When Jesus humbly washes his disciples’ feet (John 13), he engages his friends up close using the sense of touch. This article explores how his touch conveys a quality of love that no other physical ...sense can capture. Sensory Anthropology reveals how touch is often overlooked and undervalued but is quite potent. We confronted these dynamics most recently when the pandemic reversed our cultural rules around touch: almost overnight, touch became dangerous and distance a kindness. This rule-reversal proves analogous for our exploration of the foot washing. By employing Affect Theory, this study draws on these pandemic experiences alongside two tactile exchanges in the Fourth Gospel (John 9, 12) to examine how Jesus’s touch in the foot washing overturns the “rules” to convey a unique quality of love.
Sensory anthropology has quickly become a dynamic and expansive field of contem porary scholarship, with ethnographers increasingly interested in diverse sensory cosmologies as indicative of a ...“sensory turn” in anthropology. However, there has also been a tendency for these scholars to work in a linguistic silo, and overlook the potential contributions of local knowledge and scholarship. In this article, we begin to address this gap by bringing Japanese and English language scholarship on the senses in Japan into conversation to interrogate linguistic and cultural divides. Critical examination of these intertwined academic traditions not only provides new intellectual resources, it challenges assumed categories of analysis and deepens our understanding of cultural sensory formations.
This article presents a defense of the concept of materiality in the face of Tim Ingold’s critique of the concept as part of his “efforts to restore anthropology to life” in Being Alive and ...elsewhere. While acknowledging the forcefulness of Ingold’s stress on the “liveliness” of materials, and doctrine of perception “as action” (not representation), it critiques the way he neuters the perceiving subject, abstracts the senses, disregards the sensuous pleasures of making, and elides the sensori-social life of things. Three case studies are presented by way of illustration: the sensorial archaeology of perception, the “exuberant materiality” of the Byzantine bas-relief metal icon, and the tactility of “ladies’ craftwork” in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. In place of Ingold’s ideal-typical figures – the rootless wayfarer, the skilled craftsman – this article brings out the situatedness of the human subject within a particular tradition, or sensory and social regime, and how this mediates their construction and perception of things and other persons.
In this essay, I introduce an analytic of atmosphere as a way to bridge the gap between the phenomenology of the felt‐body and the anthropology of the senses. This analytic of atmospheres as ...multisensoriality partially aligns with, but also differs from other anthropological approaches to multisensoriality or the anthropology of the senses. Examining the meaningfulness of atmospheres as spatially extended emotions from a neo‐phenomenological perspective, I argue that the notion of atmosphere offers advantages for understanding sensory cultural practices such as sounding and lighting. The felt dimensions of these practices often escape full qualification by cultural discourses, but are nevertheless deeply meaningful. Further, I explore how such atmospheric meaningfulness is irreducible to particular single sensory modi. Instead, it rests on diffuse and synesthetic kinds of felt‐bodily affectedness with a holistic character. I demonstrate this by way of two ethnographic examples, investigating practices sounding and lighting, respectively, as atmospheric practices.
Purpose
Multisensory stimulation is integral to experiential consumption. However, a gap persists between recognition of the importance of multisensory stimulation and the research techniques used to ...study the effects of such stimulation on consumption experiences. This article draws on sensory anthropology to narrow the gap.
Design/methodology/approach
Sensory anthropology has the potential to help consumer researchers understand multisensory stimulation and its effect on consumption experiences. To highlight this potential, ethnographic fieldwork is reported for two related experiential settings: yacht racing and adventure racing.
Findings
It is shown how consumer researchers can apply concepts and data collection techniques from sensory anthropology to derive powerful insights into consumption experiences. A set of guidelines and examples is derived from the embodied concepts associated with sensory anthropology, namely, kinaesthetic schema, bodily mimesis, the mindful body and local biology. These concepts are used to comprehend how consumers experience sensations phenomenologically, understand them culturally and re-enact them socially.
Practical implications
By acknowledging and engaging the senses, researchers can acquire embodied information that would not be evident from the conventional interview, survey or experimental data. Sensory anthropology adds to what is known from psychological, social and cultural sources to enable organisations to differentiate their offerings by means of the senses and sensory expressions, not only in yacht and adventure racing but potentially in many other experiential settings, such as travel, shopping, entertainment and immersive gaming.
