Short Abstract

This panel explores how sensory experiences of violence shape human and ecological life. By tracing sound, smell, touch, and even silence, we ask how sensory ethnography reveals the entanglement of bodies, infrastructures, and environments under duress.

Long Abstract

This panel positions itself within the sensory turn in anthropology (Howes 1991, 2005, 2022; Howes & Classen 2014; Pink 2015; Feld 2012) and extends this scholarship into the study of war, occupation, and environmental violence across multiple regions. We invite contributions that consider how violence is navigated, lived with, and resisted through sensorial registers (auditory, tactile, olfactory, kinesthetic, etc) and how sensory experience constitutes a form of knowledge in zones of conflict.

By attending to the sensescapes (Howes 2005) of violence, the panel seeks to foreground the sensory as a critical site for epistemic work. Sounds of drones, smells of running generators, textures of dust and debris, as elements of the wartime sensescape, for instance, shape how bodies, materials, and social worlds are entangled in environments of violence. Sensory ethnographies help reveal these entanglements, affording a relational understanding of human and more than human worlds.

We ask what sensory attention can reveal about embodied experiences of violence and its impact on everyday life, about the ways people attune to unstable ecologies, and about the ethical and methodological challenges of studying violence through the senses. Bringing together ethnographies from diverse contexts, this panel aims to open dialogue on how sensory perspectives expand anthropological understandings of embodiment, environment, and the human condition under duress.

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