Ethnographies may gain from a wider focus on senses and their interdependence. Sense data is often eclipsed in the prioritization of sight. As explained elsewhere (4), visual perception is often equated to knowing, assuming an epistemic authority and sense of empirical precision. The sensory turn is in part a push for ethnographies to move beyond representing world “views”, to exploring different perceptions of the world. Incorporating sound, and analyses of sound, into ethnographic accounts may engage a wider sensory imagination and thereby unseat the exclusive certainty of sight. This is valuable as it leaves the reader and ethnographer in a constructive state of suspension that demands imagination and intellectual flexibility. In order to contend with entrenched analytical and methodological tendencies, it is important that ethnographies call attention to what might be missed in the preoccupation with the visual realm and concern themselves instead with a fuller sensorium.
Recovering rich sensory descriptions in ethnographic accounts can challenge the dry, analytical prose that has “overshadowed”, according to Paul Stoller, the “sensoria of the ethnographic imagination” (1986, 8). Complex engagement with everyday experiences involves listening carefully both to those around you and to the unsuspecting myriad of noises that risk getting “relegated to the background” (Makagon & Neuman 2009). An overload of stimuli can elicit a kind of numbing effect—often considered a characteristic feature of dense urban landscapes. As with all of our senses, we necessarily filter sounds out or relegate them to the back of our minds. Recording, re-listening, re-mixing, and re-creating audio demands a renewed focus on sounds that might initially be otherwise neglected.
city traffic. Image credit to Henry Be henry_be, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Forsey differentiates what he calls “participant listening” from participant observation to elevate the importance of listening for gathering and interpreting ethnographic data. Re-focusing on sound, and incorporating audio into final accounts, he suggests, broadens the scope of potential contributors and pushes to include more voices. Polyvocality is important to the ethnographic process—it helps to develop more faithful cultural accounts and express different dimensions of experience. It also lends a methodological transparency over the process of interpretation and dialogue, as well as the mutual intrusion of the ethnographer and interlocutor. Listening, Forsey writes, “seeks to intrigue and inform.” Different from “explaining”, “intriguing” raises more questions, unravels preconceptions, and subverts certainty.
Audio provides enriched accounts of people and places with dynamics that might exceed or elude written expression. Recorded sounds also “preserve” a sense of “presence” “that places the listener in the scene” (Makagon & Neuman 2009, 12). This calls on the reader/listener to take part in discerning the significance of events, utterances, and things; rather than relying on an authorial guiding analysis, they are tasked with making sense of more immediate data. In this sense, audio encircles the immediate instance.
While written ethnographic representations usually demand a kind of precision and “making sense of,” audio recordings admit more ambiguity and uncertainty. While visual elements require the “condition of being observable from a point in space external to them”(Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 371), sound, as Deleuze and Guattari propose, defies this condition, creating instead a “space/field of contact” (ibid.). This “field of contact”—unlike a field of view that is initiated and controlled by the subject—is affective; the listener has less control over auditory input and this element of risk and vulnerability entails being touched by sounds.
Works Cited
- Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. (1980). A Thousand Plateaus. (B. Massumi, translation). University of Minnesota Press.
- Forsey, Martin. (2010). Ethnography as participant listening. Ethnography, 11(4), 558–572. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138110372587
- Makagon, Daniel., & Neumann, Mark. (2009). Recording Culture: Audio Documentary and the Ethnographic Experience. SAGE Publications, Inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452226590
- Stoller, Paul. (1989). The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. University of Pennsylvania Press.