Seeing otherwise

Landscape change and sensory experience in the West African savannah

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2230403
AutoresTill Förster (0000-0003-0645-6095, University of Basel, autor correspondente)
Ano2024
Volume14
Fascículo3
Páginas748-764
Data de publicação2024-12-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoHau Journal of Ethnographic Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2049-1115 • E-ISSN: 2575-1433
EditoraUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/733026
OpenAlexW4404432166
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas21

Seeing landscapes change seems to be an inevitable and ubiquitous experience in times of global warming. Yet, landscape change is often underestimated, depending on how that change is perceived, experienced, and articulated over time. Like other agriculturalists in the West African savannah, Senufo farmers of Côte d'Ivoire have a pragmatic relationship to land as the existential ground of their lifeworld. Their experience of landscapes is based on the entire human sensorium and deeply embedded in bodily practices. Moving and walking are closely intertwined with seeing and aesthetic experience. Sedimented over many years, such bodily practices engender a subtle, immanent, but rarely articulated understanding of landscape and its changes. Landscape change becomes an issue of conscious, discursive articulation when the farmers as social actors refer to it through the medium of photographs taken over the past four decades, allowing them to assess the difference between now and then. Photos isolate acts of seeing from other bodily senses and the broader experience that constitutes landscapes for Senufo farmers. They instigate processes that re-embed past and present landscapes in another, monosensory experiential and propositional framework. Recognizing landscape change and experiential aspect change are two sides of the same process

Photography and Visual Culture · Visual Culture and Art Theory · Geology