“Memory is not about the Past”
Using this short film as a basis for a critical analysis of the sensory turn in visual anthropology.
“What does the future feel like?” asks Sarah Pink in the International Handbook of Sensory Ethnography (2024: 82). Approaching anthropology through the senses is a relatively new development, and it is thanks to the sensory turn, arguably the discipline’s most foundational shift. The sensory turn’s focus on experimentation, reflexivity, subjectivity, and interdisciplinary collaboration collapsed and reformulated anthropological engagement, ethnographic creation, and the way anthropologists think, opening up a wider space for what is to be considered ‘anthropology’ more broadly. The turn has been revolutionary for the discipline, and for anthropology’s place within the world, academic and otherwise. After the sensory turn, anthropological practice would never be the same, and the lessons learned from this ‘turn’ are becoming increasingly inherent within the discipline— as inherent as our sensory experiences feel to each of us. After outlining the timeline of the sensory turn, this essay will discuss some of the fundamental questions and debates born from the turn before analysing two films, Memory Is Not About the Past and Leviathan, to highlight the strides taken in this realm of visual anthropology, both in the incredible scope of sensory ethnographic film being created today, and in the vast array of issues touched on.
Pink categorizes the timeline of the sensory turn into three periods: an emergence of visual and sensory anthropology from the 1890s-1920s, a decrease in both areas from the middle of the 20th century, and a re-emergence starting around the 1980s coinciding with anthropology’s shift away from being a “monomedia” and “scientific theoretical discipline” (2005: 12). This comeback was sparked for a number of intertwined reasons. The discipline’s “crisis of representation” occurred in the 80s, generating a newfound critical eye on “the written text” that introduced the need for reflexivity and “inspired new forms of representing anthropologists’ own and other peoples’ experiences” (Pink 2005: 12,13). Secondly, the 80s/90s witnessed a decreased stigma around, and avoidance of, subjectivity, and the relationship between the discipline and the idea of inherent subjectivity came to the forefront of visual sensory practices and ethnographies, as seen through the films of MacDougall and Rouch (Pink 2005: 14,12). This reframing of subjectivity is stressed through Taussig’s discussion of mimesis; rather than critiquing or fighting his argued reality that no creation is completely true or real, he contends that “construction deserves more respect” (1993: xviii). He writes that one can either “marvel at its wonder or fume at its duplicity,” and the sensory turn, categorically, marvels, working to inspire ‘real’ emotional connections through ethnographic film (among other mediums) by engaging with the senses of the viewer. Overall, due to the crisis of representation and the reflexive turn that came out of it, a reframing of the discipline’s connection to subjectivity, and the increasing “emphasis on the body and phenomenology” (Pink 2005: 14), visual and sensory anthropologies were set on a path of deep investigation which, as Taussig writes of mimesis, “[opened] up new possibilities for exploring reality” (1993: 23). This exploration was propelled, according to Pink (2005: 44, 42), by the work of Constance Classen (1993) and David Howes (1991), who set the foundation of sensory anthropology—Classen who focused on smell and Howes who worked to compare understandings of the senses more broadly—though other key works include Stoller (1989), Classen, Howes, and Synnott (1994), Seremetakis (1994a, b), and Howes (2003).
