Edited by Constance Classen. Berg: Oxford and New York 2005. 461 pp.
The Book of Touch is the 3rd installment of Berg Publishers Sensory Formations Series. This collection documents the work of Concordia University’s Sensoria Research Team, and states as its aim to understand “the role of the senses in history, culture and aesthetics, by redressing […] the hegemony of vision and privileging of discourse in contemporary theory and cultural studies […]”. The volume surveyed here challenges conventional ways of seeing, knowing and experiencing the world by examining various functions and qualities of touch as the most elusive of our senses. Its editor Constance Classen applies a comparative approach to sensory experiences and expressions with the aim to ultimately rehabilitate tactile perception.
In her introduction Classen refers to touch as the “hungriest sense of postmodernity” (2), suggesting that little is left to feel in a society dominated by images. With the recent proliferation of cultural turns one might now sceptically anticipate yet another turn – a
‘tactile’ turn, let’s say. The editor on her part is careful not to overstress the scope of tactile culture within anthropology’s recently rediscovered sensory project. Instead, she situates the sense of touch amongst other cultural practices, grounding it in personal experience as well as social life. In her formulation, touch is not only a private act, but a fundamental medium for the expression, experience and contestation of social values and hierarchies (1). In what may be considered a pioneering approach, Classen acknowledges the influence of French philosophers Deleuze & Guattari, Derrida, Irigaray and Nancy who reflected on the subject of tactility in the late twentieth century. Drawing on this background, she amplifies its scope by dealing with the sense of touch in non-Western cultures while avoiding the habit of emphasising touch as mere physicality.
Assimilating the texts of philosophers, novelists and anthropologists, The Book of Touch is divided into nine sections, each containing a multitude of essays and dictums on the given theme. The collection approaches questions such as ‘How is touch developed differently across cultures?’ ‘What are the boundaries of pain and pleasure?’ or ‘Is there a politics of touch?’ and refers to topics ranging from a nineteenth-century account of phantom limb pain to recent reflections on the handling of photographs.
Part One is entitled Contact and grounds on the premise that we learn a “mother touch” along with a mother tongue. Engaging and conversing with other people is not limited to language, but also involves Tactile Communication, as Ruth Finnegan’s first chapter explores with regard to the social conventions of touch. In a comparable manner David Howes’ article Skinscapes. Embodiment, Culture, and Environment, employs the category of “skin knowledge” as a way of investigating the imprint of social values and environmental perceptions upon the body’s surface. Drawing on ethnographic examples from various indigenous as well as Western cultural contexts, Howes demonstrates how one’s material environment — i.e. landscape — is linked to the ‘skinscape’. He suggests that by living in urbanised, technologised Western societies “we are perhaps not so likely to think of our bodies as pastoral landscapes irrigated by rivers but we may well think of them as cityscapes, connected by road systems, communication systems and waterworks, and charged by electricity, which at times runs low” (36). Howes ends his text with some rather disturbing thoughts regarding the possible future role of ‘skincapes’ matching the virtual landscapes of cyberspace.
In the introduction to the second part of the book, entitled Pleasure, Classen comments on the sparsity of this subject within scholarly discourse. Unsurprisingly, the chapters do not deal with pleasure as a corporeal sensation as much as they consider the socio-historical development of values in relation to physical pleasures. While John E. Crowley demonstrates that the concept of bodily comfort is a development of the eighteenth century — prior to which clothing, furniture and housing had been understood as indicators of social status rather than as commodities enhancing physical comfort —, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan warns that the ongoing restriction of touch will break our sense of connectedness with the material world and, eventually, our possibilities for aesthetic enjoyment. A comparison of Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical concepts of touch in the last essay of this section reveals some significant and hitherto underappreciated differences in the two philosopher’s notions of eros and the appropriation of the other.
Part three is entitled Pain and makes extensive (critical) use of Michel Foucault’s writings on discipline, punishment and the power relations implicated in torture and physical suffering. Conceived as the “counterpleasure” in postmodernity (MacKendrick 1999), the sensation of pain is assigned an intensity of experience, increasingly equated to authenticity. The vocabulary and metaphors of pain employed in the assembled texts are remarkably rich.
