Paper short abstract

This paper addresses the serendipitous journey of the anthropologist and performer towards gaining sensory knowledge and its subsequent interpretation and transmutation into a self-sustaining textual “reality”.

Paper long abstract

In this paper I intend to invoke the idea of serendipity as a sudden and lucky "discovery", a kind of intuitive logic, or the lucidity of perception, with the help of which the accomodating logic of the anthropologist is able to grasp the sensory knowledge. I argue that in most of the cases, the process of gaining sensory serendipitous knowledge is seldom preset as a methodological target for our ethnographic fieldwork, one of the reasons for which can be traced back to the reductive idea of knowledge. Hence I emphasize the importance of a more conscious and purposeful recognition of the ways in which we gain a sudden sensory realisation which later may turn into a corner stone for a more acute understanding of our fieldwork.

Drawing from my ethnographic experience as a performing musician on an open-air stage in Bursa, Turkey, during one of my field trips, I argue that emotional involvement and openness to sensory encounters can be set as a methodological target. I show how the moment of the performer's forced silence during the concert, due to the simultaneous call for prayer from the minaret, becomes a serendipitous encounter with the expanding sensory perception, leading to articulation and reinterpretation of anthropological sense.

In arguing for the analytic tension between the sensory perception and its description and transmission, I look at how sensory knowledge is arrested, interpreted and moulded into a written ethnographic text.