The possibilities of sensory ethnography in the anthropological research of window, regarded as social and cultural phenomenon
Abstract
The aim of this poster is to investigate the possibilities of sensory ethnography as an innovative approach to the methodology of an anthropological qualitative research. The method and its use will be presented on the research of window as a cultural and social phenomena.
Window can be regarded as an anthropological constant - every person relates to it either on conscious or subconscious level. The way it is perceived significantly influences the construction of the sense of home, the processes of identity and also the social dynamics among neighbours.
However window is not a common subject of talk and therefore it is hard to approach the lived experience with window by the means of common methods of anthropological research, such as interview and participant observation in its classical form. The way out can be found in the method of sensory ethnography as it is proposed by Sarah Pink (2009).
Sensory ethnography is a process of creating and representing knowledge that is based on the ethnographer's own experience. Ethnographer while doing the fieldwork looks for the ways through which he or she creates the emphatic and on his or her own experience based understanding of what the others can perceive and know.
Application of this method showed the complexity of lived experience with the window and has revealed the insufficiency of the formal division of sensory perceptions into five modes (sight, taste, hearing, touch and olfactory sense).