We perceive the world first through our senses. The first bite of watermelon in early summer, the fragrance of the soil after rain, the juicy fried chicken at the school’s canteen… These sensory experiences constitute our memory and form our sense of place. As the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1977, 18) proposes, “an object or place achieves concrete reality when our experience of it is total, that is through all the sense as well as with the active and reflective mind.” Therefore, in this ethnographic project, I explore multiple sensory experiences in Camden Market, one of the most popular markets in London, aiming to investigate the dynamics between senses, placemaking and digital technology.
The project is based on a digital anthropological approach. Nowadays digital technologies are so ubiquitous that our everyday life is more or less mediated by them. Digital anthropology is a subject that studies the relation between human life and digital technology via an anthropological perspective. The main contribution of anthropology in digital culture studies is the holistic ethnography (the key research method of anthropology, see explanation below), which demonstrates that we should interpret digital world in the context of wider social relations and practices to understand the entanglement and dynamics between digital technologies and human life, rather than judging digital technologies as purely good or bad (Miller 2018).
On the other hand, digital technologies have been incorporated in anthropological methodology. For example, anthropologists might have replaced their traditional notebooks with digital devices such as camera phone and voice recording; and many ethnographic researches are now turning online because they aim at studying online phenomena such as video games community.
Therefore, in this project, on the one hand, digital technology is an object of study – I examine the role digital technologies play in the formation of people’s sensory experience. On the other hand, I use digital technology as a tool to collect data (video and voice recording, 360 degree photography, mapmaking) and present the results (multimedia map, interactive website).
Anthropology emphasises individuals’ practice and experience. So in this study, I am not showing what is Camden Market in a general sense, and the interactive map you are going to see is not only a digital tour to the market. Instead, I focus on the different perspectives of individuals, showing how the market can be like through different sensory experiences.
*The project is part of the assessments for the MSc Digital Anthropology course at University College London. It is an academic project without commercial intention. All the participants in the project is anonymous.
Preface
Research Questions
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How do sensory experiences contribute to the formation of people’s sense of place?
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How do the sensory experiences created/received by participants contribute to the community culture?
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How do digital technologies engage or disrupt participants’ sensory experience and sense of place?
Fieldsite & Participants
Camden Market is one of the most popular retail markets in London. The now iconic retail destination started life as a cluster of craft workshops by the Regent’s Canal and has evolved to become one of London’s most important nerve centres of artisan creativity and trading. The market is packed with stalls and shops trading in handmade clothes and jewellery, music memorabilia, objects from ages past and street food from far flung locations (Camden Lock 2016).
The reason why I choose Camden Market as the fieldsite is that this is a vibrant place full of sensory experiences. Tourists are here to visit, eat, go shopping and enjoy music. Visual, audio, tactile, smell and taste experiences are fully engaged. Vendors and shop owners are the crucial contributor to the sensory experiences. They come from different cultural backgrounds and constitute the diverse community. Therefore, in this study, I recruited one visitor and three shop owners as my participants, aiming to understand the market and placemaking process via the lens of senses. Detailed profiles about participants can be seen on the Exploration page.
image source: https://www.allesoverlonden.nl/site/wp-content/uploads/camden-town.jpg
Image Source: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/577375614738873464/
Image Source: https://wp-media.camdenmarket.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/11180529/ca07d64d60a194e754f480f6e84628539a5d4fc5_necklaces-from-poppie-jasper-camden-lock-camden-market_cm_jo_detail.jpg
image source: https://www.allesoverlonden.nl/site/wp-content/uploads/camden-town.jpg
Research Methods
A three-month ethnography was conducted in Camden Market from February to April 2022. Ethnography is the core method of anthropology, which traditionally involves observing and taking part in behaviours and experiences that are being studied, known as participant observation. As participants in the social life, ethnographers do not just observe life objectively. They interpret it with subjectivity. The process of taking part in social practices, taking fieldnotes and interpreting is called thick description (Geertz 1973).
However, in this study, what’s different from the traditional ethnography is that, I adopted sensory ethnography approach. Sensory ethnography, as proposed by Pink (2013), is a way to produce and represent knowledge based on the intersection between ethnographer’s own experiences and the persons, places and things encountered in the process. Therefore, the participatory, embodied sensory ethnography “strives to engage with the multisensory, overlapping experiences of researchers and participants” (Stevenson 2017). In this regard, the ethnographer is a sensory apprentice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Pink 2009) rather than merely an observer. Knowledge is co-created between researcher and participants, rather than transferred from one to another.
Hence, I incorporated my own sensory experiences in the interpretation of the place, be it the market as a whole or a single shop. I walked with participants (visitors) throughout the market along their preferred personalised routes, experiencing the market via senses with them. For vendors, I spent time in their shops, participating in their daily working routines in order to understand the sensory experiences they created for customers and they received themselves.
Specifically, the sensory ethnography practices include the tracking of movement, recording of soundscapes and the classic in-depth and informal interviews.
Interview
Interview
I conducted formal and informal interviews with my participants in the market. For vendors, most of the interviews were face-to-face in their shops. There were two formal interviews with each vendors (one about the sensory experiences they created and another about the ones they experienced in the market) and several informal ones via WhatsApp chat or casual daily conversation. For visitors, the interviews were more like “shoulder-to-shoulder” – they were carried out when we walking in the market, coupled with several formal interviews via phone or video calls afterwards. I kept voice recordings of the interviews with the full consent of participants.
Collaborative
Map Making
Mapping is an effective approach for visualising the sense of place. Collaborating with participants, I created interactive maps (see in the Exploration page) using the photographs, videos and sound recordings captured by participants. I tracked the walking routes of participants via an App called MyTracks and kept the sound recordings during the process. For visitors, the track is their visiting routes; while for vendors, the track started from the moment when they entered the market and ended when they finished a day’s work. Participants were encouraged to record the moments that triggered their sensory experiences. In this way, the personalised placemaking experiences through senses are revealed in the map.