A wide range of debates have come out of the sensory turn, including over the best medium through which to explore sensory ethnography. While Howes argues for the “equality among the senses” the written text allows for, scholars like Pink (2005), Gottschalk (2024), and MacDougall (2005) all side with the visual over the written form, for its more direct interaction with the viewer’s senses and the participation it encourages between viewer and viewed (Howes 2003: 57 as quoted in Pink 2005: 51). Specifically, MacDougall writes that film “[appeals] in an even more direct way to the human sensorium” precisely because of the engagement and interaction with multiple senses at once, which allows film to “recover a dimension of human experience lost in texts” (2005: 57,58). Stoller stresses two more critical considerations. He argues for the need to learn through and with the senses, and that ethnographies neglecting the senses are inherently disconnected from their chosen environments; secondly, he sheds a light on anthropologists’ own sensory biases, a trailblazer in this call for sensorial reflexivity back in 1989: “If anthropologists are to produce knowledge, how can they ignore how their own sensual biases affect the information they produce?” (1989: 7). In addition, Petty (2021) and MacDougall (2005) have discussed the need to stop privileging vision over the other senses; crucially, Petty argues for the need to stop viewing senses through the perspective of “a ‘normative’ sensory body” in her work on the visually impaired (2021: 288). Connor, who stresses that one cannot ever understand the world “through one sense alone,” calls for the need to take seriously the interconnectivity of the senses (2004: 153). This call for interconnectivity stretches to Erlmann (2020) and Pink (2005), who demonstrate the benefits, and necessities, of making sensory visual ethnography an interdisciplinary project; given its experimental and subjective nature, the subdiscipline can only learn from collaboration with the social sciences and the wider art world.
Ethnographic film demonstrates overwhelming potential to represent and engage with sensory experiences, as the films below will demonstrate. Primarily, the senses restructure the relationship between viewer and viewed, forcing the reader into discomfort and new forms of engagement, as a focus on the senses pushes the viewer from a position of observation to participation and immersion (Kasic 2024: 454), what MacDougall calls “embodied cinema” (2019: 75). As a large portion of current writing discusses, the aim of this viewer participation is often to destabilize one’s sensory experiences. In a much more visceral way than other mediums can achieve, sensory ethnographic film reveals the biased nature of embodied sensory experience: one’s relationship with the senses varies not only from culture to culture, but from person to person, and a large aim of the sensory turn has been to de-centralize one’s power and control over how they engage with and understand their senses. Filmmakers achieve this in a myriad of ways, as the films below reveal, though the main objective is to allow new confrontations with the senses to “destabilize the viewer’s perception” of their own (Carter 2004: 44). The focus is on creating new ways of sensing, perceiving, and interacting with the world; by creating “provocative and disruptive sensory ethnography” that immerses the viewer and inspires de-centralized sensory reactions in an emerging field “where the ground rules are not established,” the viewer is pushed to interact with their senses “as if encountered for the first time” (Edensor 2024: 329; Carter 2004: 44). As stated, an openness and even reliance on subjectivity is a key element of this medium, and often times reality is altered to promote a deeper and more ‘real’ engagement of the viewer with the subject matter. In Kasic’s Loose Horses, for example, a film “about horses at a livestock auction destined for slaughter,” “time is slowed down for effect in various moments to bring in an interior point of view of the horse” (2024: 459). Overall, sensory ethnographic films work to be “reflexive and subjective, attend to the visual, sensory and embodied, and challenge the truth claims of the scientific anthropology of modernity” (Pink 2005: 51,52). Memory and Leviathan are two films that embody these key pillars in diverse ways, a testament to the scope of experimentation that has come from this medium.
Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab is perhaps the leading exemplar of this monumental range of experimentation. One of their most recognized films, Leviathan (2012), is an intensely visceral depiction of the US fishing industry. It is an of embodiment of Castaing-Taylor’s stance on, and loud response to, the discipline’s persistent iconophobia, its “fear of images” (Stevenson and John 2015: 49). He calls for “a shift away from the attempt to convey ‘anthropological knowledge’ on film — […] to linguify film” (Castaing-Taylor 1996: 86). Instead, Leviathan stresses that these films “may not be providing us with information at all,” but rather to trying to spark something in the viewer (Stevenson and John 2015: 50). Pavsek in turn labels Leviathan’s critique of anthropology’s iconophobia, as logophobia: its “distaste for, variously, propositional knowledge, narrative voiceover, the preresearched and the pretextualized, the false clarity of explanation, and didacticism more generally” (2015: 5). As he suggests, Leviathan serves as Castaing-Taylor’s commentary against the “linguistic turn” in the discipline discussed above (2015: 5).
