Sensory Ethnography

"Exploring Ethnographic Filmmaking" is a four-part film series that explores anthropology’s longstanding, complex engagement with visual media, asking how film has been used not only to document and render social life, but to categorize, analyze, theorize, and intervene in the world.

Program 4: Sensory Ethnography

Swim Lesson (2018, Melissa Lefkowitz, 8 min)
Monsoon Reflections (2008, Stephanie Spray, 23 min)
Leviathan (2012, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, 87 min)

Total runtime: 1 hr 58 min

The final program explores sensory ethnography, an approach that shifts attention from representation toward immersion, embodiment, and perception. These films prioritize sound, movement, texture, and duration, inviting viewers to encounter social worlds through affective and corporeal experience rather than explanatory narration. In doing so, they push ethnographic film beyond description toward an engagement with how life is lived, felt, and sensed. 

Works such as Leviathan exemplify how film can theorize through sensation, unsettling conventional distinctions between subject and object, observer and observed. This program closes the series by foregrounding ethnographic film as an argumentative and analytical practice - one that approaches anthropology not through distance, but through attunement, responsiveness, and being-with. Together, the films ask what new forms of anthropological insight become possible when the senses are treated not as supplementary to knowledge, but as central to its production.

The screening will be introduced by Natasha Raheja, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Performing & Media Arts.

Free admission! Supported by the Department of Anthropology, the Nazaara Media Lab, a Visual Anthropology Research Lab at Cornell University, the Department of Performing & Media Arts, and the Southeast Asia Program.