Abstract
The article discusses the ways the method of videowalk is learned in the context of the seminar “Anthropology of the Senses” with a special emphasis on sound studies and how it is theoretically introduced as a performative, intersensorial and embodied ethnographic practice. It explores the potentialities offered by the recent convergences between anthropology and contemporary artistic (audiovisual) production inspired by the “ethnographic turn” in experimental representations of the urban public space. Videowalk is used as a method inviting students to produce cultural knowledge by questioning conventional logocentric (reading and writing) pedagogies and to experiment with reflexive, improvisational, emplaced and affective mediations of urban life and its changing everydayness. It is a method concerned with the intersections of theoretical knowledge with knowing-in-action , a method privileging the synaesthetic authoring of the public space, its meshworked trajectories and stories.
Highlights
The idea to offer a seminar on “Anthropology of the Senses” was formulated in the context of my engagement with the by- burgeoning field of “sound studies”, an interdisciplinary field mainly drawing from ethnomusicology⸺in particular, Steven Feld’s “acoustemology”⸺ and the long-established areas of anthropology of the senses and the body
I am going to explore the potentialities of such convergences and the blurring of boundaries between art and ethnography by focusing on videowalk as a fieldwork method involving filming in movement
My interest in the use of video as a fieldwork tool and as a form of mediating cultural knowledge was largely motivated by the strong emphasis placed on film-making as a research technique in the context of my postgraduate studies in ethnomusicology and, especially, by my tutor, John Baily, a film-maker trained as a RAI documentary film-making fellow at the National Film and Television School (UK)
Summary
The idea to offer a seminar on “Anthropology of the Senses” was formulated in the context of my engagement with the by- burgeoning field of “sound studies”, an interdisciplinary field mainly drawing from ethnomusicology⸺in particular, Steven Feld’s “acoustemology”⸺ and the long-established areas of anthropology of the senses and the body. Perhaps this is exactly the challenge in the sort of art/anthropology reciprocities discussed in this seminar: to creatively explore, invent and perform novel ways of unraveling representation as a strategy; to make it known as a process involving an author designing, experimenting, failing, re-drawing, improvising, and mediating lived experiences as relational and situated practices of knowing the world.vi
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