Author: josephine

Situating sensory ethnography: from academia to intervention

Doing Sensory Ethnography investigates the possibilities afforded by attending to the senses in ethnographic research and representation. An acknowledgement that sensoriality is fundamental to how we learn about, understand and represent other people’s lives is increasingly central to academic and applied practice in the social sciences and humanities […] [Debates…] inform how researchers represent their findings in conventional written and audiovisual texts and in innovative forms designed to communicate about sensory experience. […] [In this chapter…] First, I outline its continuities and departures from existing ethnographic methodologies. Second, I locate [p. 8 ↓ ] it in relation to the intellectual trajectories of discipline-specific scholarship and applied research.

Pink, Sarah. “Situating Sensory Ethnography: From Academia to Intervention.” Doing Sensory Ethnography. SAGE Publications Ltd. 2009.

READING NOTES

• What is sensory ethnography?
  • Ethnographic practice tends to include participant observation, ethnographic interviewing, and a range of other participatory research techniques that are often developed and adapted in context
  • shift from the ‘classic’ emphasis on ‘holism, context and similar ideas’ to the increasing fragmentation of ethnographic research.
  • critical methodology, visual ethnography
  • ethnography is a reflexive and experiential process though which understanding, knowing and (academic) knowledge are produced
  • ethnography is a process of creating and representing knowledge (about society, culture and individuals) that is based on ethnographers’ own experiences. It does not claim to produce an objective or truthful account of reality, but should aim to offer versions of ethnographers’ experiences of reality that are as loyal as possible to the context, negotiations and intersubjectivities through which the knowledge was produced. (Pink 2007a: 22)
  • [What do ethnographers do?…] iterative-inductive research (that evolves in design through the study), drawing on a family of methods, involving direct and sustained contact with human agents, within the context of their daily lives (and cultures), watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions, and producing a richly written account that respects the irreducibility of human experience, that acknowledges the role of theory as well as the researcher’s own role and that views humans as part object/part subject. (2005: 3) (Karen O’Reilly)
  • seeking to understand and engage with other people’s worlds through sharing activities, practices and inviting new forms of expression
  • necessary to rethink ethnography to explicitly account for the senses. […] reflexive, gendered, embodied, visual.
• Anthropology of the senses and its critics
  • Howes described as ‘primarily concerned with how the patterning of sense experience varies from one culture to the next in accordance with the meaning and emphasis attached to each [p. 12 ] of the modalities of perception’ (1991b: 3). .
  • how different cultures map out the senses. Based on the assumption that in all cultures the senses are organised hierarchically, one of the tasks of the sensory researcher would be to determine the ‘sensory profile’ (Howes and Classen 1991: 257) or sensory ‘order’ of the culture being studied
  • taking cultural difference as the unit of comparison can be problematic when it shifts attention away from the immediacy of sensory experience as lived, and as such from the moment of perception.
  • Ingold writes, ‘reduces the body to a locus of objectified and enumerable sense whose one and only role is to carry the semantic load projected onto them by a collective, supersensory subject – namely society – and whose balance or ratio may be calculated according to the load borne by each’ (2000: 284).
  • senses, away from ‘the collective sensory consciousness of society’ and towards the ‘creative interweaving of experience in discourse and to the ways in which the resulting discursive constructions in turn affect people’s perceptions of the world around them’ (2000:285).
• [Anthropology…]commonly assumed dominance of vision, or occularcentrism (Howes, Stoller)
  • need to separate out the idea of there being a hierarchically dominant sense
  • understanding vision in terms of its interrelationship with other senses
• [Anthropology…] [Grasseni…] “the immediacy of fleeting sounds. Ineffable odours, confused emotions, and the flow of Time passing” ([Fabian 1983]:
  • ‘skilled visions [which] are embedded in multi-sensory practices, where look is coordinated with skilled movement, with rapidly changing points of view, or with other senses such as touch’
  • British and Spanish research participants decided whether or not they would clean their homes based on multisensory evaluations and knowledge that they verbalised in terms of how clothes, or sinks or floors look, smell [p. 14 ] or feel under foot. .
• [Anthropology…] [Stoller’s work in The Taste of Ethngraphic Things, Sensuos Scholarship shows…] anthropological practice is a corporeal process that involves the ethnographer engaging not only with the ideas of others, but in learning about their understandings through her or his own physical and sensorial experiences, such as tastes (e.g. 1989) or pain and illness (e.g. 1997, 2007).
  • recently anthropological studies that attend to the senses have been done ‘at home’, or at least in modern western cultures. This has included a focus on everyday practices such as housework (Pink 2004) and laundry (Pink 2005b), gardening (Tilley 2006), leisure practices such as walking and climbing (e.g. Lund 2005), clinical work practices (e.g. Rice 2006; Lammer 2007) and homelessness (Desjarlais 2005). Such sensory ethnographies both attend to and interpret the experiential, individual, idiosyncratic and contextual nature of research participants’ sensory practices and also seek to comprehend the culturally specific categories, conventions, moralities and knowledge that informs how people understand their experiences.
  • question of the relationship between sensory perception and culture, engages with questions concerning the status of vision and its relationship to the other senses, and demands a form of reflexivity that goes beyond the interrogation of how culture is ‘written’ to examine the sites of embodied knowing.
• [Sensuous Geographies, Ethnographies and Spatial Theory] ‘An object or place achieves concrete reality when our experience of it is total, that is through all the senses as well as with the active and reflective mind’ (Yi-Fu Tuan)
  • ‘to offer a more integrated view of the role of the senses in geographical understanding: the sense both as a relationship to a world and the senses as themselves a kind of structuring of space and defining of place’ (Rodaway 1994: 4, original italics).
• micro-sociology [Simmel, Sociology of the senses]
  • First, our ‘sensory impression’ of another person invokes emotional or physical responses in us. Second, ‘sense impression’ becomes ‘a route of knowledge of the other’ (1997 [1907]: 111).
  • ‘smelling a person’s body odour is the most intimate perception of them’ since ‘they penetrate, so to [p. 18 ] speak, in a gaseous form into our most sensory inner being’ (1997 [1907]: . 119).
  • [Low examines role of smell…] ‘attempts to move beyond “absolutely supra-individual total structures” (Simmel, 1997 [1907]: 110) towards individual, lived experiences where smell may be utilized as a social medium in the (re)construction of social realities’ (Low 2005: 298).
• Christina Lammer (e.g. 2007) and of Jon Hindmarsh and Alison Pilnick (2007), which involves the use of video methodologies and sociological approaches to understand the sociality and multisensoriality of interactions in clinical contexts.
  • intercorpreal knowing [Hindmarsh, Pilnick]
• Sensory Ethnography and Applied Practice… consumer research and health studies.
  • health research… documentary video Making Contact, CORPO realities [Lammer, sociology, interventional radiology]
  • …’teaching neophyte nurses to attend to their senses and their embodied responses, in order to better understand the lived experiences of patients and their families’ (Edvardsson and Street 2007:30).
• Sensory Ethnography and Arts Practice
  • Parallel to, sometimes overlapping, and in some cases in collaboration with interest in the senses in ethnographic disciplines has been attention to the senses in arts practice
  • ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall
  • audiovisual practice of Christina Lammer
  • soundart and ethnographic representation
  • John Levack Drever has identified commonalities between theory and practice in ethnography and soundscape composition, suggesting they share a focus on: ‘fieldwork through sensuous experience and the creation of an outward response to that experience from the inside’; ‘a holistic approach to the environment and to its people’; and a concern with ‘translating their findings into condensed itinerant forms’ (2002: 24).
  • Installation and performance art…. walking as a method of researching (e.g. the arts practice of Sissel Tolaas (see Hand 2007) and the ethnographic practice of, for example, Katrín Lund (2005, 2008), Jo Lee Vergunst (2008) and others),
• Interdisciplinary Context for Sensory Ethnography
  • The extent to which this work will emerge in interdisciplinary projects that combine approaches from, say, anthropology, history and arts practice, rather than in the form of multidisciplinary edited readers and in the journal Senses and Society, still remains to be seen.

