Ethno-Graphics 28/8 – 8/9

Much of what we perceive as ethnographic knowledge can never be put into words. The attunement of our senses to another world and environment, the slow process of learning to discern what is important in the social worlds of our subjects and what the images, sounds, smells, tastes and mental maps that our subjects carry with them, mean to them; all this is part of the ethnographic knowledge we strive to obtain by doing participant observation.

Nowadays the perceptual training that is part of any specialised craft and practice involving sight constitutes a ‘skilled vision’, a concept coined by Tim Ingold and further developed by Cristina Grasseni (our colleague and The Scientific Director of the CADS Institute at Leiden University). In order to know what to film, when and how, ethnographic filmmaking also demands the enskillment of vision in ways that combines an ‘observational sensibility’ (Grimshaw & Ravetz) with ethnographic understanding.

As this knowledge is implicit and embodied we need techniques to generate that sensorial knowledge and its inherent meanings, as well as to learn to communicate with our subjects about it. This module will help you develop your observational skills and abilities to share these with others using one of the most basic of technologies – drawing.