Memory Is Not About the Past (2013), a short sensory ethnographic film by Anne Chahine about the Third Generation East, embodies the argument that “sensuous ethnography is as much about the senses as it is through them” (Larsen 2024: 195). The film’s nine participants “represent their own experiences through walking”: its abstract states that “with every step, the individuals reclaim their childhood neighbourhood and […] position themselves in the present” (Hubbard et al. 2010: 3; Chahine 2021). A nuanced example of the growing scholarship on the use of walking as an ethnographic multisensory methodology, Memory answers Moretti’s question, “[w]hat would observation of the city be like if it were immersive, fluid, haptic, and kinesthetic— always a learnt relationship rather than already given or universal?” (2024: 109). By walking with her participants, Chahine immerses herself, the camera, and by extension, the viewer, into the knowledge shared by her interviewees.
Leviathan engages the senses to the extreme while simultaneously destabilizing them—each decision made, down to the film’s colours, which “are drawn from the interior of a body: the darkness of night and the redness of coursing blood,” point to the intention of creating “an inside-out and upside-down world” (Stevenson and Kohn 2015: 49). It is full of heightened visuals, colours, and textures, all of which trigger a visceral response in the viewer. With a clear understanding that “moments when the world suddenly becomes utterly unfamiliar” are what demonstrate “how our normative sensory experiences are invariably culturally shaped,” the filmmakers rely on such moments to achieve its destabilization (Edensor 2024: 320). In addition to the lack of dialogue, the film is incredibly hard on the ear, full of sounds whose origins the viewer cannot with certainty guess. The filmmakers keep the viewer active and alert by confusing their sight and dismantling their visual realities: “at one point, those gulls seem to be flying upside down and backwards. Or are we watching them in the ocean’s mirror? It’s hard to tell” (Stevenson and Kohn 2015: 49). The viewer is also brought inside the film because of the camera’s experimental nature: “thanks to certain tools (such as multiple waterproof GoPro cameras strapped to the heads of fishermen, attached to the sides of the boat, submerged into the ocean’s depths),” the viewer is presented with a version of sight and perspective unlike what they are used to.
A key question asked in Hearing Cultures is “what is worth hearing?” (Carter 2004: 59). Is this decision ultimately decided by the filmmaker? Is there a way to decentre this position of sensory power? One way filmmakers have tried to do so is by making the subject the filmmaker, giving them the camera; in Leviathan, some of the shots the viewer is presented with come from cameras attached to the fish, which takes the control away from the filmmaker in what visuals are being filmed, and what soundscapes the viewer will be immersed in. In Memory, this question is explored in a different way; its focus on urban soundscapes aligns with Carter’s critique of the general assumption that “listening is always listening for something” (2004, 61). Memory, and the experimental realm of ethnographic film more broadly, questions this assumption, asking the viewer to let the sounds guide them, not to be listening for something but to be listening for everything. This is felt in Memory’s start: the film opens with a black screen and the emergence of an urban soundscape: the buzz of traffic, the honking of horns, the hum of the city, and human voices, children’s voices. The volume increases with the title, and it is not until the film has been introduced that the viewer is given the audio’s visual counterpart. The film ends in just the same way: after a piece of archival footage fades to black, all that is left are the sounds of birds and quiet footsteps, an intentional moment before the credits roll in silence. The film is thus framed by two moments during which only one sense is engaged: there are no visuals, and the only thing to do, is to listen.
