’s being, knowledge, cognition, language, expression, and the senses. A life is a relational process that situates someone in history, society, culture, and in language yet without generating (sensory) experiences that are experienced, enacted or understood in the same way across individuals. In light of this, sensory ethnographers relate to people as both members of a community with whom they share a particular sensorium but also as individuals with distinct particularities and contingencies marked by their precise relationships to their surrounding social world. Therefore, Irving points out how “a sensory ethnography of specific bodies in movement and action—rather than presupposing shared social and cultural experience—emphasizes variation and draws attention to how diverse bodily potentials are differently constituted” (this volume). 

Deafness is typically portrayed as an absence or lack—as the inability to hear (for a parallel argument on blindness see Hammer, 2019). But Irving—following Friedner and Kuster’s (2020) incitation to transcend this simplistic portrayal of deafness—frames the experiences of deaf students not in relation to the broader society but rather in relation to their own community’s experiences, which allows us to understand and appreciate “the sensorial and phenomenological lifeworlds of being deaf not through a lack and absence of sound but as an embodied site of sensorial richness and completeness” (Irving, this volume). The same relational quality is present in Friedner’s research on cochlear implants (this volume). Like Irving, Friedner examines the sense of hearing as politically, economically, and relationally produced and distributed. But hearing and hearing aid technologies are also “produced through relations with other people, the state, medicine and re/habilitation professionals and institutions, and multinational corporations, among other actors” (Friedner, this volume). Methodologically, this requires an approach to the study of the experiences of deaf people that is embedded in the very relations that shape their sensory socialization. Friedner thus finds herself interacting with families, educators, health caregivers, state agents, surgeons, audiologists, and speech and language therapists, and other stakeholders as a way of understanding hearing as a relational outcome. But sensory ethnography is relational in another way too, notes Friedner, in that ethnographers are not alone—despite the stereotypical portrayal of the lone anthropologist entering a distant field full of strangers.

If sensory ethnographers are apprentices, then they are always embedded in pedagogical relations where teaching and learning are happening at the same time, and never as solitary activities. Sensory ethnography is therefore relational in the sense that sense-making activities are often collaborative and participatory (see Waitt and Harada, this volume). As sensory ethnographers it is common to feel that we are learning about a lifeworld together with our research interlocutors in light of the relationships we have developed over time with them. But the relational quality of our inquiry is not something we share with humans only. 

Increasingly, sensory ethnography is a more-than-human practice. The more-than-human turn, registered in ethnography through an increasing attention to multispecies ethnography, pushes researchers to focus beyond text and language through interspecies communication process that challenge conventional forms of scholarship and Western ontologies and epistemologies (e.g., see Hamilton and Taylor, 2017). The strongest call to sensory ethnographers to engage in more-than-human issues can be found in the 2020 publication of a special issue of The Australian Journal of Anthropology on “A sensory approach for multispecies anthropology.” In the compelling introduction to the special issue Fijn and Kavesh (2020) prompt sensory ethnographers to study how human lives are always entangled with noon-human lives in a kind of relational becoming that blurs the artificial boundary between nature and culture. And this, they write, is a reciprocal process which forms a multispecies relatedness. 

Taking their lead from writers like Kohn (2013) and Tsing (2015), Fijn and Kavesh (2020, this volume) lead sensory ethnographers to investigate an anthropology of life which is focused on kinship and entanglements, an anthropology of hybrid communities that goes beyond the scope of the humanist project by viewing animacy as inevitably relational (see Ingold, 2013). This is a kind of scholarship that recognizes non-human agency, transcends the bounds of anthropocentrism, abandons the view of nature as singular and “integrates the more-than-human in understanding social, ecological and political processes” (Fijn and Kavesh, 2020, p. 7; also see Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010; van Dooren et al., 2016). As various contributors to this volume show—Fijn and Kavesh, Wright, Peterson, Fiore, Lupton et al., Paterson, and Markuksela—multispecies sensory ethnography unfolds as a an ecologically sensitive and post-humanist research that is “attuned to life's emergence within a shifting assemblage of agentive beings” (Ogden et al., 2013, p. 6). 