INTERESTING CITATIONS AND DEFINITIONS

Howes, D. (Ed.) (2005) Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader . Oxford: Berg.

David MacDougall (ethnographic filmmaker)

Christina Lammer (health research)

POST-READ

A/r/tography as Living Inquiry Through Art and Text

There is a substantial body of literature on arts-based forms of research demonstrating scholars’ endeavors to theorize the production of the arts as a mode of scholarly inquiry and as a method of representation. However, if arts-based research is to be taken seriously as an emerging field of educational research, then perhaps it needs to be understood as a methodology in its own right. This entails moving beyond the use of existing criteria that exists for qualitative research and toward an understanding of interdisciplinarity not as a patchwork of different disciplines and methodologies but as a loss, a shift, or a rupture where in absence, new courses of action un/fold. This article proposes an understanding of arts-based research as enacted, living inquiry through six renderings of a/r/tography: contiguity, living inquiry, openings, metaphor/metonymy, reverberations, and excess.

a/r/tography; contiguity; living inquiry; openings; metaphor/ metonymy; reverberations and excess

A/r/tography as Living Inquiry Through Art and Text Stephanie Springgay, Rita L. Irwin and Sylvia Wilson Kind Qualitative Inquiry 2005 11: 897

Guest Andrew Zealley

Guest speaker: Andrew Zealley, artist, musician, doctoral candidate York University