{"id":2454,"date":"2014-09-17T12:00:59","date_gmt":"2014-09-17T12:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=2454"},"modified":"2014-09-17T21:29:52","modified_gmt":"2014-09-17T21:29:52","slug":"sensory-overload","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/sensory-overload\/","title":{"rendered":"Sensory Overload"},"content":{"rendered":"

I would never have imagined an entire field of study for anthropological knowledge that focuses on senses and aesthetics. However, just because I\u2019m na\u00efve regarding such scholarly work doesn\u2019t mean I don\u2019t see its relevance, especially when entering into new cultures. When we go into a new culture we\u2019re bringing our subjective perception of our norms and those norms aren\u2019t limited to just what we see but what we smell, touch, hear and taste as well. Our norms, of course, are subjective; the culmination of a lifetime of experience which can be narrowly defined. We might assume it\u2019s the same everywhere. Sarah Pink reminds us, \u201cThe idea that ethnographic research is by nature subjective, and requires the researcher to reflect on her or his own role in the production of the ethnographic knowledge, is now a widely accepted paradigm\u201d.[1]<\/a> Likewise, when we go into a cross-cultural environment we should also reflect on our assumptions about smell, touch, taste and hearing, as suggested in \u201cDoing Sensory Ethnography\u201d; we should do an autobiographical assessment of our own personal sensory culture. In case that\u2019s as convoluted as I\u2019m afraid it might sound,\u00a0let me offer a personal example of why it\u2019s important.<\/p>\n

In October 2006, our family moved to a suburb of Bangkok. Unlike my experience with short term mission trips as a youth, this was a long-term move to a foreign country, with family in tow. A large part of my culture shock was the disconnect I felt between my own sensory assumptions and knowledge and the new sensory reality I moved into. I could probably pick a dozen examples, but my first trip to Carrefour, a local super-market, will do.<\/p>\n

We\u2019d seen it a of couple times, so I knew how to get there. Maryanne and I jumped into our Isuzu SUV, also my first driving experience in Thailand, and we made our way to do the mundane task of getting groceries. The local roads were packed, complete with street dogs, water buffalo, motorcycles, the occasional car or truck, and people pushing carts with goods for sale. I can only liken it to being in a video game where you have to avoid everything that\u2019s coming at you. Well, we made it to Carrefour without running into anything or running anyone over, a noteworthy accomplishment. Needless to say, my senses were already heightened, if not strained.<\/p>\n

Into\"da0e\" the ground level entrance we walked into what was similar to a typical Asian street market, with vendors in various stalls or booths (albeit inside, constricting the proper venting of smells, sounds, etc.) where you could buy just about anything, a bed, donuts, pets, accessories for your car, clothing, cell phones, a foot massage, DVDs, pharmaceuticals, very little rhyme or reason \u2013 my head was already swimming. From the disorganized, chaotic mess with a McDonalds and KFC thrown in, we went up a level to Carrefour, a French-based corporation so I had high hopes of some western sensibilities, alas, they contextualized. What I experienced was sensory overload; I almost turned around and went home. Up the ramp like escalator we went and into the grocery story. At the entrance was a young Thai woman selling a product, I think it was some hygiene product. What disrupted me, almost immobilized me, was that she was using a PA system (speakers, mic, amp) and it was at concert volume. I couldn\u2019t talk to my wife next to me. \u00a0Of course, all of this was in Thai, which I can\u2019t understand and sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. We began to move away from the sound, towards the produce and once again I almost turned around. My first exposure to durian, a fruit that offers us another evidence that we live in a cursed world, for certainly God didn\u2019t design it that way! Its outer husk is green with spikes (like it\u2019s from another planet) and inside it reminds me of dissecting into brain matter. The best description I\u2019ve heard of the taste \u2013 alas I wasn\u2019t brave enough \u2013 was it\u2019s like eating strawberries and cr\u00e8me out of a toilet, it\u2019s that foul. Well I could go on to tell you abut the fish sauce, still another assault to the olfactory senses, the Thais love their fish sauce! Whereas westerners have many different kinds of soda filling a grocery aisle, Thais have an entire grocery aisle of different kinds of fish sauces. When we finally got home, after the simplest of tasks, I wondered if I could survive in this strange overwhelming world.<\/p>\n

Before reading Pink\u2019s \u201cDoing Sensory Ethnography\u201d I would have assumed that the most knowledge of a culture is largely, if not exclusively, in what we see – the visual. But clearly, while what we see is important, so too is what we smell, what we hear, feel and taste. A culture is made up of all the senses. Maybe if I had a better grip on this, maybe if I had read \u201cDoing Sensory Ethnography\u201d prior to changing cultures, the \u201cshock!\u201d would have been tempered. Actually I think such an understanding would allow me to go into such an experience anticipating the dissidence between my sensory norms and the sensory norms of the host culture. Sensory-based culture shock would become sensory-based cultural discovery.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Pink, Sarah.\u00a0Doing Sensory Ethnography<\/em>. London: Sage, 2009, 53.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I would never have imagined an entire field of study for anthropological knowledge that focuses on senses and aesthetics. However, just because I\u2019m na\u00efve regarding such scholarly work doesn\u2019t mean I don\u2019t see its relevance, especially when entering into new cultures. When we go into a new culture we\u2019re bringing our subjective perception of our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[501,2,503,504,264,502],"class_list":["post-2454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-cross-cultural","tag-dminlgp","tag-durian","tag-ethnography","tag-pink-se","tag-thailand","cohort-lgp5"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2454"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2459,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454\/revisions\/2459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}