Compare methods
Review your selected methods side by side; rows that differ are highlighted.
| Sensory Ethnography× | Material Culture Analysis× | |
|---|---|---|
| Field | Anthropology | Anthropology |
| Family | Process / pipeline | Process / pipeline |
| Year of origin≠ | 2009 | 2012 |
| Originator≠ | Sarah Pink (building on the anthropology of the senses) | Material culture studies tradition (Ian Hodder; Appadurai/Kopytoff object-biography lineage) |
| Type≠ | Fieldwork and representation attending to the full sensorium | Systematic study of objects as evidence about culture and social relations |
| Seminal source≠ | Pink, S. (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage. ISBN: 9781446287316 | Hodder, I. (2012). Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN: 9780470672129 |
| Aliases | Sensorial Ethnography, Ethnography of the Senses, Multisensory Ethnography, Sensory Fieldwork | Material Culture Studies, Object Analysis, Artefact Analysis, Anthropology of Things |
| 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. | Material culture analysis is the systematic study of physical objects and artefacts — tools, clothing, buildings, gifts, commodities, everyday possessions — as evidence about the people and societies that make, use, exchange, and discard them. It treats things not as inert backdrop but as active participants in social life, carrying meanings, structuring practices, and binding people into relationships. Drawing on object-biography thinking and on Ian Hodder's account of human–thing entanglement, it asks what an object's form, history, and circulation can reveal about culture that words alone cannot. |
| ScholarGateDataset ↗ |
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