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21. Ear to Ear, Nose to Nose, Skin to Skin: The Senses in Comparative Ethnographic Practice

Convenors:

Regina Bendix, Georg-August-University Göttingen

Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz

Face-to-face encounters rely on sensory information beyond the visual. Indeed, the major categories of the congress—distance and proximity, identity and alterity in times of rapid movement and transition—are experientially achieved, or at the very least sought, through culturally diverGhent sensory repertoires. Familiar sound can ameliorate feelings of spatial or temporal displacement, alien scents within familiar terrain may undermine a positive, visual impression. In its physiological dimension, sensory perception is intensely personal and individual, but sensory semiosis is profoundly culturally shaped. The senses have posed methodological problems which also led to their marginalization in ethnographic practice. Ethnography was also strongly patterned by the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the truth-value of visual perception. Sensory semiosis as a constitutive ingredient of cultural experience thus often fell outside the purview of anthropological knowledge production. The workshop, contributing to the congress’s aim of “recasting the ethnographic presence”, will explore the place of an ethnography of the senses, cast in comparative terms and built on methodological innovation.