Abstract Summary
Referring to increasing interests in the linguistics of food and the study of sensoriality, the paper proposes an interactional embodied approach of sensory practices. Based on multimodal conversation analysis, it focuses on practices of tasting and expressing taste within activities dealing with food, in restaurants, shops, among amateurs or professionals.
Abstract :
This paper addresses recent academic interests in the linguistics of food and in interdisciplinary perspectives on sensoriality, by proposing an interactional praxeological embodied approach of sensory practices (Mondada, 2019). It focuses on practices of touching, smelling, and tasting that are crucial within activities dealing with food, such as tasting moments in restaurants, shops, among amateurs or professionals. Relying on an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach of social interaction, and drawing on a rich corpus of video-recordings of food activities in various institutional settings, the paper discusses the complex reflexive relations between talk and the embodied sensory access to materiality. Language and talk are not just the outcome of evaluations of food; they also reflexively shape the experience of food. Embodied sensorial access to the materiality of food does not constitute an individual subjective solitary experience, but occurs in social arenas where the participants’ practices are made intelligible, publicly accountable and intersubjective for and with others, and are consequently responded to by others. The paper shows how judgments of taste are produced not only by relying on individual sensory access to food but also by exploiting semiotically rich environments, where tasting descriptors are to be found. These descriptors are not only used to express sensations, but also more radically shape the recognition of these sensations. The empirical analysis focuses on embodied sensorial engagements with food items, on the consequent production of descriptors and assessments and on the way these are collectively orchestrated and sequentially responded to. It shows how the production of these descriptors and assessments is shaped by a rich discursive context in which written and spoken terminological repertoires are locally made available (in the form of tasting grids but also of overheard whispered descriptions).
