Sensory ethnography

In recent years, sensory ethnography has emerged in response to the way that anthropology has represented its human subjects in media, primarily through film. This new discipline, which has its roots in field recordings, sound art and ethnographic films, tries to develop a way of approaching anthropology's social concerns, maintaining its methodological imperative to clearly and accurately represent its subjects, while at the same time acknowledging that the audience for such research also makes up part of the meaning that it creates. In short, sensory ethnography is an attempt to resolve the subjective, artistic approaches needed to make effective and engaging work out of empirical data, at the same time as accurately representing its observations. (source)

"The practice of making nonfiction work which goes under the names media anthropology or sensory ethnography is based on the understanding that human meaning does not emerge only from language; it engages with the ways in which our sensory experience is pre-or non-linguistic, and part of our bodily being in the world. It takes advantage of the fact that our cognitive awareness – conscious as well as unconscious – consists of multiple strands of signification, woven of shifting fragments of imagery, sensation and malleable memory. Works of sensory media are capable of echoing or reflecting or embodying these kinds of multiple simultaneous strands of signification." (Ernst Karel, interviewed in Earroom)

Pages

• Lucien Castaing-Taylor
• Ernst Karel
• François Laplantine
• David MacDougall
• Véréna Paravel

Events

• The Wire Salon: In the Realm of the Senses: The World According to Sensory Ethnography, Cafe Oto, London, 7 March 2013.

Literature

Monographs

• Lucien Castaing-Taylor (ed.), Visualizing Theory, University of California Press, 1994. (English)
• Anna Grimshaw, The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology, Cambridge University Press, 2001. (English)
• François Laplantine, Le social et le sensible: introduction à une anthropologie modale, Paris: Téraèdre, 2005, 220 pp. [1] (French)
  • The Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology, trans. Jamie Furniss, intro. David Howes, 2015, xviii+152 pp. (English)
• David MacDougall, The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography and the Senses, Princeton University Press, 2005, 328 pp. (English)
• Sarah Pink, The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses, Routledge, 2006. (English)
• Sarah Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography, Sage, 2009. (English)
• Michael Bull, Jon P. Mitchell (eds.), Ritual, Performance and the Senses, London: Bloomsbury, 2015, 224 pp. [2] (English)

Journals

• Sensate: A Journal for Experiments in Critical Media Practice, since 2012. (English)

Papers and articles

• Sarah Pink, "Mobilising Visual Ethnography: Making Routes, Making Place and Making Images", Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research 9:3 (Sep 2008). (English)
• Sarah Pink, with responses by David Howes, "The Future of Sensory Anthropology/The Anthropology of the Senses", Social Anthropology 18:3 (2010), pp 331-340. (English)
• Sarah Pink, "Sensory Digital Photography: Re-thinking Moving and the Image", Visual Studies 26:1 (2011), pp 4-13. (English)
• Tim Ingold, "Worlds of Sense and Sensing the World: A Response to Sarah Pink and David Howes", Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 19:3 (2011), pp 313-317. (English)
• Dennis Lim, "The Merger of Academia and Art House: Harvard Filmmakers’ Messy World", The New York Times, 31 August 2012. (English)

Theses

• Alex Rhys-Taylor, Coming to Our Senses: A Multi-Sensory Ethnography of Class and Multiculture in East London, Goldsmiths, London, 2010. PhD dissertation. (English)

See also

Anthropology, Field recording, Sonic ecology, Media ecology