Can sensory ethnography redistribute authority?
By Junghee Yang
One of the enduring attractions and challenges of ethnography lies in the demand to translate corporeal, embodied experience into language. This process entails two interrelated dilemmas: on the one hand, attempts to attend to non-verbal cues of smell, touch, sound, and affect are inevitably reduced into language, flattening precisely what makes them meaningful; on the other, this reliance on textualisation reveals broader questions of authority, neutrality, and the politics of who can write from where. These acute dilemmas emerged during my own mini-ethnography project on sensory experiences and emotional labour in shared kitchens of student residential halls. I found myself continuously hovering between erasure of my bodily presence in the name of analytical distance and the risk of over-marking it as experiential authority, until I settled to confront the need for vulnerability and partiality.
During fieldwork, the role of the observer prioritises visual metaphors, potentially overlooking other modes of knowing (touching, smelling, listening, moving, and feeling). I found this especially true in my own field site, where sensory cues like smell and sound often revealed more about social dynamics than visual observation alone. Scholars like Sarah Pink propose sensory ethnography as a remedy. In “Doing Sensory Ethnography” (2009), Pink critiques the visual/textual bias of ethnography and advocates for “participant sensing,” which emphasises marginalised senses. Rather than about diversifying data, it is about facilitating relational interactions between researcher and participant. By “walking with others” or just by “being there,” the ethnographer learns as an apprentice and gains access to otherwise unrecognised forms of knowledge (22).
Initially, I drew on Pink (2009)’s concept of sensory ethnography as a form of apprenticeship, expecting this approach would help me make sense of multisensory experience into a more generalised form of knowledge. However, the writing process revealed that sensory data was always filtered by my body, my positionality, and my habits of perception. As a Korean woman interacting mostly with Asian women from India and China, my sense of what counted as ‘foreign’, ‘familiar’, or ‘Western’, and even what counted as sensory data in the first place, was already shaped. Although I intentionally included European and male participants to diversify perspectives, I noticed myself unconsciously aligning with the former through gender and with the latter through cultural familiarity. I was continuously aligning and distancing between the insider and outsider positions depending on the relational context, closely reflecting what Narayan (1993) calls a “multiplex identity” (673).
What seems like a matter of identity and proximity in the field becomes a question of authority on the page. As Atkinson and Hammersley (1994) famously critiqued, anthropology’s longstanding overemphasis on textual forms, reinforced by the broader ‘rhetorical turn’ in the social sciences, has constrained the possibilities of ethnographic insight. Before entering the field, researchers consume canonical, standard texts that shape how they expect the field to appear; after fieldwork, they produce similarly structured narratives that contribute to what Geertz (1973) described as a “literary convention.” In it, ways of seeing and knowing are standardised as a genre of textual product. Their critique still rings true as an invitation to reflect on the aesthetics and ethics of ethnographic texts, rather than a call to abandon writing.
Interpreting this critique as a call to expand ethnographic tools to photography, film, or other visual media would miss the point. What Atkinson and Hammersley point to is a more complex dilemma in the anthropological practices of reading our inter-textual world, both literally and figuratively. In the literal or usual sense, ‘text’ refers to techniques of ethnographic writing that have historically privileged visual information and language-reliant knowledge production. In the figurative sense, ‘text’ stands for the cultural baggage and power relations that shape the production and consumption of ethnography. In this context, the risk is not simply an overreliance on writing or vision, but a narrowing of what observation is allowed to register. When seeing becomes the dominant mode of knowing, ethnographers risk, ironically, losing sight of other forms of presence. In practice, these losses (embodied non-verbal senses, ethical and political accountability) are inseparably intertwined. This raises a question that sensory ethnography aims to answer: If sensory ethnography enables new ways of seeing and listening, can it also redistribute authority?
My proximity to the field also created a set of difficulties during the participant observation and the writing process that followed. I struggled to leave a void in the data, filling in narrative gaps with my own voice, not in the analytical sense, but in the generative sense. At the same time, I hesitated to quote myself, worrying that these would make the project appear too personal, particularly given that my field site included my living space, and my research access came so easily compared to peers’ projects. This hesitation persisted even though I was aware that my sensory impressions constituted a central source of field knowledge.
I also struggled with using the first-person voice, fearing it would appear messy or insufficiently theoretical. To compensate, I conducted more interviews, anticipating that expanding the number of external voices might legitimise the text where my own presence felt excessive. Only later in the writing process did I recognise how this impulse mirrored a pursuit of ‘professionalism’ and a broader disciplinary challenge. Revising the project meant not resolving this tension, but letting it remain visible. It also exposes the myth of ‘complete participation’: in my case, insiders perform distance in the hope of meeting academic expectations. Further, it exposes an irony of sensory ethnography where writers could minimise their own body, filtering out their interpretation of smell and sound, although the sensory research requires embodied honesty. These realisations led to revisions in both content and form. I rewrote a significant portion of my mini ethnography from the third-person description with a first-person narrative of my own sensory experience. This felt like a bold move, to expose ‘I’ as both asset and liability.
