Hänggi Philipp, Mondada Lorenza
University of Basel, Switzerland.
University of Basel, Switzerland.
Appetite. 2025 Jan 1;205:107530. doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2024.107530. Epub 2024 Jun 5.
The relationship between sensorial experiences and language during food consumption has been investigated in a diversity of settings and activities, showing a variety of sensorial practices and possible ways of discursively expressing them. In this paper, we focus specifically on activities where individuals encounter unfamiliar food, suspending expected synaesthetic associations between sensory features. Using audio and video recordings of dinner interactions in restaurants offering high-end creative cuisine and dining experiences in complete darkness, we show how the participants move from eating to tasting and engage in a multisensorial exploration of the food, where sight is either absent or insufficient to solve the puzzle of what it is they are eating. We find that this exploration commonly begins with a recurring interactional practice: the question "what is this?", initiating a sequence that reveals a public collective engagement with the food among participants. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, we investigate the sequential environments in which "what is this?" prototypically occurs, the various actions it implements, its turn design (displaying a more or less unknowing stance), as well as how it is subsequently responded to within the participants' project of identifying the food. We examine how the "what is this?" inquiry mobilizes various linguistic resources, in a way that is deeply embedded in multisensorial examinations of the food that are (made) available to co-participants, publicly seeable in high-end gastronomic restaurants, and publicly hearable in dark restaurants. Our findings contribute to naturalistic interactional research on commensality and multisensoriality, with particular relevance for scholarship addressing the primacy and limitations of sight.
在食物消费过程中，感官体验与语言之间的关系已在多种场景和活动中得到研究，呈现出各种感官实践以及表达这些实践的话语方式。在本文中，我们特别关注个体遇到不熟悉食物的活动，即暂停感官特征之间预期的联觉联想。通过对提供高端创意美食的餐厅中晚餐互动的音频和视频记录，以及在完全黑暗环境中的用餐体验，我们展示了参与者如何从进食转变为品尝，并对食物进行多感官探索，在这种情况下，视觉要么缺失，要么不足以解决他们正在吃什么的谜题。我们发现，这种探索通常始于一种反复出现的互动行为：“这是什么？”这个问题引发了一系列行为，揭示了参与者之间对食物的公共集体参与。借鉴民俗方法学和会话分析，我们研究了“这是什么？”这个问题典型出现的顺序环境、它所实施的各种行为、其轮流设计（显示出或多或少不知情的立场），以及在参与者识别食物的过程中它随后是如何得到回应的。我们考察了“这是什么？”这个询问如何调动各种语言资源，其方式深深嵌入到可供共同参与者进行的对食物的多感官审视之中，在高端美食餐厅中是公开可见的，在黑暗餐厅中是公开可听的。我们的研究结果有助于对共餐和多感官性进行自然主义的互动研究，对探讨视觉的首要性和局限性的学术研究具有特别的相关性。
