Fiona C. Ross
- Space is never neutral. Michel de Certeau (1988) argues that understanding -reading- a space has much to do with one’s position in it: the views from above and those from “on the move” differ in important ways.
- In this research I argue that engaging spaciality involves an engagement with emotion and the sensual in everyday life.
- Sensuous scholarship (Paul Stoller 1997) a scholarship that takes seriously the fact that we are engaged with all our senses in the production (and destruction) of social life.
- The experience speaks to changes in emotional and intersubjective experience over time, to an interrupted sense of bodily placement in reation to features in a landscape, and to a cognitive puzzle about the relation of the senses to the means, modes and products of categorisation and classification.
- De Certeau: Maps: perspective that broaches the objective and distant, prioritizes seeing; Tours: site oriented, speech acts, prioritizes acting. Ross adds a third: route finding: engages a sense of moving through space, navigating relationships, a careful weaving between the known and unknown.
- Tom Rice: hearing and the interpretation of sounds are… understood to be vital in a social, as well as material and spatial sense. (2003, 9)
- “Others commented that people’s chatter as they waited to collect water at the central water tanks was a central part of what gave the community a sense of itself as a community: that is, the sound offered a means through which reflexive categorisation and understanding ocurred” (41)
- “recording a map on the basis of sound and hearing would reveal a sense of the rythmic in the everyday. ” (41)
- No two days sound alike, but there are patterns that emanate from the rythms of ordinary routines, and interrumptions to those rythms could be marked.
- A soundscape would create a sense and representation of the rythm that characterises the settlement in relation to the landscape in which it is embedded.
- “The ethnographic vignettes offered here call for an understanding that takes seriously the ways that we engage in and with space/place, filling it with activity, relations, sensual engagements, interpretive activity, emotions and experience over time” (41)
- Cognitive maps are likely to change over time as routines change and relations alter, as life-cycle processes and the cultural conventions by which are marked shape and produce the experience of sociability in place. It implies that individual maps differ, and that there are overlaps and underlays. It suggests too that the roads and paths etched into a landscape do not necessarily engage an individual’s knowledge of a place or ways of inhabiting it over time. In addition to revealing the structural components of everyday life, a careful consideration of the ways that different categories of person engage and interact in space would allow us to consider the relationships between the sensory and the emotional in the making of sociality and temporality in particular places.
Referentes
- Casey, E. How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time. Senses of place.
- Rice, T. Soundselves, Anthropology today
- Soja, E. Postmodern geographies.