multi-sensory anthropology

reading list one: sub-field of discipline

Below is a list of readings that I am preparing for my comprehensive exams. As is, it is a work in progress.

Suggestions for further readings (and/or comments on inclusions) are welcome.

Boudreault-Fournier, Alexandrine. 2010. “Complicity Through Montage: A Call for an Intercultural Approach to Ethnographic Filmmaking.” Ethnologies 31(2): 169-188. doi: 10.7202/039369ar. 
Following MacDougall (1998) Boudreault-Fournier asserts ‘filmmakers should explore the possibility of incorporating the visual conventions of the Other into the structure of the film in addition to their physical image’. Visual Anthropologists to move outside of conventions of traditional ethnographic film / observational cinema and borrow stylistic approaches of fiction and art film styles in order to better incorporate visual representation of Other. “Intercultural approach” must perceive and understand visual experiences of Other but “share field of consciousness” and “adopt an attitude of openness with conditions of encounter”. This approach implies producing cultural texts that juggle with particular visual systems, rather than producing a text about a culture – allowing a way to re-imagine gap between self and Other.

Concha‐Holmes, Amanda. 2015. “Senses of HumaNature on Florida's Silver River: Evocative Ethnography to Craft Place.” Visual Anthropology Review 31(1): 62-72. doi: 1 0.1111/var.12063. 
Concha-Holmes proposes a methodological intervention – evocative ethnography in order to record the experience of sensing a place. Through videography, acoustemology, and photography Concha-Holmes creates record of the sensorial realm allowing the complex layers of relationships, rather than on isolated objects, to be captured (to some extent). Visual montage of transitioning blurred edges and merging of moments viewer experiences perception shifts edited with the soundvoyage including sounds of movement through water, allows for feeling of body in space and provides the participatory encounter with place. The poetics of such recordings merge analysis with representation through evocation: she refers to what this provides as ‘HumaNature encounters’, which destabilize any notion of nature being separate from humans.

Crawford, David and Bart Deseyn with Abdelkrim Bamouh. 2016. Nostalgia for the Present: Ethnography and Photography in a Moroccan Berber Village. Leiden University Press.

Crawford (Anthropologist), Deseyn (photographer), and Bamouh (local Berber translator) collaborate to explore the present during the rapid change in the lives of people living in the Moroccan village of Tagharghist. Photography is integral to the project, used as a way through which relationships with people were formed and Tagharghist understood. Photos were taken through slow analogue process, each image was co-constructed through dialogue with locals. In this ethnography photos are not an afterthought, they show the realities that words cannot, words do not explain images. It is an attempt to include the power of image story-telling; a dialogic visual ethnography wherein the photos “speak Berber” – countering othering, and skewed representations. Photos present a combination of ‘modernity’ and ‘traditional’ evocative of emotional connection to place that many leave in order to provide financially secure life for themselves and families. The photos show a sense of longing for life and comfort in the present beyond what is describable through words.

Culhane, Dara. 2016. “Sensing.” In Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies, edited by Denielle Elliott and Dara Culhane, 45-67. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Culhane overviews the multiple modalities (and senses) through which ethnographers engage in embodied sensory ethnographic research in order to reveal more nuanced understandings of human inter-subjectivities, which are spatially and temporally dependent. Furthermore, the sensorial are a way through which we perceive the world, understand the world, and come to know the world. “Sensory ethnography asks how multisensory, embodied, affective, lived experience relates to epistemology. What are the social and political processes through which ethnographic knowledge emerges? How do we know what we know?” (62). She invites anthropologists to engage with their embodied multisensory selves and lays out a set of exercises that not only to provide bodily learning/understanding of what the multi-sensory incorporates but also to provide a toolbox with which ethnographers can springboard off of into sensorial research. Each of the exercises build off one another and asks readers to: recognize individual sensual experiences, interaction of senses, different modes of expressing the senses, mixing up senses in humorous ways to making familiar strange, how/where sensations register in the body, when/how sensory experience and knowledge appear, sensory walk in place while considering history, how sensory experiences are shaped by commercial places, how these exercises plays into epistemology and definitions of ethnography.

