Sarah Pink\u2019s Doing Sensory Ethnography I found to be a remarkably refreshing text on methodological practice\/process.\u00a0 Pink\u2019s willingness to explore and utilize an interdisciplinary approach \u2013 or rather, a multidisciplinary approach \u2013 marked by rigor, exploration and candor is vital material needed in both the academy and in the broader world.<\/p>\n
For too long, too much of the academy has remained under a modernist bifurcation of engaging life \u2013 quantitative vs. qualitative, field vs. lab, empiricist vs. ethnographist, material vs. existential, thinking vs. doing, collective vs. individual, objective vs. subjective, etc. ad nauseum.\u00a0 Pink\u2019s 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, \u201cNot everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pink seeks holistic approaches that take into account all aspects of the senses.\u00a0 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 \u2013 no matter the research, but especially for research that is dealing directly with the interactivity of humans with one another?<\/p>\n
As well, along with Pink\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Sometimes the methodology must arise from engagement with and within the context not previous to it.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cembodied\u201d ethnography, but moving even beyond that to the idea of an \u201cemplaced\u201d 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)<\/p>\n
Overall, what reading Pink\u2019s 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 \u201ccurrent\u201d paradigmatic understandings. Again quoting Einstein, this time on flexibility, \u201cIf we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?\u201d\u00a0 We must be thoughtful, but we must risk if we are to discover new ways of being and doing.<\/p>\n
Finally, extrapolating from Pink\u2019s 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 \u201cethnographically researching\u201d) the world \u2013 not all as thorough or as systematic as Pink \u2014 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0and 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:<\/p>\n
Victor Turner \u2013 The Ritual Process<\/em><\/p>\n John Niehardt \u2013 Black Elk Speaks<\/em><\/p>\n Howard Snyder \u2013 Salvation Means Creation Healed<\/p>\n Vincent Donovan \u2013 Christianty Rediscovered<\/em><\/p>\n Mircea Eliade \u2013 The Sacred and the Profane<\/em>; The Myth of the Eternal Return: or Cosmos and History; <\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Myth and Reality; <\/em>and Myth, Symbol, Structure<\/em><\/p>\n Diane Ackerman \u2013 A Natural History of the Senses<\/em><\/p>\n Christine Pohl \u2013 Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition<\/em>; and Living into <\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Community: Cultivating Practices that Sustain Us<\/em><\/p>\n David Augsburger \u2013 Pastoral Counseling Across Cultures<\/em> and Conflict Mediation Across Cultures<\/em><\/p>\n Clifford Geertz \u2013 The Interpretation of Cultures<\/em><\/p>\n Everett Rogers \u2013 Diffusion of Innovations<\/em><\/p>\n Thomas Kuhn \u2013 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions<\/em><\/p>\n Matt Zahnsier \u2013 Symbol and Ceremony: Making Disciples Across Cultures<\/em><\/p>\n Malcolm Gladwell \u2013 all of his works<\/p>\n 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\u2026<\/p>\n Immersive ethonographic \u201cemplacement\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sarah Pink\u2019s Doing Sensory Ethnography I found to be a remarkably refreshing text on methodological practice\/process.\u00a0 Pink\u2019s willingness to explore and utilize an interdisciplinary approach \u2013 or rather, a multidisciplinary approach \u2013 marked by rigor, exploration and candor is vital material needed in both the academy and in the broader world. For too long, too […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"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":[2,264],"class_list":["post-680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dminlgp","tag-pink-se","cohort-lgp4"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680","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\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=680"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2011,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680\/revisions\/2011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}