2010 American Anthropological Association Meeting/ Society for Visual Anthropology

*”Perception, Production and Circulation: Sensory Ethnography through Media”*

Session Abstract:
This panel is organized by graduate students at Harvard University’s Sensory
Ethnography Lab in conjunction with the launch of a new academic journal of
sensory ethnography. Selected projects/papers will have the opportunity to
be published in the first edition of the Journal of Sensory Ethnography
(working title).

Through this panel we aim to recognize and problematize the relationship
between theoretical abstraction and material concreteness, to reimagine the
relationship between sensing, knowing, and thinking, and to reexamine the
implications of this for ethnographic media. “Sensory ethnography” holds
promises of engaged scholarship that explores the evocative and
representative, the affective and effective, the feeling and the meaning of
salient features of everyday life.

Today the potential for innumerable combinations of media promises
innovative modes of producing, transmitting, circulating and generating
ethnographic material. This panel seeks to discuss these various modes and
mediums vis-à-vis its relevance to improving our understanding of culturally
mediated apprehension of sensoria. Submitted abstracts may include but are
not limited to paper presentations, video, audio recording, and multimedia
projects with a goal to elaborate the capacity of these modes for critical
engagement with the emerging scholarship of sensory ethnography. Panel
abstracts can explore (but are not limited to) such themes as:

- image production and circulation
- senses and religion
- senses and the city
- memory
- place-making
- affect and publics
- senses of home
- sound/soundscapes
- senses and the built environment
- senses and gender
- media and perception
- ethnographic methodologies/ethics/research
- sensory engagement.

Key Words: sensory ethnography, media production, anthropology of the
senses, aesthetics, practice, circulation, affect

Please submit abstracts, no later than *March 26th*, to:
Julia Yezbick yezbick@fas.harvard.edu and Aryo Danusiri
danusiri@fas.harvard.edu