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Accepted Paper:

Sensing history? Knowledge circulation on themed walks and their ethnography  
Sarah Willner (Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft)

Paper short abstract:

The presentation is concerned with the tourist and ethnographers perception of archaeological hiking trails in the Austrian and Italian Alps and the limits of mobile (auto)ethnography. In collecting hikers narratives about prehistory it questions the concept of an ahistoric body as an access to the past.

Paper long abstract:

Orders of sensory perception as well as emotions are culturally determined (Geurts 2002) and a manifestation of knowledge. At the same time they are a tool of knowledge production in terms of cultural practices. The research project is interested in hiking practices on archaeological trails and the production of historical knowledge. These practices conceptualize an ahistoric body and disregard it's cultural dimension (Jeggle 1986). For example, the hikers negotiate their bodily experiences into the copper age without questioning the cultural potential of their perception. Landscapes and atmospheres then achieve evidence character and refer to a long gone past.

This epistemic shortcut can be compared with the common understanding of the ethnographer's body being a research instrument that is able to collect a deeper understanding of the subject-matter. Here the (auto)ethnographer must soon experience the limits of describing subjective perception. I would like to discuss and compare the body concepts in historically interested theme hiking and mobile ethnography.

Panel P36
Sensory knowledge and its circulation [EN]
  Session 1