Current Anthropological Research: Sensory Worlds Across Times and Cultures

This course gives a comprehensive introduction to a specific area of contemporary anthropological investigation. Current research trends and recent theoretical developments are explored through critical discussions with emphasis on anthropology's evolving engagement with the selected field. The course offers a unique opportunity to be acquainted with diverse aspects - methodological, epistemological and theoretical - of the research process, aspects that lie at the very basis of anthropological analysis and practice, and of ethnographic production.

Course theme autumn 2023

The capacity for sensing is a fundamental part of being human. Sensory anthropology works from the premise that the human sensorium - sight, sound, smell, taste, touch - is a biological resource but that is also culturally shaped and mediated. Not only are the senses combined and prioritized differently in different cultures, but the significance given to each sense is also subject to wide variations.  The valuation of the senses, and the ways they are summoned for classification and ideological work, clearly varies across history and place. Our embodied sensorium is always embedded in wider social structures, ready to be employed as perceptual technique, intersubjective marker, and as a classificatory tool to mark social distinctions and power relations. In the more phenomenological domain, the senses are intimately woven into our most basic experiences - of time, memory, space, and particular environments. Intimately bound up with emotion and affect, the senses drive our desires, imaginaries, curiosities, and the construction of our knowledge. Most significantly, the senses build communicative bridges to other species with which we interact and share the world. 

To put it simply, approaching the senses from an anthropological perspective allows us to understand their vital role in people's everyday lives, both personal and public, across different social, cultural, and historical settings.     

The course is conceived of as a journey through time and place. It is a journey that draws on diverse ethnographic examples from around the world and examines the sensory engagements afforded by rainforests, savannahs, slums, cities, multicultural markets, and the interiors of buildings. It is also a journey that incorporates sensory examples from the world of fiction, art, and the material forms that frame our contemporary lives. The journey will take us back to colonial times to recover aspects of our disciplinary history when anthropologists classified their subjects in foreign lands according to a sensory, evolutionary, hierarchical schema based on race. It will also take us back to medieval Europe where the senses were employed in making gender distinctions and other binary classifications. In both cases, the senses were pressed into service by structures of power which produced marginalization and inequality on a societal and global scale. 

Together we will explore and analyze sensory worlds through a multi-media approach - consisting of lectures, texts, sound clips, film, photo, podcasts, and forays into the savory environs of food markets. Aside from those specializing in anthropology, this course will be of interest to students across the social sciences and humanities. 

A student who has completed the course should have the following learning outcomes defined in terms of knowledge, skills and general competence.

The student will be able to:

Knowledge

• provide in-depth knowledge of the topic addressed in the course, with particular reference to its history and associated theoretical and methodological debates in social anthropology

Skills

• explain the current state-of-art of research in the field of study addressed in the course
• assess critically the various methodological and theoretical considerations that must be taken in order to further develop the field of study

General competence

• apply key concepts and perspectives from the course and its field of study independently, in the understanding and analysis of local and global processes
• apply an understanding of and critically analyze the correlation and difference between observation, empirical data, interpretation, theory and analysis in text production
• discuss the potential for applying perspectives from the course in their own research project