Elliott, Denielle. 2016. “Writing.” In Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies, edited by Denielle Elliott and Dara Culhane, 23-44. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Elliott interrogates both form and content of ethnographic writing and differentiates between imaginative forms (1) and engagements with the imagination (2). (1) Creative forms of writing expand the limits of ethnographic writing to “different types of stories and pays attention to different sorts of experiences” forcing people to think differently about the world and may grapple with theory better than more traditional conventional forms of academic writing. Poetry: more affectively portrays and evokes what is hidden in ethnography, emotions, while being critical and theoretical. Drawing: evocative and requires sensorial/affective attention to world. Micro-writing (SMS, twitter): Expansive, performative writing, expressive through shortforms and symbols, highlight unfinished-ness of narratives. (2) Imaginative writing focuses on what is typically ignored by convention. Process-based writing: “speculative thinking, unfinished thoughts, and imagination to enter our writing” resulting in creative accounts of social and political life more representative of actual life. Embodied/sensuous: Illuminate (representative and shared) stories from the mundane. Write with the world instead of about the world in order to interrogate and translate experiences/narratives/realities. As well as to theorize and grapple with socio-political world as it is embodied in lives.

Feld, Steven, and Donald Brenneis. 2014. "Doing anthropology in sound." American Ethnologist 31(4): 461-474.

Conversation between Feld and Brenneis on sound in anthropological fieldwork, writing, and presentation, what sound ethnography entails/does, and issues involved in using sound as medium medium for research. Sound and soundscapes inform processes of place-making; “acoustemology” as “sonic way of knowing and being in the world”.
Thereby informed understandings include history of sound/soundscapes and ways of listening; representation of people and place that is enjoyable and intellectually stimulating. Overlap of sounds of place, people, other beings separately and interacting create more abstract sensuous understandings which are lost by written word. Editing sounds “dialogically” with research participants to understand their [aesthetic] understandings of how they listen/hear, how they would edit mix and balance of sounds in recordings. Sound as layer to research not merely fieldnote, integral for research product, relational not separate, can be presented as finished academic product on its own. Sounds (and the editing of soundscapes) have the ability to animate social processes and realities.

Gibbs, Leah. 2014. “Arts-science collaboration, embodied research methods, and the politics of belonging: ‘SiteWorks’ and the Shoalhaven River, Australia.” Cultural Geographies 21(2): 207-227.

Gibbs uses experience as resident in place-based embodied performance research for understanding politics of belonging while also demanding more of research practices and investigative methods. She finds arts-science collaboration informs ways of living in / being in place especially within context of rapid environmental change; and similarly to Ingold’s concept of lines, suggests the necessity of recognizing ‘passing through place’; that places are “not permanently dwelt in but vital nonetheless” (207). Art works and performances responded to (and incorporated) riverscape and its seasonality (and “moods”) reveal multiple meanings of place: senses of attachment; stories embedded in place; entanglements of self with place. Responses from audience and collaborators further revealed aforementioned enmeshments in/of place but also highlighted human relationships with non-human beings including landscape, wildlife, and plant species. Such enmeshments tell stories of human encounters and use of place through descriptions of animal/plant species; listening to the words described (exotic, alien, invasive, natural, etc) reveal nuanced understanding of various peoples belonging in/of place.

Hayes, Michael Thomas, Pauline Sameshima, and Francene Watson. 2015. “Imagination as method.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 14(1): 36-52. 
Hayes et al. understand imagination as a medium through which communities and individuals can construct identities and realities that are located elsewhere and/or a way for communities to forge connections when separated through space and time. And recognize that it is through the imaginative that people participate and understand the global flows of information, people, and goods. They envision imagination as a fundamental organizing tool of ethnography that enables nuanced recognition of a “fluid, dynamic, and inventive kind of geography in which the contemporary model of bounded sovereign spaces is losing its imaginative and practical power”(37). As such, Hayes et al. use the term socius, the connections between people ideas, and goods are held together through will, in order to understand the fleeting connections and networks that are created in response to shared social, political, etc. interests. Socius, foregrounds society, and is  forever shifting, dispersing, and exhausting. Following Graebar Hayes et al. affirm that ethnography is a useful tool beyond its interpretive uses in allowing people to be shown what is possible in response to the challenges presented in this world. Beyond their theorizing on the possibilities of hope and creation of just futures that an ethnography of imagination can provide, Hayes et al. fail to explicitly provide a method or process through one can use or work with effectively.