About the senses

As I mentioned earlier, sensory ethnography is “about” the senses, but this does not mean that every sensory ethnography should be focused on advancing sensory studies, the sociology or anthropology of the senses, or any substantive field of research which focuses directly on the senses. Learning about the roles that the senses and sensations play in the constitution of the lifeworld simply means producing sensory ethnographies that are situated in sensory subjectivity (thus gendered, racialized, sexualized, enskilled, etc.), and that are critical, emplaced, affective, and multi-sensory. In short, regardless of its topic and goals, sensory ethnographies always need to take into account how our individual and embodiment and presence in the field—as both researchers and research participants—is always a distinctly sensory one. 

As Charette and Elliott remind us in their chapter, our lived experience of the body “is not a physiological machine, whose cognitive states are determined by specific sensations—it is my body, or your body” (this volume). This phenomenological body emerges from being-in-the-world. Skiers might then be able to detect textures of snow and ice and reflect on the bodily comportment those textures demand in a way that non-skiers are unable to. Sommeliers are able to identify wine’s properties in ways that less-trained wine drinkers are not. These sensory dispositions are essential to the formation of selfhood (Vannini, Waskul, and Gottschalk, 2015). As Charette and Elliott describe, when ways of sensing change due to brain injuries for example, one’s self also undergoes change. When we say that sensory ethnography is situated, we acknowledge that subjectivity does not exist in a vacuum dictated by universal neurological conditions. Rather, our understanding of subjectivity writ large—and therefore our subjectivity as ethnographers—must take into account the immense diversity of experience and the distinct ways sensing shapes selfhood, society, and culture.

A situated sensory ethnography is also an inclusive one. According to Alper (2018, p. 3561), an “inclusive sensory ethnography intervenes in ethnographic practice by addressing diversity in how both researchers and research participants process and interpret sensory information, the layered interconnections between the various senses, and the full range of potential multi-sensory encounters

to be had with media and technology in daily life.” Situatedness leads to inclusivity because it recognizes the complexity of sensory differences across individuals, across species, and even across individual members of the same non-human species. Such recognition should then lead to the acceptance of neurological diversity and ultimately to both an ontological and epistemological openness to different ways of learning both through and about the senses, a pluriverse of sensibilities (see Clément et al., 2022; Hammer, 2019).

A situated sensory ethnography is by necessity an emplaced one. The idea of an emplaced sensory ethnography can be traced back, among others, to Howes (2005; also see Feld, 2005), who argued for a paradigm of emplacement based on the relationship between embodied mind and environment. The notion of an emplaced sensory ethnography was further articulated by Pink (2015, p.28), who suggested that an emplaced ethnography “attends to the question of experience by accounting for the relationships between bodies, minds, and the materiality and sensoriality of the environment.” Like situatedness, the quality of emplacement refers to the spatialities shaping the experiences of both ethnographers and their interlocutors. 

In their chapter Sekimoto and Brown (this volume) argue that “how one finds themselves in a spatial and temporal environment is a multisensorial experience that undergirds their phenomenology of bodies, place, and social worlds.” Emplacement is then an inevitable condition of racialization. But for the racialized body emplacement is often experienced as a kind of displacement, a feeling of being out of place in the “white world.” It is an experience of hypervigilance over one’s body and one’s presence, and an experience of uncertainty and anxiety in relation to one’s surroundings. As I write these words in January of 2023, the news media have just released the video of the murder of Tyre Nichols, a young black man brutally assaulted by a mob of Memphis police officers and left for dead by them and their EMT colleagues. Though this time the police were African American, Tyre Nichols’s murder follows a string of similar incidents perpetrated by white police officers across the USA, something that many black Americans have come to experience as a constant threat to their safety every time they get behind the wheel of their car and get pulled over the police. Cases like this highlight the interconnectedness of emplacement, embodiment, and racialization. In the words of Yancy (2012, p. 45), quoted in Sekimoto and Brown (this volume): 

To be white in a white world . . . is to be extended by that world’s contours. The world opens up, reveals itself as a place called home, a place of privileges and immunities, a space for achievement, success, freedom of movement [whereas] to be black in “the white world” is to turn back towards itself, to become an object, which means not only not being extended by the contours of the world, but being diminished as an effect of the bodily extensions of others. 