Most especially, Judy Pugh’s The Language of Pain in India provides meticulous descriptions of physical and psychological suffering that reflect the underlying “integrated mind-body system” in Indian culture (118). The Tortures of the Inquisition and the Invention of Modern Guilt by Ariel Glucklich and Sex, Pain and the Marquis de Sade by David B. Morris are meanwhile prescient in linking pain to the concept of guilt, suggesting that the intentional infliction of suffering and pain constitutes the ‘internalisation’ of a system of social control.
Part Four, Male Bonding, and Part Five, Women’s Touch, are dedicated to the construction of masculine and feminine identities. Classen starts off with the observation that “[o]ne of the key features of masculine touch […] seems to be how it is used among men to express ideals of manliness, establish social hierarchies and ensure group solidarity” (155). One of the outstanding texts, Intimacy and Gender in the Trenches of the First World War, illustrates how norms of tactile contact between men and concepts of masculinity changed profoundly during the First World war, a war that so extraordinarily brutalised the male body yet paradoxically allowed for “fear, vulnerability, support and physical tenderness” (195). The two texts on Imperial Touch: Schooling Male Bodies in Colonial India deal with concepts of cleanliness and physical habits, shedding light on the imperial practices of disciplining the
‘colonised body’. They are particularly rewarding when read in comparison to the Doon
School Chronicles, a series of ethnographic films made by David MacDougall between 1997-
2000 that explore the importance of tactility to education and discipline in an elite Indian all- boy school.
Women’s Touch deals with the controversial concept of women as touch and focuses mainly on female handiwork. Be rural China, eighteenth and nineteenth-century England or early twentieth-century Paris, skillful manipulation of material and ‘craftswomanship’ has been crucial not only in securing a means of subsistence, but also in developing an alternative feminine aesthetic. It signifies an important antipode to the growing dematerialisation and the of loss physical reality of our world (Richard Sennett’s forthcoming book on craftsmanship elaborates on this theme). Other texts in the section include stirring descriptions of women’s foot binding in China and childbirth in an Inuit community.
Control, the sixth part of the volume, covers subjects as diverse as Norbert Elias’ view of medieval manners, the mechanisms of touch in a Victorian prison and the rules of touch in modern museums. The assembled texts reveal contemporary Western discourse concerning the control of touch as “an essential means of establishing and maintaining an orderly world”
(259), arising “from anxieties about the vulnerability of the social body – and ultimately, of individual bodies – to invasion and violation” (262). Elias’ text on dining habits in the Middle Ages is particularly revealing in demonstrating how the increased regulation of the sense of touch and the heightened awareness of body boundaries has come to be considered a vital part of the civilising process. Classen labels the modern etiquette of keeping one’s hand to oneself as “hands-off policy” (260). She describes how in the early museums of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the exhibits on display were explicitly expected to being touched; over time, with the increased importance of sight, the sense of touch lost its intellectual and aesthetic value. Philip Priestley’s significant study on Victorian prison life complements Foucault’s analysis of visual surveillance in the modern prison (1979) by taking into consideration the important aspect of prisoners’ tactile disciplining and the institutionalised re-education of their sense of touch. What makes the section on Control so interesting is the combined analysis of the disruptive power of unregulated tactility and its connection to the current crisis of security in Western society.
Part Seven is entitled Uncommon Touch and comprises a collection of texts on rather obscure tactile experiences, as for instance the chapter on Visceral Perception demonstrates. Drawing the attention to an inner world not customarily associated with sensory perception, the article’s author Drew Leder investigates the “perceptual reticence of our viscera as compared to the body surface” (338). Noting that our interoceptive vocabulary is mostly developed in relation to pain, Leder elucidates that the “hiddenness” of our visceral organs is essential to their healthy functioning: they require seclusion from the external world just as the sensorimotor body requires exposure. Other chapters in the section dealing with the sensual consequences of amputation, paralysis, phantom limb pain, blindness, loss of the sense of smell or the so-called “locked-in syndrome” take an interest in the experience and perception of people with an altered or heightened awareness of touch. In direct contrast, the futurist F.T. Marinetti’s 1921 essay on Tactilism contains an early plea to view touch as an art form, anticipating a time when people would “contribute indirectly toward the perfection of spiritual communication [...] through the epidermis” (331). For me, however, the outstanding text is Temple Grandin’s Autism and “The Squeeze Machine”, a vivid and haunting account of her experiences as an autistic child. She recalls how she secured her body boundaries by inventing a “squeeze machine” – a box with panels to squeeze her body – which eventually helped her find some security and relax. The examples presented in Uncommon Touch also leave a strong impression on the reader, sensitising his/her own ability for tactile experiences.
