LEARNING MORE BY SENSING MORE
Allow me to apologize first of all for the tardiness of this post. For some reason I got into my mind that there was a reprieve of this assignment due to our traveling to London. But alas, I was incorrect. Upon my return there were things stacked against me in my absence. But here, at last, is my attempt to digest Doing Sensory Ethnography by Sarah pink.
Sights, sounds, smells, taste, and touch make up the standard five sense in which we encounter our daily world. To enter into another culture and both learn and document the new culture through these five senses has to be a very difficult and time consuming endeavor. But that is just the gathering of data phase. The next difficulty is to try and comply the data in such a way as to communicate that cultural experience of the people studies to a audience. The use of sensory ethnography is the challenge that Sarah Pink desires to undertake and explain to us, her audience.
My understanding of ethnography is simply a means by which we represent, graphically, a culture that we desire to discover more about. I was interested as to how Pink was going to do this with the faculty of sensory. Visually I could conceive, but sensory, that was really new to me. Interesting enough were some of the first words that I encountered. Only eight pages into the book Pink says, “There is now no standard way of doing ethnography that is universally practiced.”[1] In any other research field this would be a ludicrous statement. Yet with this field of ethnography it is not so much the end result as it is the process or critical methodology by which we obtain knowledge and learning of a new ethnic culture. Pink go so far as to define it as a reflective and experimental process through which understanding and knowledge are produced.[2] The idea that the anthropological investigatory process of a culture could be so broad and subjectively personal, provides one with great latitude in which to conduct desired research and discovery. Ultimately, I believe this is what Pink desires and advocates for. It is therefore up to the individual ethnographer and his/her own experiences to create and represent knowledge that he/she has gathered from their own experiences and encounters with a different culture.
Through sensory and embodied experiences Pink advocates that an ethnographer might better communicate and represent a culture to a target audience.[3] This of course is the goal for every ethnographer. To have one’s target audience understand, no, feel and sense, what you have experienced when you where there, in the field, is a dream desired by all communicators and ethnographers. I have to wonder however, if what one senses is the same as what another person senses when given the same experience? Perception and personal interpretation must weigh heavily on each researcher as he/she tries to communicate what they experienced. Take for example the taste of Indian curry. To one researcher it is a foul and bitter-nasty tasking substance. To a different researcher the taste is delicious and spicy leaving you with a desire for more. The subjectivity is therefore left to the perception of the researcher and how that “taste” is communicated back to the audience. All this makes me wonder what things I have sensed and communicated to others that they may have “sensed” another way. Humm?
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