Beyond Text? ─ Critical practices and sensory anthropology

Beyond Text: Critical Practices and Sensory Anthropology addresses a series of questions concerning the relationship between anthropological understandings of the world, sensory perception and aesthetic practices. The book suggests that if different sensory experiences embody and facilitate different kinds of knowledge, then we need to develop new methods and more appropriate forms of representation that are not based solely around text or on correspondence theories of truth.

As such, Beyond Text: Critical Practices and Sensory Anthropology brings together leading figures in anthropology, visual, sound and film studies to explore how knowledge, sensation and embodied experiences can be researched and represented by combining different visual, aural, and textual forms - for example text and image, image and sound, body and voice. What we ask is the relationship between the interiority of a person's experience and its exteriority that is present to the eye, the ear and other sense organs that make the experience 'open' to anthropological forms of documentation, theorisation and representation? We argue that there is a necessary, critical development in our ways of knowing that must take place not merely at the level of theory and representation but also through innovative fieldwork methods and media practices. The collected papers and audio-visual materials presented on a DVD, explore the potential for a more sensorially-grounded, critically aware and creative approach to cultural analysis, media production and field research.

Rupert Cox is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester

Chris Wright is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London

Andrew Irving is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Director of the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester