Compare methods

	Sensory Ethnography	Ethnographic Research
Field	Anthropology	Qualitative Research
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2009	1920s–1970s
Originator	Sarah Pink (building on the anthropology of the senses)	Anthropology (Malinowski, Boas); applied in health and sociology (Geertz)
Type	Fieldwork and representation attending to the full sensorium	Method
Seminal source	Pink, S. (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage. ISBN: 9781446287316	Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. Basic Books.
Aliases	Sensorial Ethnography, Ethnography of the Senses, Multisensory Ethnography, Sensory Fieldwork	Ethnography, Participatory Observation, Field Research
Related	4	4
Summary	Sensory ethnography, developed by Sarah Pink, is an approach to fieldwork and representation that treats human experience as fundamentally multisensory and embodied, attending deliberately to smell, touch, sound, taste, and movement alongside the sight and text that conventional ethnography privileges. Rather than reducing fieldwork to what can be observed and written down, it asks the researcher to participate in and reflect on the felt, sensed texture of everyday life. It then seeks forms of representation — evocative writing, audio, video, walking with people — that can convey that sensory knowing to others.	Ethnographic research is an immersive qualitative methodology in which researchers spend prolonged time in a community, organization, or social setting, combining participant observation, interviews, and document analysis to develop a rich, contextual understanding of a group's beliefs, practices, and social structures. Grounded in anthropology and refined for health, organizational, and social research, ethnography produces 'thick description' (Geertz 1973) that reveals the meaning and context underlying observable behavior.