Feeling the city as method: embodied attunement | Lab

Join us for a Lab the Vienna Anthropology Days - February 16-19th, 2027

Breathe in time with a passing train, stand barefoot at a bus stop, or dance to the flap of a pigeon’s wings. This lab guides participants into a haptic and sensory investigation of the city of Vienna, first training them to gather felt memories as fieldnotes, then how to recall these memories as ‘data’ that can inspire more arresting ethnographic writing. 

Long abstract:

Ethnographers are used to making quick, focused observations with pen and paper, or increasingly, a phone - but what happens if our first point of contact is intuitive, non-verbal, and sensorial?

Run by the Creative Anthropology Network’s Theatre from the Field collective, this workshop will take participants out into the streets of Vienna to discover how to make ethnographic observations through the body. Breathe in time with a passing train, stand barefoot at a bus stop, or dance to the flap of a pigeon’s wings: this is not about recording one’s environment, but creating the memory of a sensation that can be recalled and developed into a ‘fieldnote’. The haptic and sensory investigation of one’s material surroundings is a fundamental practice of physical theatre, one that helps attune the body and create a relational understanding of place. This workshop turns this fundamental into a research method: we
guide participants through exercises that enhance both their sensory perception and their ability for sensory recall. In-situ, we repeat a physical interaction and inscribe the sensation in our embodied memory. 

While sensory ethnography is nothing new, we rarely have the chance to practice an intense version of this method with a group of researchers, and collectively reflect on the experience. Can we trust our senses to locate ethnographic nuances in a site, resist the urge to immediately translate them to words, and later return to the memory of those feelings as ethnographic data? Let’s find out …

Convenor:
Rich Thornton

Co-Convenors:
Jenny Tang, Katya Lachowicz and Eva van Roekel

More information: https://univie.eventsair.com/vanda2027