Beyond Text?: Critical Practices and Sensory Anthropology

Beyond text? Critical practices and sensory anthropology is about the relationship between anthropological understandings of the world, sensory perception and aesthetic practices. It suggests that if different sensory experiences embody and facilitate different kinds of knowledge, then we need to develop new methods and more creative forms of representation that are not based solely around text or on correspondence theories of truth. The volume brings together leading figures in anthropology, visual and sound studies to explore how knowledge, sensation and embodied experiences can be researched and represented by combining different visual, aural and textual forms which it demonstrates through an accompanying DVD.

The book and DVD make an argument for a necessary, critical development in anthropological ways of knowing that take place not merely at the level of theory and representation but also through innovative fieldwork methods and media practices.