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.