ABSTRACT
Sensuous scholarship refers to research about the human senses, through the senses, and for the senses. The roots of sensuous scholarship as an organized way of knowing and strategy of representation can be found in Paul Stoller's seminal work on the Songhay of Niger and his subsequent reflections. As merely a specific genre within a broader category, the somatic layered account is in fact a specialized technique—one of many devices in the toolbox of sensuous scholarship. Stoller's solution is to generate sensuous scholarship: a new form of "impressionist and literary tale". Sensuous scholarship is tasteful fieldwork about, through, and for the human senses. It is fieldwork about the senses because it attempts to focus on a much-neglected dimension of life: the realm of human sensations. Human sensations are indeed actions through which ethnographers perform a self and bring a world into being.
