Orchestrating Multi-sensoriality in Tasting Sessions: Sensing Bodies, Normativity, and Language

This article develops an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach of sensuous practices based on video materials and multi-modal analyses. Focusing on professional training in cheese tasting in Italy, the article shows the interplay between the bodily sensorial access to a material object and verbal descriptions of its sensorial qualities. Sensorial experience is not only configured as the body touching, smelling, or tasting a sample, nor simply orchestrated as a response following an authorized instruction; it is organized by multiple sociomaterial resources, including tasting grids as textual artifacts for enhancing and disciplining the senses. The article proposes a praxeological and interactional approach of sensoriality that integrates bodies, language, materiality, and normativity.