of (for example) touch and direction would be transformed.
Geographers who have recently taken ethnographic approaches to the senses include Divya P. Tolia-Kelly’s collaborative work concerning migrants’ perceptions of the Lake District in the UK (2007), Tim Edensor’s writings on industrial ruins (e.g. 2007), Justin Spinney’s mobile (2008) ethnography of urban cyclists and Lisa Law’s (2005) analysis of how Filipina domestic workers negotiated their identities in Hong Kong. Some of this ethnographic work examines the senses through the geographical paradigm of landscape. For instance, Law shows how, amongst other things, Filipina domestic workers produce their own sensory landscapes in public spaces of the city on their days off. Through this she suggests that they evoke ‘a sense of home’, which ‘incorporates elements of history and memory, of past and present times and spaces, helping to create a familiar place’ (2005: 236). In the context of an existing lack of ‘a methodology for researching sensory landscapes’ Law suggests ethnographic research can make an important contribution (2005: 227). This and other work, such as the innovative collaborative arts practice-based methodologies developed by Tolia-Kelly in her work on migrants’ experiences of landscape (2007) demonstrate the potential for ethnographic methodologies in human geography. By focusing the sensory experiencing body and exploring its interdependency with landscape (see Casey, 2001) a sensory ethnography can reveal important insights into the constitution of self and the articulation of power relations.
A particularly important influence in the way the senses have been discussed in human geography has been through the notion of the ‘visceral’. For the geographers Allison Hayes-Conroy and Jessica Hayes-Conroy ‘visceral refers to the realm of internally-felt sensations, moods and states of being, which are born from sensory engagement with the material world’ including that of ‘the cognitive mind’, since they stress: ‘visceral refers to a fully minded-body (as used by McWhorter 1999) that is capable of judgment’ (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2008: 462). In their work, which focuses on the visceral nature of food experiences, they connect the politics of everyday life to the way it is experienced, therefore seeing the study of the sensory experience of food as being a route through which to understand how power relations are embedded in everyday life. Their view of what they refer to as ‘visceral politics’ moves away from the idea of ‘individualistic forms of being-political’ and instead they profess to ‘move towards a radically relational view of the world, in which structural modes of critique are brought together with an appreciation of chaotic, unstructured ways in which bodily intensities unfold in the production of everyday life’ (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2008: 462). In their later work they move beyond the focus on food experiences and argue for a wider application of a visceral approach in geography; indeed, suggesting that
geographic work demands attentiveness to the visceral realm, a realm where social structures and bodily sensations come together and exude each other, where dispositions and discourses seem to relate as organic-synthetic plasma, and where categories and incarnations defy themselves, daring to be understood. (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2010: 1281)
The interests in spatial theory, the senses and the ‘visceral’ that have converged in the work of human geographers create a fertile intellectual trajectory for a sensory approach to ethnography to draw from. In Chapter 2 I take these connections further to suggest how geographical theories of place and space (Massey, 2005) might, in combination with philosophical (Casey, 1996) and anthropological (Ingold, 2007, 2008) work on place and the phenomenology of perception, inform our understanding of sensory ethnography practice. The attention that human geographers tend to pay to the political and the power relations that are embedded in the everyday, the way it is experienced and the spatial relations that it is implicated in, sheds a specific light on the questions that we might ask through sensory ethnography practice.
Sociology of the senses: interaction and corporeality
A history of the sociology of the senses
An initial impulse towards a sociology of the senses was proposed by Georg Simmel in his 1907 essay ‘Sociology of the senses’) (1997 [1907]). Simmel’s agenda was not to establish a subdiscipline of a sociology of the senses. Rather, as part of an argument about the importance of a micro-sociology (1997 [1907]: 109) he focused on, as he puts it, ‘the meanings that mutual sensory perception and influencing have for the social life of human beings, their coexistence, cooperation and opposition’ (1997 [1907]: 110). He suggested that our sensory perception of others plays two key roles in human interaction. First, our ‘sensory impression’ of another person invokes emotional or physical responses in us. Second, ‘sense impression’ becomes ‘a route of knowledge of the other’ (1997 [1907): 111). Although Simmel concluded by proposing that ‘One will no longer be able to consider as unworthy of attention the delicate, invisible threads that are spun from one person to another’ (1997 [1907]: 120) it was a century later that sociologists began to engage seriously with this question. In part Simmel’s legacy encouraged sociologists to focus on a sensory sociology of human interaction. When I wrote the first edition of Doing Sensory Ethnography, published in 2009, coinciding with my own rather frustrated search for sociological research about the senses, Kelvin Low had recently confirmed the earlier assessment of Gail Largey and Rod Watson (2006 [1972]: 39) in his observation that ‘sociologists have seldom researched the senses’ (Low, 2005: 399). Nevertheless, some significant sociological work on the senses has since emerged, including that of Low himself, discussed below.
Although Simmel saw the ‘lower senses’ to be of secondary sociological significance to vision and hearing (1997 [1907]: 117), he suggested that ‘smelling a person’s body odour is the most intimate perception of them’ since ‘they penetrate, so to speak in a gaseous form into our most sensory inner being’ (1997 [1907]: 119). This interest in smell and social interaction has continued in the sociology of the senses. Largey and Watson’s essay entitled ‘The Sociology of Odors’ (2006 [1972]) also extends the sociological interest in social interaction to propose that ‘Much moral symbolism relevant to interaction is expressed in terms of olfactory imagery’ (2006 [1972]: 29). They stress the ‘real’ consequences that might follow from this (2006 [1972]: 30). For instance, they note how ‘odors are often referred to as the insurmountable barrier to close interracial and/or interclass interaction’ (2006 [1972]: 32) as well as being associated with intimacy amongst an ‘in-group’ (2006 [1972]: 34). Also, with reference to social interaction, Largey and Watson see odour as a form of ‘impression management’ by which individuals try ‘to avoid moral stigmatization’ and present an appropriate/approved ‘olfactory identity’ (2006 [1972]: 35). Low (who proposes that this approach might be extended to other senses (2005: 411)) also examines the role of smell in social interaction. He argues that
smell functions as a social medium employed by social actors towards formulating constructions/judgements of race-d, class-ed and gender-ed others, operating on polemic/categorical constructions (and also, other nuances between polarities) which may involve a process of othering. (2005: 405)
As such he suggests that ‘the differentiation of smell stands as that which involves not only an identification of “us” vs “them” or “you” vs “me”, but, also, processes of judgement and ranking of social others’ (2005: 405). Building on Simmel’s ideas Low’s study of smell (which involved ethnographic research) ‘attempts to move beyond “absolutely supra-individual total structures” (Simmel, 1997: 110) towards individual, lived experiences where smell may be utilized as a social medium in the (re) construction of social realities’ (Low, 2005: 398).
Departures from the early sociology of the senses
Other sociological studies that attend to the senses have departed from Simmel’s original impetus in two ways. On the one hand Michael Bull’s (2000) study of personal stereo users’ experiences of urban environments takes the sociology of the senses in
