Abstract

Just as finding a language for ethnography - especially when trying to describe our sensory «impressions» - poses a dilemma, a problem also arises when actors seek to do the same thing in their ordinary world. The condition of an ethnographer who, while tasting wines, studies what tasters do and say in the same social situation, i.e. wine tasting, is particularly useful to highlight both sets of problems, as well as to ultimately overturn the way we conceive them. Questions pertaining to practice and learning not only lie in the acknowledgement of the limits of our language, but also in the search for a language to describe those limits. As a tool of knowledge, language works together with the senses during any activity. The problem lies in being able to describe what you know as much as in describing in order to know. By employing Wittgenstein as a starting point, the article discusses some categories and synaesthesia as limit-tools of the knowledge work that is embedded in the activity of wine tasting.