Paper short abstract:

This paper grapples with the question of what language to use to access phenomenological and sensory experience without reinscribing divides between subject/object, mind/body, or implications of false fixed or steady states. Building on sensory and phenomenological anthropology, we propose a conceptualization of "ambience" as an alternative to emplacement, "the sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-environment" (Howes 1995), and argue that ambience is better able to attend to the fluidity and process of home as experience. Ethnographically, we explore how ambience creates sensory and embodied experiences of home for populations in the United States and Marseille, France.

Paper long abstract:

In recent work in anthropology, "emplacement" has been offered as a corrective to the concept of embodiment which bridges the mind/body divide, but, some critics suggests, falls short of revealing the sensory interrelationship of the body and mind to the environment. In conceptualizations of emplacement, the environment is conceived as "both physical and social" as exemplified in the phenomenological experience of "feeling at home," which is constituted by a concatenation "of sensory and social values" (Howes 1995). In this sense, emplacement contrasts with displacement, the feeling of "being homeless." However, with its prefix, "em" (en), "emplacement" expresses conversion or entry into a specified state, suggesting that home is a fixed entity, rather than embodied process. In this paper, we suggest that anthropologists would be better served by focusing on concepts that unfix a sense of spatial boundaries and rootedness. We offer "ambience" with its implication of "lying all around" and immersion in the sensual (as in ambient temperature, ambient light, and ambient sound) as an alternative, exploring how ambience creates sensory and embodied experiences of home for populations in the United States and Marseille, France.