Experimental Ethnography: Performativity, Movement, Mediation

Abstract

The article discusses the ways the method of videowalk is learned in the context of the seminar 'Anthropology of the Senses' with a special emphasis on sound studies and how it is theoretically introduced as a performative, intersensorial and embodied ethnographic practice. It explores the potentialities offered by the recent convergences between anthropology and contemporary artistic (audiovisual) production inspired by the 'ethnographic turn' in experimental representations of the urban public space. Videowalk is used as a method inviting students to produce cultural knowledge by questioning conventional logocentric (reading and writing) pedagogies and to experiment with reflexive, improvisational, emplaced and affective mediations of urban life and its changing everydayness. It is a method concerned with the intersections of theoretical knowledge with knowing-in-action , a method privileging the synaesthetic authoring of the public space, its meshworked trajectories and stories.