Scientific inquiry eschews and embraces sensory experience. Yet sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, and movement all inform scientific work. Across disciplines, bodies—scientists’ bodies, citizens’ bodies, participants’ bodies—are instruments. As Natasha Myers (2015, 204) puts it, bodies are “resources for learning the fine structures of complex . . . forms.”

Scientific knowledge-making practices that engage the senses—those of sensory science, for example—insist that researchers decontextualize and desocialize the sensorial process. Laboratory conditions, proponents argue, are necessary to understand and quantify how tasting or smelling is done. You like wine? Let us serve it to you through a small door in the wall. Similarly, chemistry, biology, computer science, and even engineering notoriously write the mediation of the senses out of scientific work. But neither scientists, no matter how pure their science, nor the people and things they study live in sensorial vacuums. How, then, to account for the role of the senses in the work of science?

Despite the role that the body and its senses play in expert practices of research, sensory information—be it gained, stored, mediated, or communicated through the body—remains suspect. The tacit nature of such information doesn’t help; difficult to capture and to assess, its role remains uncertain at best. “To accept sensuous scholarship,” notes Paul Stoller (1997, xvii), “is to eject the conceit of control in which mind and body, self and other are considered separate.” Stoller’s suggestion, counter to the tenets of scientific objectivity, highlights the central problem addressed by this Correspondences series: mapping, acknowledging, measuring, and respecting sensorial experience remains contested work in the practice of science.

Unique among the disciplines, anthropology has a long tradition of attending to sensorial experience. The anthropological work of observing inescapably and explicitly entails being affected; the authoring anthropologist must register the effects on the body of being elsewhere. Some scholars in science and technology studies take this being-affected of the anthropologist as a model for the scientist’s relationship to her research practices more generally; they argue that the body, again as instrument, is always an element in the scientific equation (Latour 2004; see also Muniesa and Trébuchet-Breitwiller 2010).

Yet much remains to be explored here. Anthropologists do not always or necessarily address the senses as a serious and systematic object of study, including in their own practices of knowledge-making. A paucity of tools for engaging the senses as “topics of ethnographic analysis or of theoretical development” (Sutton 2010, 210), complicated by scientists’ reticence to acknowledge their own “body experiments” (Myers 2015, 1), makes the capture of sensorial experience a challenge, even as anthropologists acknowledge its importance.

The contributors to this session of Correspondences contemplate opportunities for engaging the senses and their inevitable shortcomings, drawing on work by a range of anthropologists. We question and develop methodologies that explicitly account for the sensorial, insisting on taking the senses seriously. We ask what resources anthropology offers as its sensibilities enter sites of knowledge production such as the lab, the field site, or the built environment. More specifically, we ask, what tools does anthropology have in its toolkit for capturing and communicating the ineffable, ephemeral, individual practices of smelling, tasting, touching, and experiencing? We are interested in how anthropology can help to chart the ways in which the sensorial realm shapes the material relations of which scientific and other knowledge-making practices are made.