An emplaced sensory ethnography is attentive to the ways racialized embodiment and emplacement are embedded into people’s experiences of and practices in space and place. Sekimoto and Brown argue that an emplaced ethnography needs to take into account how sensing and sensible bodies are always enmeshed in a relation with “the historicity of the particular relations of sensing in a given encounter” (this volume). Going beyond the traditional domain of visibility, Sekimoto and Brown remind us that the emplaced body is a multi-sensory subject. Drawing particular attention to the kinetic domain, they alert us to understand emplacement as a capacity (but also a subject to various limitations restricting that capacity) to move in coordination with other bodies and the affordances present in an environment. And that movement, in all its specificity and in the ways in which it is enabled and constrained by power relations, is something that sensory ethnographers must continuously be reflexive about (see Pink, 2015). 

Given the way sensory embodiment is shaped by unequal power relations, sensory ethnography is often a critical form of inquiry. Like all other forms of critical ethnography (e.g., see Madison, 2011), sensory ethnography is often explicitly committed to a progressive and democratic social and political agenda and it is resolutely devoted to drawing attention to the countless ways in which the sensorium is complicit in the reproduction of gender, racial, sexual, and other inequalities. In this book alone the critical quality of sensory ethnography is evident in contexts such as immigration and urban politics (Fiore), the reproduction of disability (Friedner), gentrification (Moretti), consumer culture (Gottschalk), racialization (Sekimoto and Brown), and erasure from collective memory (Yoshimizu), just to mention a few. It is therefore no accident that a growing volume of sensory ethnographies are produced through a critical or even transformative paradigm focused on collaboration and equal participation (see Waitt and Harada, this volume). 

Though many of the fifteen qualities I describe in this introduction are not particularly novel and have in fact been a trademark of sensory ethnography since its early days, other qualities are newer as they are responsive adaptations of sensory ethnography to trends and shifts endemic to post-millennium-turn social sciences. Two of these qualities pertain to affect and the multi-sensory body. Let us begin with affect and with what one might call affective sensory ethnography. In affective ethnography affect is a resource for the conduction of ethnographic practice and representation, a resource felt and then re-enacted through the researcher’s embodiment and presence in the ethnographic text and performance (Gherardi, 2018; Lamrani, 2021). Simply put, an affective sensory ethnography is not an ethnography that is about affect but rather an ethnography that is itself affective: emotionally vivid, visceral, and redolent of feelings, moods, dispositions, and pre-cognitive energies. Informed by the affective turn in the social sciences, an affective ethnography is both the outcome of affective dynamics which have left a mark on the ethnographer and his/her interlocutors and a generative and transformative force with a capacity of its own to affect its audiences. 

Gherardi (2019, p. 742) defines affective ethnography as “a style of performative ethnographic process that relies on the researcher’s capacity to affect and be affected in order to produce interpretations that may transform the things that they interpret.” In my view, such transformative capacity takes place in two ways. First, affective sensory ethnography does not preoccupy itself with finding definitive answers to research questions or arriving at conclusions that reduce complex social realities to comprehensive explanations. Rather, affective and non-representational sensory ethnography produces works that allow readers (or viewers, listeners) to re-imagine the social world through a multitude of possibilities. Instead of going after “what is”—and therefore ontological answers—affective sensory ethnographies go after “what could be” and “what else could be” (see Vannini and Vannini, this volume). By doing so affective ethnographers move their audiences to interpretive theoretical possibilities, generating potentials, and stimulating lively transformative energies to do something (rather than just know something). Secondly, affective sensory ethnographies are composed (i.e., written, filmed, performed, etc.) to make people feel something. These affective sensory ethnographies are profoundly sensual and moving, and strategically attentive to the pathos from which they derive their transformative power. Examples of these kinds of ethnographies can be found in this volume in the chapters by Stoller, Peterson, and Stewart.  

The turn to affect across the social sciences has generated a great deal of interest in atmospheres. An atmosphere is an ambiance, a collective and yet pre-cognitive feel or mood of a particular place at a particular point in time as experienced by those who are present there (see Sumartojo and Pink, 2020). Contemporary sensory ethnographers have become particularly invested in the study of atmospheres in two principal ways: in terms of the experience of its participants and in terms of their design (though as we will see shortly, these two ends of the spectrum are always understood and investigated in relation to one another). But regardless of the atmospheric subject which a particular study is about, sensory ethnography itself has developed a certain atmospheric quality and orientation. The chapters by Lynch and Bille provide us with two different examples of this quality.

