Читать книгу Doing Sensory Ethnography - Sarah Pink - Страница 15

The ‘reflexive turn’ in social and cultural anthropology is usually attributed to the ‘writing culture’ debate and the emergence of a dialogical anthropology (e.g. Clifford and Marcus, 1986; James et al., 1997). This highlighted amongst other things the constructedness of ethnographic texts, the importance of attending to the processes by which ethnographic knowledge is produced and the need to bring local voices into academic representations. The reflexivity that emerged from discussions in sensory anthropology was a critical response to this literature. Howes argued that the ‘verbo-centric’ approach of dialogical anthropology was limited as it failed to account for the senses (1991b: 7–8) and Regina Bendix criticised ‘its focus on the authorial self [which] shies away from seeking to understand the role of the senses and affect within as well as outside of the researcher-and-researched dynamic’ (2000: 34). In the late 1980s reflexive accounts of the roles played by the senses in anthropological fieldwork began to emerge in connection with both the issues raised by the ‘writing culture’ shift and the contemporary emphasis on embodiment. These works stressed the need for reflexive engagements with how ethnographic knowledge was produced and an acknowledgement of the importance of the body in human experience and in academic practice. Paul Stoller’s The Taste of Ethnographic Things (1989), followed almost a decade later by his Sensuous Scholarship (1997), pushed this ‘reflexive’ and ‘embodied’ turn in social theory further. Stoller’s work shows how anthropological practice is a corporeal process that involves the ethnographer engaging not only in the ideas of others, but in learning about their understandings through her or his own physical and sensorial experiences, such as tastes (e.g. 1989) or pain and illness (e.g. 1997, 2007c). Likewise, Nadia Seremetakis (1994) and Judith Okely (1994) both used their own experiences as the basis for discussions that placed the ethnographer’s sensing body at the centre of the analysis. As for any ethnographic process, reflexivity is central to sensory ethnography practice. In Chapter 3 I build on these existing works to outline how a sensory reflexivity and intersubjectivity might be understood and practised.