InspireGather

Speaker: Dr Mark Paterson.

 

 

This talk will briefly outline two conceptual strands, before attempting to link them through practice. Firstly, the recent ‘return to the senses’ within the social sciences and its historical context. The haptic (e.g. Paterson 2009) becomes a nonoptical means to consider how somatic sensations, including the lesser-discussed senses of kinaesthesia (movement) and proprioception (bodily position in space) may be explored. While discussions of forms of ‘inner touch’ that complicate the Aristotelian five-fold model of the senses have occurred throughout the Early Modern period (e.g. Heller-Roazen 2009), there are implications for returning to the body in social science fieldwork, including the literature on reflexivity. The return to the senses is a return to a reflexive form of embodiment that takes account of the inner senses.

 

Secondly, given the difficulty of identifying such somatic sensations, how they might be represented or remediated through ethnographic text or film places a burden on the powers of sensory media and metaphor. The representation of inner senses might complement a turn to ‘haptic cinema’ in film studies (e.g. Marks 2000, 2002; Sobchack 2004), or Sarah Pink’s urban ethnographic work which deals directly with the senses. Nevertheless, I will argue, reflexive embodiment that accounts for the inner senses might explore creative and experimental means to capture embodied, mobile modes of encounter with place. My main example here will be film-making for an upcoming international field trip. By developing these often-ignored aspects of ethnographic place-making, I therefore consider approaches to capture the multisensory flow of field-based experience in practice as well as in theory.