Lynch’s chapter takes us to places like spas and casinos––commercial environments whose atmospheres have been strategically designed with the intent to sell a particular consumer experience. It is here that we ethnographically encounter the ephemerality of a distinct sensory experience. Sensory ethnography, by way of embodied presence, approaches the study of atmospheres through descriptions that are “particular, intimate, fleeting, impressionistic, and partial” (Lynch, this volume). Unlike other approaches to atmospheres which are more static, more ambitious in their attempt to explain away atmospheres as more permanent conditions, atmospheric sensory ethnographies are briefly suspended in webs of relations that spin sensible ephemera. In Lynch’s words: “even spaces that are positively saturated with sensory design (like the casino, or the spa) cannot design out the contingent nature of sensory-spatial relations” (this volume). 

To apprehend these relations, even in part, sensory ethnographers sometimes rely on interviews with atmospheres’ participants—a method that sets them apart from other students of affective atmospheres. But these are not “typical” interviews (if there is such a thing). As Bille writes in his chapter, sensory interviews too take on uniquely atmospheric qualities. Atmospheres after all may be clearly felt by people, but remain notoriously difficult to describe and make sense of through words. These challenges compel ethnographers to find alternative ways to “observe, describe, analyze and theorize atmospheres beyond the words of research participants” (Bille, this volume). Atmospheric sensory ethnographies then become cautious about both the apparent clarity and vagueness of interviewees’ articulations. The key to this atmospheric quality of sensory ethnography, Bille writes, lies in showing “how the distinction between semantic and metaphysical vagueness offers a pragmatic approach to what participants say, which acknowledges the importance of cautiousness towards both fixating an ephemeral experience as well as the certainty of participants’ articulations of the nature of the world” (this volume). In so doing an atmospheric sensory ethnography becomes less self-certain, less stable, less definite, but infinitely more attentive to its own precarity and ephemerality.   

At its onset, sensory ethnography was characterized by a single-sensory approach. A study might focus on smell, for example, or on touch, or taste, and so on. Largely, this was a reaction to (but also a continuation of) the modus operandi of visual ethnography. While there is nothing wrong with a single-sensory approach, a growing number of contemporary sensory ethnographies are moving toward a multi-sensory approach (see Howes, 2019; Pink, 2015). Multi-sensory ethnography does not single out certain senses or sensations but examines them instead in relation to one another. This allows ethnographers to understand how senses and sensations inform one another, how discourses and representations belonging to one sensory realm shape other sensory realms, and how distinct sensory practices unfold as ecologies of sensation rather than as atomistic acts. Multi-sensory ethnographies are also re-conceptualizing sensory politics by re-imagining how sensory dynamics particular to one sense can be approached from the perspective of other senses, such as the case of “non-ocular vistas” recently examined by Jackson et al. (2021) in the context of the Peckham skyline. 

The turn towards a multi-sensory ethnography is largely an epistemological one. Thus, rather than studying and understanding sensations as arising from one sensory domain only, a multi-sensory ethnographer is open to the ways in which sensing is a way of taking part, of sharing, in the broad domain of the sensible. As Laplantine (2015, p. 2) puts it: “The experience of fieldwork is an experience of sharing in the sensible [le partage du sensible]. We observe, we listen, we speak with others, we partake of their cuisine, we try to feel along with them what they experience.” Howes (2019) has framed this approach as a new way of doing fieldwork, a departure from the classic method of doing participant observation and indeed a new practice of participant sensation, a way of sensing and making sense along with others through an actively social—rather than merely physiological—process (p. 18). One would be tempted to say, following Howes’s suggestion, that instead of interlocutors (i.e., people we speak with) or informants (i.e., people who give out information) sensory ethnographers should refer to research participants as co-sentients. Perhaps one day!   

In part, ethnographers are also becoming more sensitive to the need of adopting multi-sensory approaches due to the diffusion of technologies and consumer objects that trouble the traditional boundaries amongst the senses and promise to create experiences—both functional and aesthetic—that are increasingly vivid, immersive, and encompassing of multiple sensory domains. The chapters by Gottschalk, Paterson, as well as Barker and Jewitt address some of these cases. Attention to the multi-sensory is also opening up new avenues of professional inquiry for sensory ethnographers, such as design. In her chapter Pink for example examines the role of sensory design in opening possible futures, arguing that a new mode of doing scholarship and engagement can engage in and influence the ways futures are conceptualized, planned, enacted, and experienced.

