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Paper short abstract:

This paper is a reflection on pedagogy. I describe a course on Culture and the Senses, which draws on my practices as an artist and as an anthropologist. The intent is that students engage with the world and reconsider the boundaries and forms of their knowing. They become, for moments, artists.

Paper long abstract:

I trained as an artist in Canada in the 1970s, then turned to anthropology as another way of doing the same things. I saw both as ways to understand and experience how humans come to know the world—social, mental, and material—in a particular way, in a particular body, and take it as a given, a freely standing reality apart from interactive creation.

This paper is about a class I teach on Culture and the Senses. The key idea of the course is that the senses are culturally mediated, and culture is sensually mediated; the key work of the course is weekly exercises in which students, hopefully, glimpse moments when the way they understand their worlds and the things in it shifts. Not just cognitively, but through, say, tactile engagement or looking in dim light and recognizing how little input their mind needs to organize something they view as constant. Exercises include touching, drawing, photographing, listening, feeling contact of body with environment, and building models through which they consider how “representation” is a sensually informed cultural practice.

Inspired by my own experience, and adapting the work of Tim Ingold, this paper offers a reflection on pedagogy. My artist friends say the student projects are themselves like installations, asking for engagement. I rejoice that the students are out of their minds as they pay attention to the world. I hope that as anthropologists they appreciate that culture is embodied, and that the boundaries of their knowing—of all kinds--are fluid.