“You Need to Listen to the Market!”: Making Decisions Through Senses in China’s Largest Cut-Flower Market

Abstract

The Dounan flower market can be a “hot and noisy” time and space, which is composed of the engine sound of motor tricycles, the grating of trailers rubbing against the concrete floor, the honks of reversing vehicles, and bargaining, chitchats, provocations, quarrels, and sometimes fighting. A booming market is a market clamoring with noise (auditory sense) and heat (an embodied feeling). In a couple of hours, floral traders deploy their embodied feelings of perception to make decisions on when to close a deal, what is a good price, and how to make bargains. My two ethnographic case studies—“you need to listen to the market” and “feelings of the market” delineate how the senses as a decision-making repertoire inform the everyday economic practices of floral traders in Dounan. At the interface of the sensory and the economic, I explore how rational, economic decisions are embedded into the “irrational,” sensory knowledge. Situated in sensory studies in Asia, this article elaborates the socio-cultural specificities inoculating the sensory knowledge of social agents without ignoring the nuances of how phenomenologically individuals engage in their everyday sensory practices.