ABSTRACT
I had always considered myself to be an urban sociologist brought up on the works of Ervin Goffman and a wide range of subcultural sociology often coming under the rubric of sociology of deviance. As a teacher I found that students often warmed to the ethnographic aspects of everyday life in its many guises and forms as distinct from the meta-theoretical meanderings of so much research. When I began interviewing subjects for my first book Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life, I had never heard of sensory ethnography and indeed unknowingly worked within an implicit visual epistemology of the social world. The chapter begins with a reflection on what was to become an auditory epistemology of everyday urban experience based upon “deep-listening” embodied in the ethnographic encounter with Walkman and later iPod users at the time. In trying to disentangle the meanings embodied in use, I realized that the visually based epistemology of urban life that so much work entailed offered very few insights into what I was “hearing.” In this sense, an auditory-based ethnography produced new sets of theoretically informed insights that were not restricted to the visual or, indeed, the auditory. Today, theorists of the everyday have to contend with complex and challenging new mediations that reformulates our relation to the world, to others, and indeed ourselves. The chapter reflects upon how new structures of meaning and practices might be incorporated into a sensory ethnography.
