The Interpretation of “Local” Literacy Practices through Ethnography

Ethnography is a practice of inscribing local practice into texts, developed in the context of social anthropology. Local literacy practices often remain hidden, dependent on context and shaped by histories and cultures. Literacy is entwined with how lives are lived. Collaborative ethnography enables an approach that permits researchers to collaboratively develop research questions with participants and, rather than researching on people, researchers work with people as coresearchers. Local literacy practices are situated in homes and communities as well as within everyday contexts such as markets and mosques. Community literacy practices can be collaboratively understood and studied using this approach. Communities experience and practice diverse and multiple literacies, both locally and transnationally, and mapping this diversity is key to an understanding of the fluid and changing nature of literacies. Literacies can be understood as being multilingual, digital, transnational, and multimodal, thus expanding the concept of literacy as lived within communities. Threaded through this analysis is a discussion of power and whose literacy practices are seen as powerful within community contexts. Collaborative ethnography is a powerful methodology to excavate and co-analyze community literacy practices. Other methods that can explore local literacies include visual and sensory ethnography. Power sharing in terms of the design and architecture of the research is important for hearing voices and working equitably. There are many concepts introduced within, including the idea of literacy practices, the link between literacy and identity, the importance of an understanding of multilingualism, and the importance of situating literacy in communities.

Poza formą i treścią. W stronę materialności

Artykuł przedstawia rozważania na temat Leviathana (2012), filmu zrealizowanego przez Luciena Castaing-Taylora i Vérénę Paravel, antropologów współtworzących Sensory Ethnography Lab (Uniwersytet Harvarda). Autor proponuje, by traktować film jako antropologię nowej generacji, zrywającą z tradycyjnym Geertzowskim „opisem gęstym”, nastawieniem antropocentrycznym i reprezentacją dominującą w myśleniu zachodnim. Kładzie nacisk na materialność/materiały, zmysłowość, procesualność, a także nierozróżnialność aktorów ludzkich i pozaludzkich. Ważnymi dla prowadzonego wywodu autorami stają się Gilles Deleuze i Félix Guattari oraz Tim Ingold. Zdanie tego ostatniego (Zaangażowanie w świat wiąże się z odczuwaniem go, a nie zamieszkiwaniem w świecie sensu) mogłoby być szczególnym wprowadzeniem do analizowanego filmu.

Colando fragmentos do mundo da vida social: recortes do cotidiano de camponeses do baixo tocantins paraense

Este ensaio visual trata do mundo da vida cotidiana de camponeses agroextrativistas no Pará, especificamente no baixo Tocantins, região das ilhas do município de Mocajuba. Segue o método da etnografia sensorial, discute a relação entre corpo, ambiente e formas de aprendizagem técnica com a virtuosidade dos indicadores socioambientais e argumenta que tais técnicas não são transmitidas, mas ensinadas e aprendidas por meio de um complexo engajamento sensorial com o ambiente.Palavras-chave: Camponeses agroextrativistas. Cotidiano. Trabalho. Etnografia Sensorial. Corpo. Ambiente. Glueing fragments of the world of life: cuttings from the daily life of peasants from downtown Tocantins paraense Abstract: This visual essay deals with the respect of the everyday life world of agro-extractivist peasants in Pará, specifically in the lower Tocantins, region of the islands of the municipality of Mocajuba. It follows the method of sensory ethnography, discusses the relationship between body, environment and forms of technical learning with the virtuosity of socio-environmental indicators and argues that such techniques are not transmitted, but taught and learned through a complex sensory engagement with the environmentKeywords: Agroextractive peasants. Daily. Work. Sensory Ethnography. Body. Environment.

“Institutionalized States of Information Abstinence”

In this study, I provide applied examples of using cut-up poetic inquiry as an arts-based research method for analyzing erasure poetry. The erasure poetry was composed by five poet-participants and me during a sensory ethnography that explored embodied experiences of a sexual educator training program. I first overview erasure poetics in the context of sexuality education. I explain how erasure poetry as method can interrupt authoritative proclamations of truth, while also providing a technique to grapple with complex, corporeal data – central topics in sex education research. I then theorize cut-up poetic inquiry as an additional form of erasure, asking and illustrating how the processes of cut-up can distill information to enable emergent analytic insights in the context of my research. Throughout, I meditate on how erasure poetry as an arts- based research method can contribute to discussions of language, discourse, and embodiment in sex education research.

Sensory Ethnography as a Methodological Resource for Qualitative Research

The article poses the problem of the possibility of including sensory ethnography in the methodological arsenal of qualitative sociological research. In order to substantiate the possibility of this step in sociological methodology development the author presents the theoretical origins of the sensory turn that took place in social and humanitarian knowledge. After that, the author reconstructs the process of sensory turn reception in cultural anthropology and sociology. According to the author, the sensory ethnography approach formation may be considered as one of the methodological consequences of sensory turn as well as extension of research problem set opportunities. Shifting the research focus towards the sphere of sensory experience and, as a result, including the sensory aspect of everyday life in research designs, are considered as the incentives to development of new methodological approaches, such as sensory ethnography.

Experiments in Methodology: Sensory and Poetic Threads of Inquiry, Resistance, and Transformation

Undertaking a practice-led, qualitative research inquiry, I forged an alternate methodology where narrative inquiry, sensory ethnography, and ethnographically based poetry intersect and open a space “in-between.” I call these intersections between narrative approaches and experiments in ethnography “Sensory Poetic Relationship Mapping” (SPRM). I discovered that metaphorical spaces, places, gateways, sites of inquiry and “counter-factual spaces” can come into being. The process of SPRM enabled “hidden” community-based narratives to be revealed through dialogue, narrative, poetry, metaphor, and handmade relationship maps. As an act of creative resistance, this offered alternate voices to the dominant narratives communicated by interconnected institutions of power. SPRM cracked open the metaphorical landscape in which these marginalized stories had been relegated to the periphery, so they could flow. These narratives rewoven to the center unexpectedly interconnected and revealed new sites for future inquiry.

Embodied Engagements with the Megaliths of Carnac: Somatic Experience, Somatic Imagery, and Bodily Techniques in Contemporary Spiritual Practices

This article explores bodily interactions, somatic experiences, and embodiment of New Age and contemporary Paganism practitioners conducting spiritual practices in the megaliths of Carnac in northwest France. Inspired from the sensory ethnography approach and applying a specific methodological framework elaborated for this study, the article argues that participants’ spiritual experiences are constructed using three main elements: somatic experience, somatic imagery, and bodily techniques. Collected data provides understanding of the practitioner’s elaboration of spiritual experience, while also suggesting further inquiries to assess sensory models prevailing in contemporary spiritual practices.

Sensoriality, Social Interaction, and “Doing sensing” in Physical–Cultural Ethnographies

As recently highlighted, despite a burgeoning field of sensory ethnography, the practices, production, and accountability of the senses in specific social interactional contexts remain sociologically under-explored. To contribute original insights to a literature on the sensuous body in physical–cultural contexts, here we adopt an ethnomethodologically sensitive perspective to focus on the accomplishment, social organization, and accountability of sensoriality in interaction. Exploring instances of the senses at work in social interaction, we utilize data from two ethnographic research projects to investigate the production of running-together and swimming-together by skilled, experienced practitioners. We focus on two interlinked sensory modalities: auditory attunement, and vision and intercorporeality, identified as key dimensions of sensory embodiment and “togethering” in these particular domains.