Sensory Ethnography as Emplaced Ethnography
Sarah Pink’s Doing Sensory Ethnography I found to be a remarkably refreshing text on methodological practice/process. Pink’s willingness to explore and utilize an interdisciplinary approach – or rather, a multidisciplinary approach – marked by rigor, exploration and candor is vital material needed in both the academy and in the broader world.
For too long, too much of the academy has remained under a modernist bifurcation of engaging life – quantitative vs. qualitative, field vs. lab, empiricist vs. ethnographist, material vs. existential, thinking vs. doing, collective vs. individual, objective vs. subjective, etc. ad nauseum. Pink’s text moves beyond such artificial limitation and instead interacts in the interstices of a multiplicity of meanings and means. As Albert Einstein wrote years ago, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
Pink seeks holistic approaches that take into account all aspects of the senses. Why should aspects of smell, and vision, and touch, and hearing, and taste not always be included in the process of research? Very logically, are these not all factors that can bear influentially upon our understanding of outcomes – no matter the research, but especially for research that is dealing directly with the interactivity of humans with one another?
As well, along with Pink’s emphasis on holistic engagement with research contexts I appreciated her emphasis on noting that she is not providing wrote methodological orientations, but more offering guidelines for practice. Pink recognizes that in dealing with such massive variations/variables as happen with people and places and space and time a prearranged set of parameters and rules is not always advisable. Sometimes the methodology must arise from engagement with and within the context not previous to it.
This sense that Pink writes about methods arising from connectedness and encounter come from her appreciating the efforts of people articulating the idea of an “embodied” ethnography, but moving even beyond that to the idea of an “emplaced” ethnography. (p. 25, 26) Utilizing an author named Howes, Pink shows that embodiment may mean the integration mind and body, but emplacement means the integration of body-mind-environment. (p. 25)
Overall, what reading Pink’s Doing Sensory Ethnography did for me was to remind me that some of the books/authors that I have appreciated most over the years are the ones who did not place stringent disciplinary limitations on their research efforts and instead maintained a level of flexibility in their orientations which allowed them to make new discoveries above and beyond “current” paradigmatic understandings. Again quoting Einstein, this time on flexibility, “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” We must be thoughtful, but we must risk if we are to discover new ways of being and doing.
Finally, extrapolating from Pink’s material, I would like to just offer a smattering of examples of other texts/authors that have helped me toward living into and understanding more holistic ways of viewing (if not always specifically “ethnographically researching”) the world – not all as thorough or as systematic as Pink — and hope that some of them may be of interest/aid for others as we think about ways to consciously engage and understand the world round-about us:
Victor Turner – The Ritual Process
John Niehardt – Black Elk Speaks
Howard Snyder – Salvation Means Creation Healed
Vincent Donovan – Christianty Rediscovered
Mircea Eliade – The Sacred and the Profane; The Myth of the Eternal Return: or Cosmos and History;
Myth and Reality; and Myth, Symbol, Structure
Diane Ackerman – A Natural History of the Senses
Christine Pohl – Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition; and Living into
Community: Cultivating Practices that Sustain Us
David Augsburger – Pastoral Counseling Across Cultures and Conflict Mediation Across Cultures
Clifford Geertz – The Interpretation of Cultures
Everett Rogers – Diffusion of Innovations
Thomas Kuhn – The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Matt Zahnsier – Symbol and Ceremony: Making Disciples Across Cultures
Malcolm Gladwell – all of his works
And just some authors, Thomas Merton, Mary Oliver, William Stafford, Norman Wirzba, Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Dillard, Walter Brueggemann, Sadhu Sundar Singh, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, various liberation theologians…
Immersive ethonographic “emplacement” seems to me to be a fabulous idea for doing grounded, meaningful research that really seeks to take into account the whole context of people on whose behalf such research is being pursued.
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