Herzfeld, Michael. 2001. “Senses.” In Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society, edited by M. Herzfeld, 240-53. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Herzfeld values the use and consideration of the senses in ethnographic work, yet cautions that a focus solely on the senses without placing it into wider context of anthropological canon would result in the marginalization of the anthropology of senses. Further, “an anthropology that refuses to admit the significance of what it lacks the technical means to measure or describe would nevertheless be a poor empirical discipline indeed” (248).  Consideration for how bodily sensation and cultural value are mutually engaged at all times in various ways should be attended to along with the resultant range of social relations. He asserts that anthropologists study sense semiosis rather than sense perception, as anthropology is concerned with the social as opposed to the psychological.

Social codes determine what sensory behaviour means dependent on circumstances, for instance the various significance of staring; there are also personal idosyncracies that produce further variation. Very little ethnographic writing focuses on this. Senses are reified as precultural and transparent; the visual is understood as the primary sense; oral/aural are seen as acceptable alternative to visual in knowledge creation and meaning making: these hinder understanding that senses are culturally constructed. Herzfeld looks to the work of Stoller and Seremetakis in calling for a reorientation of senses away from the visual as the central tenant in order to notice and attend to them as “intangible-seeming sources of evocation” and recognize the cultural interplay of the senses.

High, Steven. 2013. “Embodied ways of listening: Oral history, genocide and the audio tour.” Anthropologica 55 (1): 73-85.

High uses audio-tour of Rwanda Genocide Commemoration march, multiple voices share their experiences of being in place in Montréal, and their thoughts, connections, and experiences of living through genocide and experiences of commemorating it through the street where they now live. Audio tour (walk) engages participants in narrative within particular space. Following narratives simultaneously with footsteps of narrator merges experiences of own physical reality but also of experiences and narratives presented by audio-walk. And activates the imagination in a way that blurs experiences / place-time so that the participant is experiencing 2 worlds at once. Listening along with walking confronts participants with reality other than their own allowing wider understanding of affective relationships experienced in place. Audio-walk demonstrates the power of multiple sensorial dimensions in the relationship between narrator and listener, and further the acquisition of knowledge/understanding. Audio walk does more that provide the oration (as Portelli shows imparts emotional, experiential knowledge), putting people in exact location where the story is being told/taking place where these emotions derive from add another dimension/connection to participants understanding of these feelings. Builds connection in/to story but also develops deeper understanding of place- build place to participants unaware of what took place and understand it in a new way. A method for sharing stories, also strengthens arguments for the walking argument and being in place.

Howes, David. 2010. “Making sense in anthropology” In Sensual relations: Engaging the senses in culture and social theory, edited by D. Howes, 1-60. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press.

Senses are cultural, in how they are constructed, prioritized, and perceived. Meaning is experienced and communicated through the sensory; social relations are based in sensory relations meaning experiences of culture are a full bodily experience. Historically anthropology has been more interested in bodies and what they do rather than learning how senses are used/understood in meaning making. Sensory models differ in ways that the senses overlay, interact to create meaning and reordered based on circumstances. Four anthropological paradigms for studying senses: visual ignores other vital cultural sensory fields, for example kinaesthetic experience cannot be understood through visual; antivisualist too much bias against sight; synaesthetic: unity of senses creating meaning; phenomenal: the physical characteristics of senses their ranges are highlighted differ cross-culturally inform how they structure transmission of information. Anthropology’s focus on text, including field notes, privileges textual analysis failure to understand sensory; own cultural coding of the sensory creates impossibility to train senses to perceive sensory models that differ from own. Call to elicit sensory models of those whom are being studied (along with their theoretical frameworks) rather than relying on own bodily experiences. Howes believes that writing is the best mode for translating sensory experiences (for Anthropologists) as not trained with techniques to convey codes of the sensory. Necessary for Anthropologists to communicate distance between culture being represented and readers, to not convey that a first hand experience being given.

Ingold, Tim. 2010. “Footprints through the weather‐world: walking, breathing, knowing.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16 (S1): S121-S139. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9655.2010.01613.x

Ingold interrogates the process of knowledge making that exists along the way, that is our experiences from getting here to there, and living our ordinary day-to-day lives is a source of knowledge acquisition it is how we become knowledgeable; it is the movement through rather than the destination that provides the lessons. An individual’s relationship and interaction in/on/with path contains details of what knowledge is and how it is formed. He considers the ground, not as an inert surface but as an entity full of vitality and life and all of the processes enabled/mediated through the ground. Movements through space as wayfaring (on paths) or transporting (on tracks) leave traces, and decisions are made (and result in knowledge acquisition) in response to a winding route. Traces reveal observations made and way that life unfolds. There are more than traces left behind by footsteps there are also threads strung through the air that is breathed. Experience and knowing through the ground and what it gives but also the weather that we perceive and that we perceive in. That is the experience of movement between particular places and all of their makeup informs what we come to know and how we come to know. Particular attention needs to be made to how movements are shaped by context.

