Written by: Michael Badriaki on September 12, 2013

During a busy week of work, family and school related activities, Pink’s book “Doing Sensory Ethnography” was an insightful read. The adage, “Don’t judge a book by its cover!” did not stand a chance because from the onset. I was immediately impressed by the green, red, coffee brown, pink, ice cream picture on the front cover and the lips in the extreme upper left corner. What great aesthetics!

The reading had already solicited sensory visual appetite which would soon be confronted by one argument in the book which suggested:

…that the assumption that vision is necessarily a dominant and objectifying sense is incorrect.” Why one might inquirer? The “….assumption was brought about because instead of asking, ‘How do we see the environment around us? ….instead philosophical critics of visualism’ presuppose that ‘to see is to reduce the environment to objects that are to be grasped and appropriated as representations in the mind. [1]

I wondered as to whether this might explain why some people might ask for permission to look at an item while reaching out to touch or feel it at the same even when she or his visual ability is intact.

For some people, seeing is believing, indeed and perhaps many are eventually led to the expansive notion of “skilled visions”[2]; which Pink describes as “embedded in multi-sensory practices, where look is coordinated with skilled movement, with rapidly changing points of view, or with other senses such s touch.”[3] All the above effects are brought to bear by the presence of ethnographers. It is clear from the material that sensory ethnography applies to a wide variety of contexts in which its practice can yield a vast array of research data. However, ethnographers seem to play a major role in influencing the outcomes of the subject at hand. Pink points out that “earlier sensory ethnographies focused almost exclusively on cultures that were strictly different from that where the ethnographer had originated.”[4] This has direct implication for the kind of images that emerge and photographers who venture to into cross-culture ethnography need to have a certain degree of cultural intelligence, if they are visiting a host culture on a short-term basis.

I have worked with a number of relief organizations and imagery has been a key part on how short-term volunteers and staff have sought to narrate their experiences overseas. While a genuine photograph may tale a thousand words, I have often wondered to what extent most of the photos are manipulated and adulterated to shoot a particular interest even at the expense of people’s snap realities.

In contrast, the author mentions:

Anthropological studies that attend to the senses have been done ‘at home’, or at least in modern western culture included a focus on everyday practices such as housework, laundry, and gardening, leisure practices such as walking and climbing, clinical work practices. “Such sensory ethnographies both attend to and interpret the experiential, individual, idiosyncratic and contextual nature of research participants’ sensory practices and also seek to comprehend the culturally specific categories, conventions, moralities and knowledge that informs how people understand their experiences.[5]

Unlike the previous ethnographical focus on culture, a sensory approach provides a viewer with more opinions for human interaction. Firstly, his or her’ “sensory impression’ of another person invokes emotional or physical responses. Secondly, “sense impression becomes ‘a route of knowledge of other”.[6] It was confirmatory for me to learn that sensory ethnography can positively shape the world of image. When a sensory ethnographic outlook towards culture along with other ethical principles guide the practice of photography, I wonder what impact such a disposition would produce. What would it mean for relief, humanitarian and mission’s agencies to represent the “sensory learning of ‘being there”[7] instead of the conventional methods aimed at shocking people with pictures of poverty and death from the “third world”?

Pink introduces a reader to the many facets of the interconnected senses and sensory and I was intrigued by the idea of “walking with other”[8] as corrective and formidable points of view in ethnography.

About the Author

Michael Badriaki