He Heard,She Heard: Toward a Cultural Sociology of the Senses

When studying cultural goods, sociologists have tended to focus on the production of those goods, and on the social patterning of tastes. To date, little work has considered the organization of cultural experience. This reflects both a general historical devaluation of the embodied and experiential aspects of social life, and a tendency among scholars to view language and discourse as distinct from embodied and practical elements of culture. In this article, I introduce an interview method designed to facilitate the description of music experience. My data reveal gender differences in descriptions of a particular subtype of sonic experience, which suggest potential variations in experience. These findings indicate that (1) experience and discourse are culturally structured, (2) a more generative (re)conceptualization of the language-experience relation emphasizes domain interdependence rather than independence, and (3) particular types of language can facilitate the expression of harder-to-articulate qualities of experience.