Irving, Andrew. 2016. “Random Manhattan: thinking and moving beyond text.” In Beyond Text?: Critical Practices and Sensory Anthropology, edited by Rupert Cox, Andrew Irving, and Christopher Wright. Manchester University Press. doi: 10.7228/manchester/9780719085055.003.0033.

Irving considers the effect that inner dialogues, including memories and imagination, have on shaping individuals’ experiences. Inner dialogue is ever-changing, is shaped culturally, and influenced through external stimuli; but it is also a reality that needs to be accounted for when making claims about people and the ways that they construct and experience the world around them. While these may be representative of outer expressions and actions, they are not identical; inner expressions are a way through which people “self-consciously understand, negotiate and reimagine their surroundings, themselves and others”(13). Irving had hundreds of individuals record iterations of their inner dialogues as they move through Manhattan to interrogate Simmel’s notion “that cities create distinctively urban modes of experience and expression due to the ‘intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli’ (Simmel 1950 [1903]: 409)”(7). This experimental research, and its hundreds of recordings, have been made available for use beyond research analyses and as a way to engage with inner dialogue and highlighting both the similarities and differences in the ways that individuals construct and experience place through audience that is able to compare recordings to each other and to their own experiences in place.

Lipset, David. 2014. “Living Canoes: Vehicles of moral imagination among the murik of Papua New Guinea.” In Vehicles: cars, canoes and other metaphors of moral imagination, edited by D. Lipset and R. Handler, 21-47. New York: Berghahn Books.

Though he does not state his research process, the value of multi-modal understandings of being in the world is implicit in Lipset’s work. He examines the canoe as both symbolic of Indigenous identity as well as site of capacity building for transcending applied colonial limitations to ethnicity and national particularity. Using Bordieu’s conceptualization of habitus, Lipset examines place of canoes among Murik people of Papua New Guinea as metaphor for Murik moral bodies that also explain how modernity (or postcoloniality) is understood and evaluated morally.

Murik bodies are assemblages that are not bound to physical bodies. Body is understood as canoe wherein the canoe is a material object of transportation as well as symbolic for moral reflexivity that express the uncertainty created when moving through social space; shamans and warrior as canoes for spirits, leaders as canoes. Canoe as metaphor for body with stomach, arms, and two heads; spirits travel through/across moral limits for moral purposes. Canoe as metaphor is a social-moral derivative that: “is aroused by a desire for collective agency and moral integration that is jeopardized by the moral boundaries it traverses, boundaries [modernity / postcolonialism] where that self-same agency and integration are called into question” (36). The meta-metaphor of canoe is reference to ways in which Murik customs, incongruent to postcolonial realities, can move forward. 

MacDougall, David. 2005. “Part 4: The Ethnographic Imagination.” In, The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the senses, edited by D. MacDoudall, 213-274. Princeton University Press.  

MacDougall outlines visual anthropology’s distinct history and contributions separate from ethnographic writing; it is a different mode of anthropological inquiry that implicates the performative rather than a substitute for writing/ telling. He asserts that the visual has been deemed as supplementary to anthropological writing rather than interpreted for its unique objectives and methodologies. Early visual anthropology should be seen as a radical strand of anthropological discourse. The failure to recognize film’s unique analytic offerings relegates the visual to a different mode of note taking rather than acknowledging its communication of the fine nuances and details entrenched in visual. The visual presents abstract ways of knowing that exist beyond verbal language; including embodied experiences, relationships of people to places and material, and performative aspects of social lives, including postures-emotions. MacDougall advocates for exactly what Jean Rouch, and more recently Boudreault-Fournier have produced, the creation of anthropological films rather than films about anthropological work; that is an offer of experiences rather than dictated accounts. This approach utilizes a different way of ethnographic seeing, which implicitly communicates tensions between the uttered and unspoken, theory and the act, the real and imaginary. The visual shifts anthropological focus allowing recognition of the full scope of perception and experience, which allows entry into lives that differ from our own. MacDougall points to three principles of visual anthropology’s distinct usefulness: (1) abstract expressiveness; (2) recognition of ways-of-knowing that exist outside of scientific method; (3) expressive social experiences of relationships to/with/in topographic, temporal, corporeal, interpersonal. The visual expresses what is not possible through language alone.

