Paper short abstract:

In this paper, the daily experience of buying food is seen as sensory experience. Thus the ethnography work within a market could only be carried out as an apprenticeship.

Paper long abstract:

The main line of research lies in my ethnographic work about a food market in Catania, Sicily. Learning to attain competence in 'the world of consumption' proved to be a multi-faceted process, transcending the mere activities of 'shopping' and 'buying'. The experience of the market is a totality of smells, sounds, consistencies, textures, and tastes, which follows customers home, until their kitchens and finally into their mouths. The market can be understood only in its overwhelming combination of perceptions, but it needs to be placed in a specific narrative of history, place and culture.

In this market a direct sensory relation with food is sought after, and represented as the traditional Sicilian way of experiencing food. It also helps to maintain a specific relationship to the landscape. It is the very performance of Sicilianess that takes the shape of a synaesthetic opera, in which different actors play their roles: acting, singing, sensing. The reciprocal orchestration of this piece is synaesthetic and kinaesthetic, marrying senses and movement together. It is exactly, and only, in the field of this cultural perception that one moves inside the market.

In such an environment, ethnography takes the shape of a sensory apprenticeship, which refers to the idea of food as craft and to the combination of bodily participation and cognitive knowledge. Apprenticeship implies participation and this way of looking at learning overcomes the dichotomy between body and mind.