and Street, 2007; Hindmarsh and Pilnick, 2007; Lammer, 2007), sensory design and architecture (Malnar and Vodvarka, 2004; Pallasmaa, 2005 [1999]), attention to the senses in material culture studies (e.g. Tilley, 2006) and in performance studies (Hahn, 2007), in branding (Lindstrom, 2005), the ‘multi-modality’ paradigm (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001), archaeology (e.g. Levy et al., 2004; Witmore, 2004), history (Classen, 1998; Cowan and Steward, 2007) and within the notion of ‘complex ethnography’ (Atkinson et al., 2007).
The approach to sensory ethnography advocated here does not need to be owned by any one academic discipline. Instead, across these fields of study scholars are creating new paths in academic debate through the theoretical exploration of sensory experience, perception, sociality, knowing, knowledge, practice and culture (e.g. Ingold, 2000; Thrift, 2004; Howes, 2005a; Pink and Howes, 2010; Ingold and Howes, 2011). The debates and arguments inspired by these literatures are shaping academic scholarship, empirical studies, interventions and futures across a broad range of substantive areas. They inform how researchers represent their findings in conventional written and audiovisual texts and in innovative forms designed to communicate about sensory experience. They also have implications for ethnographic methodology.
What is sensory ethnography?
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.