Million, Dian. 2011. “Intense dreaming: Theories, narratives, and our search for home.” The American Indian Quarterly 35(3): 313-333. 
Million asserts that: “theory, narrative, and critical thinking are not exclusive of each other ” (315); despite the affective dimension of stories/narratives, Indigenous storytelling is a form of theory that enables disruptions to Western conceptions of ‘knowledge’ about people and the ways that ‘things’ are / should be. That is they assert different ways of knowing. Instead of using concept of imagination,  as Hayes et al.’s (2015) do, Million uses concept of dreaming to offer possibilities / solutions in/to challenges of the world as well as to privilege non-Western ways of knowing. Million understands intense dreaming as “the effort to make sense of relations in the worlds we live, dreaming and empathizing intensely our relations with past and present and the future without the boundaries of linear time. …Dreaming often allows us to creatively side-step all the neat little boxes that obscure larger relations and syntheses of imagination” (314). Similar to Simpson’s work on Indigenous narratives, Million’s concept of dreaming affectively communicates the kinds of worlds that Indigenous peoples want to live in, that are squashed out by the imposition of Western colonial regimes. That is the necessity to work with/through Indigenous subjectivities.

Moretti, Cristina. 2011. “The Wandering Ethnographer: Researching and Representing the City through Everyday Encounters.” Anthropologica 53(2): 245-255. doi: 142.103.160.110. 
Moretti calls for ethnographers to pay attention to the random/chance encounters that occur throughout fieldwork experience especially in the seemingly mundane acts of walking and moving through the places in which we work. The short snippets of overheard conversations between seniors, between venders, and witnessing a street musician encounter with police officer on her walks lead by various informants/city dwellers provided Moretti with deeper understanding of how everyday spaces are unfinished – the “disjuncture between reality and the collective imaginary”. Furthermore, Moretti’s paper is a provocation for experimental forms of ethnography which circulate and engage with people’s everyday journeys – she suggests circulation of transit booklets to be a part of what is being investigated– filled with writings, ideas, images, objects, etc. to stimulate conversations among ‘regular’ people living their lives and generate little interventions that could be ‘found’ in everyday life.

Pink, Sarah. 2008. “An urban tour:  the sensory sociality of ethnographic place-making.” Ethnography 9(2): 175-196.

Pink understands ethnography as a practice of place making, and argues that ethnographers must not simply experience place through their own sensorial realities but must endeavor to understand embodied sensorial experiences of locals in place when conducting/writing ethnography. Pink explores a slow city through sensory experience, she is led on an urban tour wherein she walks, eats, drinks, etc. with locals in order to attune her own senses and rhythms in a way similar to the people she works with, to attempt to make place in the ways that they do; and finds that revisiting experience with materials (and the senses they elicit) is more meaningful for re-constructing place rather than reviewing what the materials are. She understands sensoriality as a shared social practice that enables researchers a nuanced understanding of research participants embodied experience in place which does not allow full reality of peoples’s memories, experiences or imaginations but allows for understanding of the ways that people remember and imagine their lived experiences. For instance how history and heritage are constructed, lived, and maintained. Considering the importance of embodied experience attending to the senses is vital to ethnographer for “the making of ethnographic place happens somewhere at the intersection between the ethnographers direct experience and its reconstitution as ethnography” (191).

Pink, Sarah. 2015. Doing sensory ethnography. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Paying particular attention to how place and space are experienced through the sensory offers a window into understanding how people experience, remember, and imagine the world. Pink acknowledges that people are emplaced through sensuous interrelationship between body-mind-environment, wherein sensory meaning and modalities are ways of knowing that are culturally specific. She asserts that ethnographers are differentially emplaced, and exist in co-presence with those they aim to understand and is thus concerned with the processes of multi-sensorial inquiry. Or more specifically that is how an ethnographer comes to know the ways through which others experience, remember, and imagine the world. Sensory knowledge is not transmitted through repetition or template but is acquired through the self, agency, intentionality and creativity and because ethnographer is emplaced separately she cannot fully realize another sensory way of knowing but can occupy parallel or similar place in order to develop understandings of such. Sensory ways of knowing derived by research are thus interconnected with ethnographer’s own emplacement and how they interact and share space with others. Sensory knowledge is continually reconstituted through practice and part and parcel of how we experience / come to know the world. Pink’s interrogations demand that researchers pay particular attention to processes through which people engage in/with the world and require the researcher’s own personal engagements in order to develop interpret their own embodied way of knowing through the codings and discourses of the with whom they are working.

Porcello, Thomas, Louise Meintjes, Ana Maria Ochoa, and David W. Samuels. 2010. “The reorganization of the sensory world.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 51-66.

This paper acknowledges that senses are generally considered in isolation by anthropologists as well as general (Western) public. The authors suggests that there are 3 genealogies of how senses are dealt with and understood in anthropological research: (1) communicative –senses as cultural experience; (2) phenomenology (or perceptual knowledge) – senses mediate material, social, spiritual worlds; (3) materiality of senses – senses are entry point into history of memories. Each mode of sensorial research attempts to position senses as a site of knowledge perception / construction, and are framed as remedies to the focus on “purificatory practices” of the classic sites of Anthropological knowledge construction. Porcello et al. argue that a centring of the senses that opposes text and language as sites of knowledge construction fail to consider that work down in language and text that agrees and supports sensuous perspectives and understandings. They suggest that linguistic discourse is a site of sensorial experience and thus language expression requires to be considered in tandem with bodily sensorial experiences to fully understand embodied knowledge. For instance, much work in language and discourse underline the importance of social and sensuous components of language. Porcello et al. argue for attention to expressive forms across its broad spectrum (arts, music, film, language, sensory) across cultures in order to question the role/place of senses in the “postcolonial rethinking of modernity”.

Rhys-Taylor, Alex. 2013. “The Essences of Multiculture: A Sensory Exploration of an Inner-City Street Market.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 20 (4): 393-406.  

Attention to sensuous experiences, particularly of taste and smell, reveal understandings of the multicultural encounters in cities that are otherwise overlooked. Smells and tastes offer certain level of comfort of home to immigrants, as well as mark (often negatively) cultural difference, but understanding their experiences reveals the production of transcultural, the collision of cultural traditions where dangerous differences are weak. Recorded sensuous experience of place (sounds, smell, flavours, and textures) twice a week for two years – translated into words. All ethnographic accounts are partial – point from which to create more totalized sensorial experience of city can develop. Written account of olfactory experience (mostly culinary related) while walking through London market reveals various cultural influences; and the sensuous experiences into the lives of the market goers can be understood to blur the boundaries of embodied culture of individuals. Rhys-Taylor asserts that the scentscape highlights “the production of convivial forms of the metropolitan multiculture” (399) for instance individual market stall owners develop sensory recognition and knowledge of cultures beyond their own in order to cater to diverse patrons enabling financial success. Cultural foods with similar textures and tastes become hybridized and interchangable, creating a type of peasant fusion cuisine. These sensoria mélange are sites of dialogue and exchange of cultural competency, which reveal processes of transculturalism.

Seremetakis, C. Nadia. 1993. “The memory of the senses: historical perception, commensal exchange and modernity.” Visual Anthropology Review 9(2): 2-18.

Seremetakis explores the material dimension of the senses; she understands how the history of a memory can be embedded in sensuous experiences, such as in tastes and textures of particular foods. In order to communicate how sensory experiences are interrupted and emotions are displaced in ethnographic work, Seremetakis highlights her position as ‘native anthropologist’ through a narrative style that combines personal history with anthropological fieldwork. Throughout the narrative vignettes she frames senses as sites of recovery for lost experiences and recognizes that there is a difference (dulling) in the perception of senses through time as modes of the past are deemed useless and replaced by colonial impositions of “modernity”. Materiality is significant in understanding the sensory as it is/contains/elicits understandings related to perception, knowledge, and being. The material item can be understood as a meta-sense. Therefore, she stresses the importance of commensality, “the exchange of sensory memories and emotions, and of substances and objects incarnating remembrance and feeling” in ethnographic work to enable wider awareness of experience and perception, acknowledging the emotional and social dimensions involved in exchange and how senses register exchange. Pink (###) applies this to the sharing of food as a way to engage with other people’s ways of meaning making, and knowing.

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2014. “Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3 (3): 1-25.

