Mixing Methods, Tasting Fingers: Notes on an Ethnographic Experiment

This chapter by Anna Mann, Annemarie Mol, Priya Satalkar, Amalinda Savirani, Nasima Selim, Malini Sur, and Emily Yates-Doerr reports on an ethnographic experiment. Four finger eating experts and three novices sat down for a hot meal and ate it with their hands. Drawing on the technique of playing with the familiar and the strange, it is not our aim to explain our responses, but to articulate them. As we seek words to do so, we stretch the verb to taste. Tasting, or so our ethnographic experiment suggests, need not be understood as an activity confined to the tongue. Instead, if given a chance, it may viscously spread out to the fingers and come to include appreciative reactions otherwise hard to name. Pleasure and embarrassment, food-like vitality, erotic titillation, the satisfaction or discomfort that follow a meal—we suggest that these may all be included in tasting. Thus teasing the language alters what speakers and eaters may sense and say. It complements the repertoires available for articulation. But is it okay? Are we allowed to mess with textbook biology in this way and interfere, not just with anthropological theory, but with the English language itself?