Thinking and feeling the concept of Knowing
Thinking and feeling a combination of knowing
As we go through life it is always a challenge to go beyond what we feel. I preach to people about faith a lot because I know that people are more prone to feel their way through life. But reading this book has made me conceptually a little wrong. Our environment and setting is always important to what we feel or think. Our environment also dictates to us visually and sensory where we are. I think this is important because we are always a product of where we came form but just not a clone of where we come from.
In this respect I know that in everything we see we have emotions that govern our reactions. I believe that we should let the church know that though the feelings we have and the mental problems we face dominant how we react, it’s never the true picture of what we face.
“The relationship between sensory and perception and culture is one of the topics that you have to discuss.” Each one is different. I find this an important aspect though coming from the inner city. People will perceive you the wrong way and you have no qualifications for them to make those perceptions. Where you are born has nothing to do with who you are. Also how you feel about culture is always shaped by your culture and to me most people have no idea what people go through from other ethnic backgrounds. So I feel that the relationship and perception of a culture always sets the tone for the way people feel in those cultures. But it’s not right or wrong it’s just biased by the person perception of the person from another culture. Analyzing stuff is not the best way to do sensory ethnography. Being born in an environment always shapes you and gives you the real feelings about where you are.
The anthropology of the senses “engages with questions concerning the status of vision and its relationship to other senses,” Visual ethnograpthy has a lot to do with sensory ethnography. What people see everyday develops the mood of the culture. I have experienced this. I hated coming home from school to the ghetto. It always made me feel doomed. It also had a positive effect it motivated me to never live in the ghetto and to get out of it. This required a vision. My surrounding did not have a good prescription but my inner self did and I had to follow that. It dictated my relationship with my family and my friends. Any environment we are in has structures that shape our vision and relationships and we sense it!
In conclusion how we receive things and how we perceive things is paramount in how we engage questions about things. Vision is shaped by our environment good or bad. But then we do what Sarah Pink said, “ It demands a form of reflexivity that goes beyond the interrogation of how culture is written.” I can say amen. How culture is written is always written from the perspective of the writer. If the writer engages questions that are not exclusively cultural they get a perception of that culture from that culture. I feel that this is important because when a person comes to a conclusion about what a culture is like they should not use only the norms of that culture to measure it. They should be more aware that the best way to determine the atmosphere of a culture rests in other cultures not exactly like it!
About the Author
Travis Biglow
Pastor of Victory Empowerment Center. Regional Chaplain High Desert Regional Center Graduates Azusa Pacific University. Licensed General Contractor B. I am the married with one daughter, two grandsons and one step son.3 responses to “Thinking and feeling the concept of Knowing”
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Travis,
Thanks for the connection between what we sense/who we are and the challenge of faith. There is always a difference between who we currently are and who God wants us to be.
Travis – you bring up a good point of how the inner/internal world impacts the outer/external world, as well as the other way around. How is it that some make it out of tough situations while others don’t? As well, how is it that some in what would be characterized as good situations turn out worse off? It would be an interesting conversation to bring in an ethnographer, a theologian, a sociologist and/or psychologist, and a community activist together to see how each of them viewed the same circumstance. don’t you think?
Great reflection Travis! Culture is so complex: its a lens through which we see the world (that colors our seeing); its the soil in which we grow; its a text that we read. It both limits and empowers us. It is the text we write that in turn wants to write our story; becoming a co-author, with God, of our story in culture is one of the arts of critical engagement.