Through telling story of Kwezens and the sugar maple, Simpson relays Nishnaabeg intelligence. Land is context and process. Stories that engage in place are a theoretical anchor where “meaning transforms over time and space”. Conditions not just content of story are lessons. There is continual regeneration of Nishnaabeg theory through embodied practices, which are at once intellectual, physical, spiritual/emotional, contextual/ relational, and intimate / personal holding meaning to individual lives. Theory generated from ground up – meaning is derived from own life. Nishnaabeg concepts of time and space disrupt linear thinking – multiple manifestations of story throughout land. Not land-based pedagogies – land is pedagogy: Do. Join. Experience. Simpson asserts for Indigenous intelligence to thrive “resurgence of indigenous intellectual systems and reclamation of context” is required rather than indigenize the academy as it “puts places people back on the land in context conducive to resurgence and mobilization”.

Simpson, Leanne. 2014. “ ‘Bubbling Like a Beating Heart’: Reflections on Nishnaabeg Poetic and Narrative Consciousness.” In Indigenous Poetics in Canada, edited by Neal McLeod, 107-19. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Press.

Individuals able to understand stories in different ways based on their own life experiences. Meaning is derived from context rather than contents, references to wider pieces of knowledge and inter-relatedness drives Nishnaabeg consciousness. For instance heart – ode- being route word for city, a river – such realizations allow one to be pulled into Nishnaabeg views of world if only for a moment. That is the content of stories are revealed at different levels based on listener’s own position in life. There is a dynamic relationship between storyteller and listener is the heart of where knowledge transmission lays. Storyteller must read listener’s needs to understand how they may be interpreting story, to respond and alter tone or contents along way in order to impart particular wisdom or lessons. Stories allows both story-teller and listener to imagine living in alternative realities, for example a world where Nishnaabeg intelligence is not undermined by colonialism, in order to imagine what is possible. Nishnaabeg creations (including stories) are a form of communication that doesn’t exist in the world of settler colonialism; their aesthetic imparts a reality of the world based in duality/perception, abstraction, metaphor, and multi-dimensionality. Doing and living (for example engaging in creative process of storytelling) provides more information about how to be and how to live rather than explaining / analysing (of academic work).

Stewart, Kathleen. 2008. “Weak Theory in an Unfinished World.” Journal of Folklore Research 45 (1): 71-82. 
Stewart uses an assemblage of seemingly distinct vignettes as points of encounter rather than theoretical explanations for dealing with and understanding the affective dimension of ordinary life. In each of these ‘disparate scenes’ something “comes together” and “maps a thicket of connections between vague yet forceful and affecting elements” (72). It is a kind of, what she calls, a ‘weak theory’ of experience wherein “theory comes unstuck from its own line of thought to follow the objects it encounters” (72). Stewart attempts to demonstrate the importance of experience in understanding theory and as theory. She looks to the textures and rhythms of life just in much the same way that Massey understands place as unfinished and thrown together. There is an instantaneous composition of experiences in a moment: something is already there at the same time as it is waiting to happen “in disparate and incommensurate objects, registers, circulations, and publics. It’s in fall colors, maple syrups, tourist brochures…”(72). She calls for particular attention to be paid to the seemingly unrelated, and the elusiveness of the effects of affect.

Stoller, Paul. 2007. “Ethnography/memoir/imagination/story.” Anthropology and Humanism 32 (2): 178-191.

Anthropology is a personal discipline wherein the life of the Anthropologist is embedded in the research. Writing ethnography is the foundation of anthropology, which enables “readers to understand the wisdom of others, which, in turn can open their being to an increasingly complex and interconnected world”. Stoller asks what makes an ethnographic text have lasting influence, one that will be read again and again. Beyond affective descriptions and engagement with people and places, ethnographers need to grapple with elements of life that are relatable cross-culturally that come out of the ethnographers development of social and emotional relationships. From interlocutor Stoller learns to write stories of others, authors must write their own as it takes two people to write stories. There is a need to use experience as bridge to connect outer realities to inner impressions – other to selves, readers to writers; imagination is a force that guides us through and to the story that links past, present, and future. Stoller advocates for the use of artistic expressions as entry into understanding of the world from alternative viewpoints, which enable new ways of seeing and experiencing the world and telling new stories.