Here, I realised Pink’s suggestion maintains a methodological invention rather than a political one. Without sensitive attention to positionality and power, sensory methods risk becoming another form of extraction or Othering. There remains the risk of reproducing an extractive gaze that simply collects sensory data without interrogating its own authority, even when the fieldwork appears immersive. I call this the ‘Sniffing Coloniser’: a figure who claims closeness through embodied experience yet reinforces hierarchies by narrating sensory difference. Atkinson (2014) similarly critiques this possibility of sensory ethnography becoming performative, suggesting that researchers may ‘do’ sensory work to appear progressive while unchallenging institutional norms (79). Then the more pressing question becomes: When sensory ethnography fails to redistribute authority, where does that failure occur?
Arjun Shankar’s (2019) concept of “participatory pedagogy” offers a useful response. Drawing on fieldwork and a participatory photography project with youths in rural India, Shankar experiments with transgressing sensory biases to learn how images can be heard. Shankar’s pedagogy of listening, or “participatory hearing”, is grounded in reciprocal teaching and learning in the field, which enables the participants’ “practices of refusal” (231) on dominant narratives about rural life. By taking these refusals seriously, the researcher is forced to begin from narratives of lack and powerlessness, rather than omniscience. Consequently, Shankar models a humbler anthropology that foregrounds co-creation, reciprocity, and refusal as methodological commitments. Rather than resolving questions of authority, this approach reframes how authority might be unsettled through practices of listening.
Shankar’s intervention makes newly visible another enduring dilemma in anthropology: the tension between claims to neutrality and the politics of marked and unmarked authorship. This is not a failure of participatory pedagogy per se. Rather, it reveals a constraint imposed when such experiments must ultimately take the form of a readable academic text. As Atkinson and Hammersley (1994) already observed, while science and rhetoric cannot be sharply distinguished in ethnographic writing, the dominant style still favours authorial omniscience. This compels researchers to position themselves as neutral, objective observers distinguishable from the Other. In this form, ethnographic writing is not merely a genre but a persuasive apparatus that translates qualitative experience into scientific knowledge and secures anthropology’s disciplinary authority—an apparatus shared, in different ways, across research traditions beyond anthropology. The move toward humbler, sensory ethnographies often faces requirements of renewed distancing at the moment these experiences are rendered as data, inscribing the familiar divide between the Author and the Other. As “Writing Culture” (Clifford and Marcus 1986) reminds us, this is not a stylistic issue but an ethical and political one.
Put differently, participatory pedagogy is not a remedy if thick description continues to involve others on unequal terms. Crucially, this tension extends beyond anthropology. Feminist geographer Max Liboiron (2021) critiques similar dynamics in the academic norm of unmarked whiteness:
It is common to introduce Indigenous authors with their nation/affiliation, while settler and white scholars almost always remain unmarked, like “Lloyd Stouffer.” This unmarking is one act among many that recentres settlers and whiteness as an unexceptional norm, while deviations have to be marked and named. Simone de Beauvoir (French) called this positionality both “positive and neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general.” (3).
Un/marking is about the power that decides who gets to speak as a universal voice and who must speak from a situated voice. Some researchers, such as Sophie Chao, insist on full transparency, opening their works with positional declarations: “I write this commentary from the positionality of a Sino-French female, middle-class scholar, trained in Anglo-European forms of research and operating within a discipline – anthropology […]” (Lundberg, Regis, et al. 5). Her model shows how reflexivity rather than composed objectivity exposes the politics of knowledge production, marking and rendering the researcher’s positionality thick rather than neutral.
The value of such experiments lies in their capacity to expose how sensory descriptions can be shaped by culturally situated or class-specific habits of perception. What becomes legible as ‘foreign’, ‘familiar’ or even as sensory data is already subjectively distributed across bodies, backgrounds, and social proximities, which is a point that became unavoidable through my own mini-ethnography. Again, in exploring the (inter)textual world of contemporary anthropology, methodological and political dimensions of text and observation cannot be seen as separate domains.
Sensory ethnography attempts richer ways of seeing and listening, but my experience suggests that its political stakes do not lie in how many senses we activate, or how immersive our fieldwork appears. They lie in a quieter, more uncomfortable moment, predominantly after the fieldwork: when sensory experiences become text, and when the writer decides what to do with the ‘I’. When sensory ethnography fails to redistribute authority, the failure happens here. When embodied knowledge is translated into a readable form that argues neutrality, fluency, or professionalism at the cost of the writer’s marked position. Reclaiming the ‘I’ in sensory ethnography is not about self-disclosure of authenticity, nor is it a confessional tool. It is about refusing the fantasy of neutral observation and staying with the risks of writing from somewhere.
Bibliography
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Clifford, James, and George E Marcus. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. University Of California Press, 1986.
Liboiron, Max. Pollution Is Colonialism. Duke University Press, 2021.
Lundberg, Anita, et al. “Decolonizing the Tropics: Part One.” ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, vol. 22, no. 1, James Cook University, July 2023, pp. 1–28, https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.22.1.2023.3998. Accessed 2 Oct. 2023.
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