For the senses

When Paul Stoller (1997) wrote Sensuous scholarship, the power of storytelling was clear in his mind. Poorly told tales from the field were something he likened to the lingering taste of bad sauce. Narrative ethnographies instead, Stoller argued, had a captivating power over audiences, a power that moved people by virtue of their intimacy, their humanity, and ultimately, their intrinsic value as stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end. As Stoller reminds us in his chapter in this volume, the narrative quality of sensory ethnography, makes people want to keep turning pages. By showing rather than just telling, sensory ethnographies invite us as guests into distant worlds whose sensations are both different and familiar thanks to rich descriptions that are artfully conveyed through care-full prose. Though sensory ethnographies are sometimes narrative, there still are not enough narrative sensory ethnographies around. This requires a greater attention to the need to “re-sense the sensory.” As Stoller puts it in his chapter: “re-sensing the sensory requires storytelling that evokes space and place, hones in on the sonority of vibrant dialogue and depicts the idiosyncrasies of character. These creative moves result in works in which wisdom jumps from the author’s page to the reader’s mind.”

What Stoller calls “writing-as-art” has the power to make readers (as well as viewers, listeners, etc.) feel what other people, and ethnographers themselves, feel. Narrative sensory ethnographies are no longer just sensory (as in, relating to the senses and sensations) but sensual (as in, gratifying the senses by way of exciting, troubling, stimulating, or otherwise affecting sensations). Sensory affective ethnography seeks to enliven sensations rather than interpreting them (see Vannini and Vannini, this volume). This kind of ethnography draws from the power of story to, not so much “transport” a reader to a faithfully-captured lifeworld, but rather to animate a new lifeworld where ethnographic audiences can both imagine and re-imagine the possibilities of existence (also see Elliott and Culhane, 2016). The sensuous quality of these ethnographies often requires that many of the conventions of scholarly writing are destabilized. Gone are the typical organizational schemes (i.e., introduction, background, methods, analysis, conclusion), gone is the need for neatly-assembled paragraphs that are wrapped around a single topic and key citations, gone is the habit of packaging quotes into indented blocks, gone is the forceful presence of ubiquitous citations, and so on. 

Whereas the sensual and narrative qualities of sensory ethnography are not new to the last decade of sensory ethnographic research, the three final qualities I wish to highlight are. Inventive, multi-modal, and non- or more-than-representational ethnographies were novelties when Pink wrote the first edition of Doing sensory ethnography (2009), and still had not fully come into their own when the second edition was published in 2015. Let us begin with the non- or more-than-representational quality, as it is arguably the key to understanding the remaining two. Non-representational or more-than-representational research can take multiple forms, some of which can be too complex to explain in a few lines. But in a nutshell non- or more-than-representational research is a kind of scholarship cognizant of the failings of representation and the impossibility of capturing the depths and nuances of experience (Vannini, 2015a). Non-representational theory and research therefore attempt to “cope” with these failings by animating (rather than reporting) the complexities of our more-than-textual, more-than-human, and multisensory world (Lorimer, 2005, p. 83). Coping often takes place through experimentations, in both writing and other modes of communication, that are intended to simultaneously enliven and unsettle, often with the goal of pushing their audiences to re-imagine something (rather than explain it or understand it). 

Unlike most research, which is indicative and therefore concerned with “what is,” non- and more-than-representational research is subjunctive and therefore concerned with “what if” (Vannini, 2015b). Take for example the contribution to this volume by Ayaka Yoshimizu. Because there are no memorials to the lives and deaths of Japanese sex workers who lived in the transpacific world from the second half of the nineteenth century through early twentieth century, Yoshimizu finds herself performing “unmemorials, memorial objects or sites that are meant to commemorate lost lives or past events but whose intentions are undone or undermined due to the absence of the memorial objects, commemorators, or narratives that enable commemoration” (this volume). The more-than-representational value of this approach lies in the fact that Yoshimizu treats her sensory ethnography as “performative” rather than “informative.” In other words, rather than being concerned with what there is, with what informs her as a “detached researcher of the past from which to reconstruct a possible account of the distant past,” she performatively interacts with what could be in order “to create an occasion for embodied knowledge to be generated about and in the present” (Yoshimizu, this volume).