The interconnectivity of the senses is tested in both films. As Fijn and Kavesh write, “[v]ision, sound, touch, and texture are easier to invoke than the filmic portrayal of smell and taste” (2024: 241); however, as the senses are interlinked, Leviathan relies on the former to suggest instinctual reactions in the latter: the film’s sharp focus on sounds, its close ups, the textures, all animate the smells in front of and around the camera. All of the viewer’s sensory expectations are shaken up; none of them are met. Memory similarly layers the senses to overstimulate the viewer, though for different reasons. In one walking conversation, people pass in between the speaker and the camera, creating a light sense of claustrophobia and overstimulation; however, as opposed to Leviathan, this is to bring the viewer closer to the participant’s storytelling, to make them feel present with her as they feel and hear these passers-by with her. Memory demonstrates the interconnectivity of the senses through its relationship between sound and sight; the dance between the two senses is what creates the space for the destabilization of the viewer’s assumed sensory knowledge, and thus the immersion and participation of the viewer. Oftentimes we are presented with audio that doesn’t match the visual. As the camera freezes on the first participant, for example, the viewer slowly understands that the sounds are coming from another shot; in another instance, the viewer learns only after the shot changes that the audio didn’t come from the one they just watched. In both cases, the overlaying mismatched audio and visuals are a subtle way in which the viewer’s sensory engagement is destabilized: these moments where the origins of the audio cannot be located serve as a disruption in the viewer’s sensory coherence. However, whereas in Leviathan this disconnect served to confuse the viewer’s senses, here it seems to be for the sake of creating a layered city soundscape, and a depth to the film. Moreover, this kind of interweaving between audio and visual is used to inspire certain emotional reactions in the viewer. As this same participant speaks about her past, the sounds of happy children are layered on top of the visual, which here embeds the film with the sense of nostalgia that she herself feels, encouraging the viewer to feel the same. Memory thus demonstrates a keen awareness of the empathizing, nostalgic, and embodied powers of sound, and throughout the film, sound is used to inspire an empathy or shared experience between viewer and subject.
Chahine also uses this relationship between the two senses to explore the concept of passing time, and specifically to overlap the past and the present, which serves the twofold purpose of again representing the nostalgia felt by her participants, and deepening the nostalgic response of the viewer. She invites the viewer to participate by bridging the gaps between past and present: we are presented with a voice speaking about her old neighborhood— “and here this street was completely empty”— paired with archival footage of a quiet street, and a parent pulling their child down the snowy sidewalk in a sled. The viewer is thus immersed in this connecting of past visuals with present sounds. Highlighting the change in the city’s landscape through its soundscape, in contrast to the urban and industrial sounds that opened the film— the sounds of the present— in these flashbacks we are offered a much more peaceful soundscape of gentle wind and birds. This sensorial and temporal layering reveals the ways in which the senses can transcend time, as here, decades’ old visuals and current sounds exist in the same moment. As the participant goes on to say that “when spring starts, [she] always [remembers] the feeling of being here,” the accompanying visual switches to archival footage of a daughter walking down the street with a bouquet of flowers, again pushing the viewer into the role of participant in their association of the girl seen, with the woman heard. The gap in time and sense is then closed; sound and sight meet once again in the present moment as the camera finally reveals the to the viewer’s eye the woman speaking, in the very moment she addresses her never being here “to see how the neighborhood has changed.” The moment she returns to discussing her present reality, the viewer is brought into the present with her; they are brought in and out of her memories, in and out of the past, made more immersive by the fact that both temporalities are brought to life through immersive soundscapes.
The experimental nature of both films is what allows either to reach such a wide audience. While Leviathan’s success spans across disciplines, Memory’s message bridges cultural gaps. In terms of the former, Leviathan’s success both within and outside of anthropology and even academia demonstrates the wider scope of engagement that experimental sensory ethnographic film allows for; welcoming in interdisciplinary modes of collaboration and creation allows for much larger scale engagement, and thus a greater number of perspectives on the film itself. And of the latter, as Hubbard et al. (2010: 6) and Moretti (2024) highlight, “the senses of belonging [are] negotiated” through walking. As Memory portrays, the experience of walking is both a collaborative means of reaching understanding (Hubbard et al. 2010: 3), and a way to engage “some of the complex links between the senses and urban change, including displacement, gentrification, and people’s embodied experiences of dwelling in transforming urban communities,” some of the film’s key themes (Moretti 2024: 109). Thus, despite this film’s cultural specificity, rather than inhibiting understanding between cultures, Memory’s storytelling through and with walking serves as “a powerful way of communicating about experiences and ways of knowing across cultural divides” (Hubbard et al. 2010: 3).
