Review on Pink (2015) Intro to Doing 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. Sensory ethnography is not totally distinct from the rest of ethnography, as there is no such thing as ‘non-sensory’ ethnography. After all, the ethnographer always uses his or her eyes and ears during fieldwork, relying on the senses of sight and sound to form observations. The term ‘sensory ethnography’ is meant to remind the researcher that a myriad of other senses exist as well, many of which are routinely overlooked in studies of the social and cultural world. In this chapter, we will consider what these senses are, how they can be recorded, and how they might play into ethnographic explorations of particular kinds of work. “, by Monoskop.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *