In Defense of the Sensual: Meaning Construction in Ethnography and Poetics

Abstract

Lack of closure in ethnography is less a problem of unknowables than plural “knowabilities” and the frustrations of choosing among them. Human beings are sensual and intellectual creatures who experience the world through that combination and whose corporeal existences are appropriated and molded by culture—the system of signs and meanings that defines for us the nature of the world and our place in it. Carving science or poetry out of this “made”universe requires heigh tenedsensitivity to its properties. Yet mostly, only poets write about experience consistently from a sensual perspective. Poetry is another way to encode and share the foundations of such experience; poetry can ground theories of the world that actually involve our interactions with it, not just abstractions from it. Thus, a more robust entrance point for modern ethnography may be best centered on some combination of humanistic and scientific design as artful-science, not on either extreme.