New approaches in ethnography strengthen the importance of material and sensory aspects of the world anthropologists observe. A prominent endeavor into new modes of experimentation with sensory ethnography are the media projects of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. What do all these projects contribute to ethnography? Are these experimentations worth anything in the depiction of reality or are they simply abstractions and individual interpretations? I want to take a very brief look at why I think that experimentation with media is not only helpful but also necessary for ethnography.

Doing ethnography is an attempt at capturing the unique realities of people’s lives by experiencing these lives as closely as possible. By the practice of experience I refer to a certain state of awareness, of ‘being there’ and seeing, feeling, tasting and listening to the things that happen around us. ‘Knowledge is gained through cultural immersion’. How much of this knowledge is lost when ethnographers produce textual representation of the physical world they experienced? How much ‘experience’ can a textual approach even represent if experience itself is known to be multi sensory?

A textual approach might focus on the meaning people create and attribute to the world they experience. But wouldn’t we, as readers of ethnographies, first want to gain a sense of what their world feels like? I would argue that people create meaning based on what they experience – not what they experience individually, but rather what they experience intersubjectively as humans in interaction with the physical world. Trying to convey a sense of this group experience should be the first duty for every ethnographer and the first step in any attempt of depicting the culture’s practices and knowledge. Here, experimentation with sound and images can offer ways of depicting these experiences, especially if the ethnography is concerned with bodily aspects of cultural life or people’s perceptions of environment.