In recent years, anthropologists have pointed out that sensory perception is related to culture. Constance Classen (2012), the author of The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch, says that "sensory perception is both a physical act and a culture. "One controversial claim has been made famous by the insistence of Marshall McLuhan (1967). He insists that societies without words are dominated by spoken words and sounds, while societies with words experience words visually and are therefore dominated by vision. 
 
 
The key research question on this website is the relationship between the senses and culture. Based on the ethnography of the portobello road market, the site explores how people in the market use touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste to access sensory experiences, how each person's sensory experience differs about their cultural background, and which senses can be digitized and how the senses interact with each other in a digital context.

​

I developed an ethnography using the Portobello road market as my field site to address these research questions. Portobello Road Market is one of the famous markets in London, which is full of shops from different places and requires people's senses to experience, including the sense of sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. 

​

I recruited six vendors as my volunteers, three of whom I conducted participant observations and three of whom I conducted in-depth interviews, selling aromatherapy soaps, CDs, organic mushrooms, ceramic mugs, fried chicken rolls, and remade glass clocks. I discovered that people use different focus senses for different products and found multi-sensory interactions. After getting their consent, I placed a tape recorder in their booths and recorded their daily phrases to attract customers. WordCloud software was used to analyze the words that appeared with high frequency. Firstly, I observed the soap stall owners that soap requires the customer's sense of smell, but the outdoor space of the market also poses a challenge to the sense of smell, making the scent of soapless noticeable, so the stall owners use their sense of sight and sound to attract customers first. Second, in my observations, I found that stall owners use their senses as a tool to attract customers. Aroma soap stall owners' marketing techniques are based on customer perceptions to attract customers to use their senses to explore the merchandise. For example, a sign that says "handmade" is used to visually attract customers because, in their perceptions, handmade soap is more valuable because it is unique than soap produced on a factory line. Third, in my communication with the vendors selling organic mushrooms and ceramic mugs, I found that different people describe the senses differently, based on their cultural backgrounds. For example, many vendors sell the same mushrooms and ceramic mugs in the market, but they have different ways of setting up their stalls, describing the mushrooms, and appealing to their customers' senses. That is due to their different life backgrounds. For example, the descriptions of mushrooms as "fresh," "cheap," "organic," and "elfin" are This is because different stall owners have different locations and purposes for mushroom farming.

​

To understand the relationship between the senses and culture, I recruited three visitors to the market as my participants in the tour. They were a British male who came to the market for the first time, a British female who came to the market for the third time, and a Chinese girl who went to the market every week. I asked them to draw a sensory map after visiting the market, and in the communication, I learned how people from different cultures use their senses and how these senses are combined with their memories. Besides, I set the rapid spread of Covid-19 in the UK as a turning point to examine whether the senses were different then than they are now. When Covid-19 was spreading widely in the UK, portobello market managers required people to wear masks and keep a social distance in the market. I spoke with the fried chicken stall owner and asked him to recall how the fried chicken rolls, which require the senses of taste, smell, and touch, were affected by the restrictions, and he provided me with video footage of him at the time, and of him in 2022. These two videos and his communication allowed me to understand the restrictions on people's sense of smell and taste during the Covid period and hit the restaurant industry.

​

To understand the digital use of senses in the market, I used Instagram as a field site for online ethnography and analyzed the content of Instagram hashtags with #portobellomarket. Also, combined with my interviewees, their Instagram accounts were analyzed. In observation, I found that digital technology allows visual and auditory senses to be digitized, and the visual and auditory evocation of people's memory and cognition can also bring the experience of smell, touch, and taste to people. At the same time, digital technologies such as Photoshop, filters, and video editing can transform nature and bring different sensory experiences to people. In the observation of stall owners, we found that in the digital era, people can get more information through cell phones, and digital devices become an extension of organs, making the sensory experience richer. At the same time, the dissemination of the concepts of "recyclable" and "organic health" in the digital era has also changed people's sensory use, and people will subconsciously pay attention to these objects when their vision or hearing captures content with these keywords.

​

This project combines the differences in each person's senses and cultural background to examine how culture and social relationships shape our senses and, in particular, how sensory experiences in memory affect how they function. From the anthropological perspective, senses are embodied (Liang 2019), where the senses are embedded in people's social relations, and the expression of the senses is based on language, class, and taste. At the same time, attention can be paid to sensory culture and the boundaries of ethnic groups. Human sensory organs are the same, but the representation of senses may differ from culture to culture, and studying the perception and representation of senses in different cultures can help us recognize and delineate the boundaries between ethnic groups (We 2019). In the digital age, it is essential to study how digital technology, including digital devices and digital platforms, can make the senses digital. When technology intervenes in the senses, is it still natural to think about the human emotional world (Braidotti 2018)? Is nature the product of observation and reproduction through technology, or how does technology challenge the senses? This requires anthropologists to look critically at the impact of digital technology on people's sensory experience and to contextualize it in the context and cultural background.

​

Reference list:

 

Braidotti, R., & Hlavajova, M. (Eds.). (2018). Posthuman Glossary. London and Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic.

Classen. (2012). The Deepest Sense : a Cultural History of Touch / Constance Classen. University of Illinois Press.

​

Liang Yanyan. (2019). Exploring the Anthropology of the Embodied Senses: A Review of the Symposium "Senses, Memory and Identity". Collection, 2.

​

McLuhan, M., & Fiore, Q. (1967). The medium is the message. New York, 123(1), 126-128.

​

Wu Da. (2019). Sense, culture and ethnic boundaries: A sensory anthropological perspective. Journal of Southwest University for Nationalities: Humanities and Social Sciences Edition, 40(11), 7-13.

​