The model of the five senses is persistent through Western culture since Aristotle. This chapter explores the contemporary debates that animate the study of the senses across disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. It also locates the specific approach of sensoriality developed in this book within this interdisciplinary landscape, insisting on the importance of language, the body and action. Grounded on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, the book proposes a novel conceptual and analytical approach, focusing on sensing (rather than the senses) in social interaction, and insisting on the way sensing is embedded in situated actions and activities, and more specifically within social interaction. This provides for a conception of sensoriality that is social, praxeological, and intersubjective, based on the way people engage in sensorial practices mobilizing their body and talk, as well as the way these actions acquire their intelligible, accountable and normative character in and through social interaction.

The final chapter discusses the results of the analyses in light of the proposed conceptual and analytical framework for the study of sensoriality in social interaction. The conclusion provides for an integrated view of the sensorial moments analyzed in the previous chapters and highlights their systematicity in terms of methodic accomplishments of the participants within specific and consequential sequential environments. The sensorial qualities sensoriallydiscovered, explored and recognized as well as the sensorial access making them possible, be in terms of sight, touch, smell, or taste, are made relevant within specific courses of action. This reveals the deep praxeological and interactional organization of sensoriality, which concerns both its situated character within the unfolding of the activity and also the minimal details of a body bending over the obejct to smell, of the tongue exploring the mouth, of the quick and repeated palpation movements of the hands. The book reveals both how these sensorial practices are carefully formatted and how these details are made witnessable and observable for others, securing their intersubjectivity. Far from being a private interiorized neurophysiological process, sensoriality is a strongly social, intersubjective, interactional web of practices.

Tasting is an embodied practice – beginning with putting the sample in the mouth, achieved through specific ways of chewing it, and completed by swallowing it – which cannot be reduced to a private, neurophysiological process, but which is rather an interactional intersubjective achievement. The chapter describes the systematic ways in which the participants create a specifically relevant interactional space for the customer to begin to taste, and to focus on their tasting, while the seller suspends talking and favors an exclusive attention to tasting, albeit continuing to monitor the taster, before both participants resume mutual gaze and reengage in talking. Tasting can be performed in a diversity of ways, alone versus together, in silence versus in a guided, instructed way – but even when the taster is given the opportunity to taste individually and in silence, tasting remains an interactional achievement. Tasting is also a practice distinct from eating: the former privileges the exclusive, silent focus on the sensorial qualities of the sample, while the latter happens in the midst of the conversational engagement, enabling multiactivity and multiple engagements.