The present and future of a sensuous sociology

Sociology and anthropology’s cultural and bodily turn is witnessing the fast growth of new subfields of study such as the sociology and anthropology of the senses. Whereas the study of the body has enjoyed tremendous growth over the past decade and a half and has perhaps by now reached maturity, the study of the senses is only recently coming into its own with the recent publication of the peer-reviewed journal The Senses and Society, and the production of a few interdisciplinary readers, as well as the publication of a handful of foundational scholarly essays and monographs. Still absent from the field of the sociology of the senses, however, is a focused and comprehensive research agenda. In bridging cultural/qualitative sociology and cultural/humanistic anthropology we argue for the need to blur boundaries which, in this field, are particularly weak due to the ethnographic scope of much research. Serving both the sociological and anthropological constituencies at once means bridging ethnographic traditions, cultural foci, and socio-ecological approaches to embodiment and sensuousness. In our presentation on the present and future research agenda of a sociology of the senses we make the case for the merit and promise of not only focusing on the senses as a research subject, but also on adopting sensuousness as ontological and epistemological elements, that in, on adopting a sensuous approach in its own right.