Paper short abstract:

Using ethnographic data related to clam harvesting and Tai Chi, I explore how the different ways in which practitioners direct their attention influences (i) what they come to know about the world and (ii) how others assess what they know.

Paper long abstract:

What we pay attention to influences what we experience and come to know about the world. Culture plays a huge role in directing how we employ our senses, as well as how we focus our attention when using those senses. Added to this, cultural (including scientific) biases exist in relation to which senses and what types of attention are considered worthy of merit, and which ones can be ignored, which then impacts assessments of whether and to what degree the knowledges that result from these experiences are good/useful or bad/unuseful. This presentation draws on a variety of ethnographic experiences/fieldsites to explore how these two issues intersect. It explores how attention is deployed differently by different knowledge-makers, and how knowledges are assessed as superior or inferior by others due to the ways in which their attention was focused. The two key ethnographic cases explored are related to clam harvesting and the practice of tai chi. In relation to the former, I describe why scientists employing their attention differently than Nuu-chah-nulth and Kwakwaka’wakw clam harvesters came to feel their knowledge was superior. In relation to the latter, I explore how tai chi practitioners pay attention to and cultivate sensations that scientists and many Westerners treat as non-existant or suspicious and, because of this, treat the claims of tai chi practitioners as unbelievable and therefore inferior to their own.