Sensing in Social Interaction
The Taste for Cheese in Gourmet Shops

This book offers a conceptual, methodological, and analytical approach to how people engage with their senses in social interaction.

Lorenza Mondada (Author)

9781108484251, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 November 2021

200 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 3.5 cm, 0.99 kg

'This text is well-documented in both theoretical background and methodological foundations, presenting numerous empirical data samples together with their context and subsequent analysis … Advanced courses addressing embodiment studies, anthropology of sensing, or interdisciplinary theory studies and graduate-level social science methodology courses will find a good fit for this book in the curriculum as an exemplary, rigorous case study … Highly recommended.' S. M. Weiss, Choice Connect

This book offers a novel perspective on how people engage in sensing the materiality of the world as a way of social interaction. It proposes a conceptual and analytical advance in how to approach sensing as an intersubjective and interactional phenomenon within the framework of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology. Based on a uniquely rich set of video-recorded data, the author shows how people reacting to cheese in gourmet shops across Europe highlights the part the senses play in human behaviour and communication. The multimodal analysis of the case studies reveals the systematic features of looking, touching, smelling, and tasting in situated activities. By blending interdisciplinary research with real life, the volume puts together a theoretical and methodological framework for studying the embodied and linguistic dimensions of sensing in interaction.

Part I. Sensoriality in Interaction: 1. From the senses to sensing in interaction
2. Methodology
Part II. Looking and Knowing: 3. Looking for a cheese
4. Asking for a cheese: the calibration of looking and knowing
Part III. Sensing Together: 5. Touching: professional and lay touch
6. Smelling: professional and lay smell
Part IV. Tasting, Assessing and Making decisions: 7. Requests and offers to taste: the sequential environment of tasting
8. The anatomy of tasting
9. The outcome of tasting: assessing and decision-making
10. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Social, group or collective psychology [JMH], Social interaction [JFFP], Food & society [JFCV]