Stoller, Paul. 2010. Sensuous Scholarship. Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press. Considers the body as a tool of anthropological inquiry, as a primary text that can be read and analysed in order to understand human experience and cultural constructions. Stoller asserts the necessity of understanding “sensuous epistemologies” of the people and societies Anthropologists study in order to produce ethnographic work that opens up wider awareness of the make-up and experiences of the societies themselves, as well as comes to a fuller realization of human experiences. That is knowledge is embodied in the way people move and act in the world and therefore human sensory, emotional, perceptual experiences must be including in considerations of how knowledge is constructed, understood, transmitted, and acquired. He uses own ethnographic fieldwork to showcase: how taste and sound inform worldviews, how embodied rituals carry/tell history. That is the past becomes an embodied memory. Calls for openness to other ways of being and perceiving in order to recognize and receive wisdom from others: “the world, for the sensuous scholar, remains a wondrous place that stirs the imagination and sparks creativity” (136).

Strang, Veronica. 2005. “Common senses: Water, sensory experience and the generation of meaning.” Journal of Material Culture 10 (1): 92-120. 
Strang looks to water in order to interrogate how there is a connection between material, sensory, and cognitive potentialities shared by all people, while also recognizing the differences shaped by sociocultural and material contexts. Using two ethnographic examples of riverside communities, Strang considers the cultural context in each community of their relationships and interactions with water, and how they are experienced understood. She understands that the physicality of any object is the basis from which cultural meaning is constructed. Cross-cultural commonalities of water result from: (1) its observable and experiential characteristics (human need for it, fluidity, its constant characteristics whether large or small scale; (2) human sensory experience generate basic common meaning that persist through time and space, but particularities and nuance of meaning is derived by socio-cultural context. She suggests that the environment is a blank slate to which humans apply cultural meaning but it evokes particular sensory responses / experiences that exist cross-culturally. It is how the senses are understood and contextualized which differentiate the sensory perception / meaning given to environments and the relationship between humans and the environment.

Sutton, David E. 2001. “Sensory Memory and the Construction of ‘Worlds.’” In Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory, 73–102. Oxford: Berg.

Sutton considers food as a vessel, which contains memories of sensory and social experiences – especially as food has travelled through the world with migrants; it is not merely symbolic of social relations but it assists in forging and maintaining them. Sees everyday experiences as capable of evoking memories about the ways that meaning and identity is formed. The fact that food can smell and taste of a particular location (or home) reveals sensory experiences as a vein through which people can remember and reconnect to place and how materials/entities can shift in their meaning and identity when experienced in new or different contexts. Eating food from home is the embodiment of knowledge that others at home are eating the same food. Synesthetic experience provided by foods has effects that allows embodied aspect of creating a whole reality, memory, world, life. Ethnographic examples show that taste and smell have “much greater association with episodic than semantic memory, with symbolic rather than linguistic, and with recognition rather than recall, helps to explain why taste and smell are so useful for encoding the random, yet no less powerful, memories of contexts past than, say, vision or words” (102). Food being an emotional and synesthetic experience makes the act of eating foods from home an entry point into envisioning “worlds” from which the individual has been spatially and/or temporally displaced.

Zhang, Jinghong. 2017. “Tasting Tea and Filming Tea: The Filmmaker's Engaged Sensory Experience.” Visual Anthropology Review 33(2): 141-151.

Zhang uses her experience utilizing ethnographic film to complicate the representations of sensorial experiences. As a filmmaker Zhang also participated in tea tastings – and noted in these experiences that her sense of taste was muted (or perhaps not remembered) as focus was placed into the audio-visual senses. Noting how different senses work differently, some being more or less active, adds another dimension to understanding the interconnectedness of senses and the call for Anthropological work to engage in the multi-sensorial. Zhang uses a POV filmic approach when experiencing her own tasting that actively brings viewers into her experience, evoking an embodied/sensorial experience of taste. She argues that an intimacy between the sensory experience of the filmmaker, the subject, and the viewer can be created through giving attention to the filmmaker’s engagement with the environment. Showing facial reactions to taste differ from the descriptions given. While holding camera, bringing tea bowl to mouth (which comes toward viewer and then disappears from view as filmmaker drinks/tastes) engages the viewer. Zhang uses the camera as an extension of her own sensory experience to provide viewer’s entry into her embodied sensory experience. She argues that this bridges the gap between filmmaking and representation of the senses, and results in a more whole sensory ethnography that is more reflexive.