Dear List Members,
In the class I am currently teaching we look at the intersection of sensory
and social / gender(ed) hierarchies. Last week we discussed classical
sensory anthropological / ethnographical literature, carving out the
importance for the researcher to use all of their own senses in order to
get a glimpse into the role of the senses in everyday life. One student had
strong doubts about the validity of taking the researcher’s body so
seriously when gathering scientific data. Her boyfriend is in technology
studies and as it is already difficult for her to make him understand the
(value of) the discipline of anthropology it is even more difficult to
justify this sensory-bodily approach. Another student who is in a similar
personal situation, confirmed the uneasiness this causes.
I totally get their (self-)doubts. A discipline as marginalised as cultural
anthropology (former Volkskunde in Austria), employing ‘soft’ research
methods and then going further by taking the researcher’s body into account
seems just too much. Where is the science?, the question somehow arises for
these undergrad students.
In a world, where numbers rule the production of evidence, also knowledge
cultures as different as the “hard” sciences and, say, anthropology seem to
compete with each other and define value of disciplines, respectively. My
question is: What do I tell these insecure students? How do we “sell” our
value to people with technological / “hard” science background? How do we
make it plausible to them what and how we do it?
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