Originality/value
This article offers distinct and original methodological insights for consumer researchers by focusing on concepts and data collection techniques that assist the study of experiential consumption from an embodied and corporeal perspective.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork among border police agents at Copenhagen Airport and Gibraltar International Airport, the article explores the convergences and divergences between human and ...technological sensory work and decision-making in the daily operation of border and security control. Presenting two situations in which travellers and their luggage are scrutinised and their intentions and potential future actions are imagined, the analysis focuses on the interface between biometric technologies and human agents, the different technological and human capacities to identify and assess threats, their different capacities for hindsight and foresight, and the constant shifts in modes of seeing, unseeing and reasoning that the interface installs. The analysis concludes by showing that the actual object of assessment in border control is neither an ID nor an identity, but a synthetic and ephemeral figure created in the instant of control as a composite of data inputs and multiple sensory cues.
Moving beyond a rhythmanalysis approach to banal mobilities and diurnal journey making – commuting, visiting, shopping, leisure – this paper explores how place‐dependent forms of transport shape the ...feel and flow of the city. Theorizing the city as polyrhythmic reveals multiple traces of local/global and past/present in the socio‐historically situatedness of urban mobilities. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Ho Chi Minh City, I reconsider the dis/orderliness of different movements in the mega‐urban postcolonial Global South. The paper's main arguments are arranged around the thick description of a scene in HCMC's everyday traffic flows as experienced from the curbside of one of the city's busy streets. I draw on concepts from avant guard musical composition to rethink the de‐synchronization and disharmony of congested roads as polyrhythmic relations. Firstly, I deploy the concept of aleatory to offer an alternative explanation for unpredictable elements in metropolitan traffic flow. Secondly, I apply the concept of phasing, or syncing, to sensory experiences of roads to explore co‐production of polyrhythmic relations. Thirdly, I reflect on isorhythmia and stochastic processes to analyze influences of models of digitization on repetition and randomness in mobilities.
Pigdogging is a popular pastime in Australia, a form of recreational hunting whereby people collaborate with dogs to chase and catch wild pigs. This paper analyses the hunt as an interspecies event ...that unfolds through the sensual and sensory entanglements of human and nonhuman, with a particular focus on the perspectives of the hunters. The concept of ‘atmosphere’ will be employed to frame an ethnographic analysis of two facets of pigdogging. First, by hunting with a dog, humans augment their capacity to identify the presence of pigs through the canine's extraordinary sense of scent. Through this relationship, the world of scent is revealed as having atmospheric properties: an enveloping phenomenon which is known through the dog, yet also escapes the hunter's perceptual apprehension. Second, this paper will illustrate examples of how atmosphere develops through the sensual relations between human and nonhuman bodies during the hunt. An affectively charged interspecies encounter is composed and participated in by the hunter through this recreational practice, and affords the enactment of subjectivities central to an aesthetics of pigdogging. Hunting atmospheres in this paper emerge at the juncture of human and more‐than‐human bodies, perspectives and worlds.
This special issue suggests that the need to examine the entangled lives of species, selves and other beings through a multisensory perspective is crucial and timely. Developing on a sensory ...analysis, one that emerges through what Anna Tsing refers to as the ‘arts of noticing’ (2015), this introductory paper explores how both nonhuman and human lives are intertwined, and how their close examination can guide anthropologists in their ability to capture the subtleties of more‐than‐human engagement, connection and relatedness. Through articles within this issue from Australian anthropology and beyond, we ask how becoming‐with more‐than‐humans helps us to construct a post‐humanist analysis in the combination of sensory anthropology and multispecies anthropology. Through a combination of these two fields, the paper suggests, anthropology can take up the opportunity to think about animals as subjects, through our ability to communicate beyond language and to engage in a more meaningful way through interspecies knowledge‐making.
It has long been claimed that there is no lexical field of smell, and that smell is of too little validity to be expressed in grammar. We demonstrate both claims are false. The Cha'palaa language ...(Ecuador) has at least 15 smell terms, each of which is formed using a type of classifier previously thought not to exist. Moreover, using conversational corpora we show that Cha'palaa speakers also talk about smell more than Imbabura Quechua and English speakers. Together, this shows how language and social interaction may jointly reflect distinct cultural orientations towards sensory experience in general and olfaction in particular.
PDF
