ABSTRACT
The anthropology of the senses takes a cultural approach to the study of the senses and a sensory approach to the study of culture. Its methodology of choice is sensory ethnography (also known as participant sensation). There are three main variants of sensory ethnography: classic, cinematographic, and experimental. The first is exemplified by such monographs as Body and Emotion (Desjarlais, 1992), Culture and the Senses (Geurts, 2002), and Sensual Relations (Howes, 2003); the second by the audiovisual work of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab (directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor); and, the third by A Different Kind of Ethnography (Elliott & Culhane, 2017) as well as diverse experiments in the emergent field of sensory museology. This chapter presents a genealogy of sense-based social inquiry across the three variants, with a particular focus on how “sensing cultures” took over from “writing culture” in the early 1990s, as well as the highly productive exchanges between sensory anthropology and medical anthropology, and the sensualization of material culture studies of the last two decades. As the philosopher Michel Serres once remarked: “If a revolt [in scholarship] is to come, it will have to come from the five senses!” (cited in Howes, 2022, p. 3). All of the contributions to this handbook testify to the accuracy of Serres’ pronouncement.
