Human Instruments: Sensory Science and the Exclusions of Perceptibility

In this paper, Dr Ella Butler analyses how perceptibility is organised as a social process in a scientific experimental setting. Specifically, she details how an American sensory science lab conducts a form of test called descriptive analysis which aims to transduce the sensory experience of a comestible into a set of terms characterising elements of taste, flavour and texture.

Dr Butler focuses ethnographically on the process by which the meaning of terms is agreed upon – how some words are taken up by the tasting panel while others are discarded. Language becomes part of the architecture of the lab, through which perceiving subjects are made into and imagined to be forms of scientific instrumentation. She shows how exclusion, rejection and deferral become primary means by which consensus on sensory properties is ultimately achieved, a result of the tricky semiotic ideology of science whereby the relationship between language and underlying reality is at once both disavowed and instrumentalised.

Ella Butler is a research fellow in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University. Her work draws on science and technology studies (STS) and sensory anthropology to investigate the intersections between theories of embodiment, science, and the cultural politics of commodities, with a particular focus on food and pharmaceuticals.
 

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