The imaginative quality of sensory ethnography is based on its more-than-representational basis. Rather than being concerned with prediction, an imaginative approach builds off trust and hope, and in “anticipation of what might be going to happen next” (Pink, 2021, p. 193). In Pink’s words:

While earlier urges toward reflexivity have focused on the past, applying the same reflexive gaze to our imagined and sensed futures is a methodological step toward connecting to other people’s ways of sensing what might happen next. To be able to intervene in the world, in collaboration with others, we need to attend to what these interventions might feel like and to the ways that the circumstances that might emerge from them will feel.

Unlike research concerned with explaining what is and what has been, imaginative sensory ethnography is interventional and driven by methodologies focused on understanding what else something could be, and what will be, and therefore with the unknown, the imagined, and the possible (e.g., see Elliott and Culhane, 2016; Vannini and Vannini, this volume). 

Imagination is often understood as fabrication, but as Ingold (2022) has recently argued, imagining is a form of world-making. To imagine is to take part in active processes of a world in formation, thus “corresponding” with the emergent properties of the lives of the world’s human and non-human inhabitants. “What if,” Ingold asks in his chapter in this volume, “in order to get to the root of our experience of sound” we have to set aside the binary understanding of a sound as something that “can only be either ‘in the world’ or ‘in the mind,’ either physical or psychic”? “What if,” Ingold asks, “it were neither one nor the other?” Imagination is at the root of creation but it is also at the basis of much experimentation. The kind of experimentation, for example, that goes on as people deliberately attempt to enter unfamiliar environments as part of leisure pursuits (see Edensor, this volume). But it is also the kind of experimentation that goes on when research itself becomes artfully creative in order to make certain experiences come to life (see Elliott and Culhane, 2016). 

It is no accident that non-representational and imaginative research is thus generative rather than merely descriptive, creative rather than merely definitive. And in many cases this kind of research is also multimodal, that is, communicative through a multitude of modes beyond the classical written word (e.g., see Cox, Irving, and Wright, 2016). In this volume alone sensory ethnography is conducted through performance, film, photography, community events, decks of cards, exhibitions, sound archives, and more. Multi-modal sensory ethnography is of course not new. As Pink (2015) has noted before, multimodal communication is an ideal strategy to convey sensory ethnographic information, and the history of anthropology and other social sciences is rife with examples of scholarship intended to be heard, seen, and touched, rather than just be read. But what is increasingly novel about contemporary multimodal sensory ethnography is its creative elan, its impetus to do something new rather than just mimic something else. 

Thus, in this volume multimodal sensory ethnography breaks loose the ontological, epistemological, and above all axiological boundaries between science and art. In some cases it does so through an attentive examination of the technological affordances of representational tools like video cameras (see Hölsgens’s chapter), in other cases it does so by through the yet-unexplored possibilities afforded by artificial intelligence (see the chapter by Hennessy and colleagues), and in other cases still it does so by way of involving local communities through arts-based inquiry fueled by cultural critique and social and political emancipation (see chapters by Uzwiak and Rhys-Taylor). As Jewitt and Mackley have written elsewhere, the idea is not simply to augment the old potential of sensory ethnography by going beyond the limits of written word, but instead to respond… 

…to the methodological challenge of how to understand this changing social landscape. A challenge underpinned by a growing “restlessness or dissatisfaction” amongst qualitativeresearchers with the failure of dominant social science methods to adequately account for the visual, the sensory and the digital, an increasing awareness that body experiences cannot be reduced to talk, and the need for embodied methods to help gain insight on the social significance of bodily and sensory experience (Jewitt and Mackley, 2019, p. 92).

The book’s outline

As the editor of this handbook, I made a conscientious effort to neither instruct nor prescribe volume contributors to organize or format the content of their chapters in any specific way. Handbooks are often highly-structured reference books which derive their value from both a quest for comprehensive coverage and consistent style across chapters. But that approach, to me, seemed anathema to the principles of (sensory) ethnography. So, rather than map out the field, identify chapters, and then seek out contributors to write about the topics identified by the editor, I (mostly) asked contributors to write about whatever they wanted and then grouped such chapters together. This “inductive” approach to chapter and topic selection has resulted in a book that does not pretend to be comprehensive but rather in a book that is invariably reflexive. In fact—again drawing inspiration from the ethnographic tradition—I asked contributors to reflexively share the lessons they themselves have learned from the conduction of their work. As a result, rather than feeling like extensive literature reviews all chapters feel like reflections based in personal experiences and fieldwork. 

