ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author offers an ethnographic example of how sensing beauty is a skilful and situated capacity, namely a skill that is learnt, embodied, and socialized in specific ways for distinct practices. Harvesting the pastureland is a functional necessity, a skilled activity, and a canvas open to creativity and design so that children can take part in the same 'common sensing' through leisurely games. By participating in place-making activities, a 'common sense' is developed, namely the sense of this particular place as worthy, of this landscape as beautiful, of this memory as valuable. Ultimately, to study beauty as skill is a way of arguing for the complexity of sensory ethnography vis-a-vis the determinism and reductionism of the new neuro-everything. Apprenticeship thus shapes forms of 'common sensing', namely a socialized, learnt way of attuning to certain – and not other – shared understandings of order, harmony, and design.