Both films demonstrate the future towards which the sensory turn has propelled the discipline: it has been and will continue to be the catalyst for the debunking of old anthropological goals and ‘truths’. One critical question being raised through sensory ethnography film is, is empathizing the same as sharing experience? Pink asks, “do existing modes of presenting ethnographic film provide us with an anthropological understanding of these sensory experiences, or do they only offer us the chance to empathise based on our own particular experience as individuals and anthropologists?” (2005: 51). Anthropology, in this sensory turn, is moving towards a broader reckoning: while films can spark profound emotions, responses, and relatability, have “transformative effects,” and cause considerable self-reflection, they cannot recreate for and within the viewer the experience being presented (Pink 2005: 52). Can the written word? Can anything? Taussig has understood since the 90s that anthropology’s never-ending striving towards the “true real” is futile (1993: xviii). Sensory ethnographic film, in all of its experimentations, still cannot produce this effect; in the coming years, the discipline will have to make peace with the fact that this effect can never be achieved. Anthropology can never create a written, visual, audio, or other space in which the viewer can step into the direct shoes of the subject, and the sensory turn will be the propellor for this surrendering to subjectivity.
Bibliography
Carter, Paul. 2004. “Ambiguous Traces, Mishearing, and Auditory Space.” Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity, 43-63. Routledge.
Castaing-Taylor, Lucien. 1996. “Iconophobia.” Transition 69, 64-88.
Castaing-Taylor, Lucien, and Véréna Paravel. 2012. “Leviathan.” Sensory Ethnography Lab. Harvard University.
Chahine, Anne. 2021. “Memory Is Not About the Past.” Journal of Anthropological Films 5:1. https://doi.org/10.15845/jaf.v5i01.3189.
Connor, Steven. 2004. “Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing.” Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity, 153-172. Routledge.
Edensor, Tim. 2024. “Defamiliarizing the sensory.” The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Ethnography, 320-331. Routledge.
Erlmann, Veit. 2020. “But what of the ethnographic ear? Anthropology, sound, and the senses.” Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity, 1-20. Routledge.
Fijn, Natasha, and Muhammad A. Kavesh. 2024. “Toward a multisensorial engagement with animals.” The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Ethnography, 237-247. Routledge.
Gottschalk, Simon. 2024. “Sensory Degradation and Somatic Labor: Critical sensory ethnography for hypermodern times.” The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Ethnography, 69-81. Routledge.
Hubbard, Phil, Maggie O’Neill, Sarah Pink, and Alan Radley (eds.) 2010. “Walking across Disciplines: From Ethnography to Arts Practice.” Visual Studies 25:1, 1-7.
Kasic, Kathy. 2024. “Sensory Verité: the intersection of sensory ethnography, sensory biophilia, and cinéma vérité.” The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Ethnography, 454-465. Routledge.
Larsen, Jonas. 2024. “Sensuous ethnographies of running: comparing running with walking.” The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Ethnography, 193-203. Routledge.
MacDougall, David. 2005. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton: PUP.
MacDougall, David. 2019. “The Third Tendency in Cinema.” The Looking Machine: Essays on Cinema, Anthropology, and Documentary Filmmaking. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 65-76. https://doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9781526134097.003.0006.
Moretti, Cristina. 2024. “Sensing the City: Multisensory participant observation and urban ethnography.” The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Ethnography, 108-119. Routledge.
Pavsek, Christopher. 2015. “Leviathan and the Experience of Sensory Ethnography.” Visual Anthropology Review 31:1, 4–11.
Pink, Sarah. 2024. “Sensory Futures Ethnography: Sensing at the edge of the future.” The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Ethnography, 82-94. Routledge.
Pink, Sarah. 2005. The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses. London and New York: Routledge.
Petty, Karis Jade. 2021. “Beyond the senses: perception, the environment, and vision impairment.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27:2, 285-302.
Stevenson, Lisa, and Edwardo Kohn. 2015. “Leviathan: An Ethnographic Dream.” Visual Anthropology Review 31:1, 49–53.
Stoller, Paul. 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. Routledge.