I have divided the 36 chapters into six parts. Part 1 situates contemporary sensory ethnography and its agenda into its pasts, presents, and futures. Chapters in this part of the book trace the lineage of sensory ethnography and its evolution over time (Howes, Bull), examine the new challenges that sensory ethnographers face in light of new technologies and cultural practices (Paterson, Gottschalk), highlight the critical potential of sensory ethnography and the need for political commitment (Sekimoto and Brown), and outline the future possibilities that are opening up for the field and its practitioners (Pink). 

Part 2 examines some of the more common methods and strategies followed by sensory ethnographers, focusing in particular on the challenges that doing sensory ethnography presents. Contributions cover reflexivity and autoethnography (Hockey and Allen-Collinson), participant observation (Moretti), interviews (Bille), collaboration (Waitt and Harada), multi-sensoriality and technology (Barker and Jewitt), as well as relationality (Friedner). One of the unique characteristics of this handbook is the diversity of topics it covers, and Part 2 of the book is clear evidence of this, with subjects ranging from running (Hockey and Allen-Collinson), gentrification (Moretti), light and atmosphere (Bille), disability and mobility (Waitt and Harada), industrial design (Barker and Jewitt), and deafness and technology (Friedner). 

Part 3 of the book gathers chapters that emphasize the sensuous, affective, and atmospheric qualities of sensory ethnography. Two chapters (by Stewart and Peterson) in this part of the handbook are explicitly driven by the value of sensuality and in order to do so they eschew theoretical and methodological self-exegesis. They both transport us to corners of America that do not typically capture headlines, lifeworlds in which Stewart and Peterson attune themselves to fragments of practices and experiences understood as singularities, ephemeral atmospheres, and ordinary affects. In this part of the book, we also learn about the power of narrative to inform sensuous scholarship (Stoller), about sensuous geographies in the context of running and walking (Larsen) and in the context of sensory design of consumer spaces (Lynch). The chapter by Waskul reflects instead on the rhetorical qualities and compositional strategies employed by sensory ethnographers. 

Part 4 of the handbook is dedicated to more-than-human sensory ethnography. The more-than-human domain is incredibly diverse, ranging from fish and the realm of fishing (Markuksela), artificial intelligence and the digitality of the cloud (Hennessy et al.), urban waste and litter (Fiore), mountains and their sensescapes (Wright), and timber sculptures (Lupton et al.). The scope of more-than-human sensory ethnography is brilliantly introduced by Fijn and Kavesh’s opening chapter, which begins with engagement with animals and goes on to describe the field of more-than-human sensory ethnography in its key characteristics and unique agendas.

Part 5 of the handbook is dedicated to non-representational issues. The opening chapter by Tim Ingold forces us to come to terms with the simplicity of ordinary thought about sound and challenges us to think about it in non-binary terms. Ingold takes us along on a unique sound walk throughout which we are prompted to re-imagine what we hear and how we hear it. In typical non-representational style, in his chapter Edensor asks us to re-imagine the potentials of unfamiliar sensory experiences, in a way continuing along the path opened by Ingold. The chapters by Charette and Elliott and by Yoshimizu ask us to reflect on the limits of the word and the failures of selfhood and memory, respectively in the context of brain injury and memorialization (and the lack thereof). My chapter with April Vannini makes a case for the importance of imagining for real and outlines a few practical lessons in terms of creation, attention, and correspondence. Drysdale and Filmer’s chapter provides us with a set of useful reflections on non-representational thinking at work in the context of doing sensory ethnography in queer spaces. 

The last part of this volume, part 6, gathers together a variety of reflections on the multimodal power and potentials of sensory ethnography. Chapters touch on film and video (Kasic, Hölsgens), sound (Cox), community-based inquiry (Uzwiak, Rhys-Taylor), and photography (Irving). Topics range from skateboarding (Hölsgens), nature and place (Kasic), sound archives (Cox), and community (Uzwiak) to food (Rhys-Taylor), and sensory education (Irving). The book is then brilliantly concluded by Anna Harris’s insightful and thought-provoking epilogue

As an editor I am aware that there are limitations—indeed utter distortions—inherent in writing about multimodal scholarship rather than showing it through the modes it is intended to be communicated in, and therefore I have striven to utilize the web to do what the book cannot. Several of the chapters in part 6 of the book, but other parts as well, are accompanied by visual and audio material hosted by Concordia University and David Howes’s Sensory Design team at: http://www.sensorydesign.ca.