Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the varying meanings that the concept of the senses contains within one single institution, a German Science Museum. Based on ethnographic fieldwork including visual methods and extensive field walks I argue that the museum is not only multivocal but also allows for multiple sensory approaches that museum staff put to use in their daily work of mediating exhibitions.

Paper long abstract:

My doctoral research engages with the so-called "anthropology of the senses" that challenges anthropologists into reflecting own models and narratives of the sensory as utterly cultural products and calls for a stronger focus on the multisensory quality of our being in the world.

At my ethnographic field site, a German Science Museum that features a children's museum dedicated to the "five senses" as well as a vast and multivocal permanent gallery on the "human being", I am interested in exploring what the concept of the "senses", which is widely used at the museum, means to different individuals and communities of practice and how it is being narrated, appropriated or challenged by museum staff.

In this paper, I am drawing on the concept of "skilled vision" (Grasseni) in order to introduce the ways in which two museum interpreters perceive of the permanent gallery: it will be argued that the exhibition is actively being appropriated in radically different ways by interpreters depending on the perspective their original community of practice within the museum's larger professional community conveys.