Sensing Cultures and Environments

Ethnographic Terminalia is hosting a special round table discussion organized by David Howes. This round table brings together scholars from Canada, USA, and Australia who are actively engaged in thinking through and building experiments in anthropology. This group will explore how new forms of experimental mediation are enabling the sensing of cultures and environments as a means to challenge historical silences, absences and marginalities.

Thursday, November 21 (4pm-6pm)
The Hangar at the Center for Digital Media
577 Great Northern Way, Vancouver, V5T 1E1

The practice of ethnography has increasingly come untethered from writing and vested in other modalities, from sound to film to virtual reality, together with a pronounced new emphasis on movement (walking, dance, performance). The substitution of sense-based methods and media for the language-centred method of old has resulted in a significant re-figuration of anthropological knowledge: mediation has taken the place of representation, and immersion has supplanted observation and description. As François Laplantine puts it in The Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology anthropologists now seek to “feel along with” others as a critical component of sensory ethnography.  The growing experimentation with different ways of sensing has challenged the former assimilation of the work of interpretation to linguification or textualization. Anthropology is no longer the “discipline of words” it once was: sensing cultures through multiple modalities has taken over from “reading culture” (Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures) and “writing culture” (Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture). Collaborative, relational, participant action research and multimodal, multi-authored  human and non-human points of view are taking shape through new media, attuned to the work of culture as embodied experience and encounter. This roundtable explores how new forms of experimental mediation are enabling the sensing of cultures and environments as a means to challenge historical silences, absences and marginalities.

Organized by David Howes

Presenters:

Discussants:

  • Ethnographic Terminalia collective

At the Terminus:

This workshop will take place in the gallery for the At the Terminus exhibition. This will provide participants the opportunity to visit Wakanda University,  sq̓əq̓ip – gathered together, and Bee Roll.

Displacement. Indigenous on Indigenous Scholarship. Acrylic on canvas. 122 x 79 cm. 2019

Displacement. Indigenous on Indigenous Scholarship. Acrylic on canvas. 122 x 79 cm. 2019. David Garneau