Part eight, Tactile Therapies, is about healing practices and alternative medicines applied to touch. Beginning with Jesus as “the best-known example of a tactile healer in the West” (347), Classen draws from various examples of therapeutic touch ranging from more familiar practices such as physiotherapy to Non-Western medical procedures such as acupuncture, sweat baths, Ayurvedic massage, qigong, yogic exercise and therapeutic dance. S.V. Govindan’s article, for example, traces the roots of massage in both Asian and Western cultures back to 2500 BC and illustrates the benefits of tactile Ayurvedic medicine for strengthening both body and mind. The idea of healing through touch, however, exceeds the mere medical field in so far, as it is also frequently associated with magic or supernatural influences, as the case of ‘royal touch’ illustrates. In his essay, The King’s Touch, Keith Thomas examines the widespread medieval believe that the touch of the sovereigns of England or France could cure scrofula, also called ‘King’s Evil’. The custom survived well into the eighteenth century, when it increasingly came to be regarded as superstitious and died out. Touch is nevertheless still closely related to religious as well as secular power and plays an important role in the affirmation of social orders and roles. Roy Porter’s text on the physician’s touch in eighteenth-century England, for instance, shows that tactility in a medical context is not just simply related to the notion of cure but can also be perceived as “a performance in which the physician enacts his identity through a set of established procedures and conforms his right above all, to touch and penetrate the body” (349). The articles in this section help to clarify that medical or healing touch does not only concern treatment, but also examination and diagnosis and is thus far from being limited to so-called ‘alternative therapies.’
The ninth and final part — Touch and Technology — deals with the acceleration of machines and bodies. All the assembled texts analyse ways in which modernity has changed, or continue to change, human perception. Taking into consideration the physical interaction between bodies and machines, the commodification of touch and telepresence as an out-of- the-body experience, this section provides a compact outline of the role tactility plays in digital technology. On this note, Dorinne Kondo’s Artisans and Machines in Japan argues that industrialisation is not necessarily opposed to craftsmanship. People in Japan who perceive themselves as working with machines do not necessarily feel as alienated as is often assumed in the West; Kondo locates the reason for the effortlessness handling of modern technologies in the traditional Shinto spirits considered to inhabit inanimate objects and,
therefore, mechanical devices too. Susan Kozel’s description of Experiences of a Virtual Body derive from her participation in an art installation called “Telematic Dreaming” in which she visually detached herself from her body by projecting her image into another room. The audience’s reactions to the artist’s projected self were transmitted back to the artist from where she could then move her body in response. Taking part in the experiment for a month, Kozel realised that one’s internalised behaviour does not easily change along with an alteration of one’s appearance. She describes how her personal experience did not correspond to the cyber-feminist paradigm of cyberspace as a liberating disembodied space in which age, sex and race do not matter. She nevertheless proposes that virtual reality might potentially offer “a space for us to recognize the tendency for our prejudices and conditioning to be carried forward, and to work at a new way to interrelate” (445). The volume concludes with an epigrammatic note on data streams and virtual touch.
In brief introductory chapters that precede each section, Classen contextualises and summarises the selected passages. Nonetheless, the metaphors she uses to describe the organisation of the sections and the images she uses are often rather clumsy. The compilation also regrettably makes very little use of the writings of Merleau-Ponty and/or Luce Irigaray, although Classen acknowledges their influence on issues concerning tactile culture and kinaesthetic perception in her preface to the volume. Igrigaray’s remarkable statement in An Ethics of Sexual Difference that “God is always entrusted to the look and never sufficiently imagined as tactile bliss” (1993:162) could have enhanced further reflections on the contradiction inherent in the concept of a solitary spectator-god, as well as on gendered renderings of touch in general. Notwithstanding, the volume presents a very well informed and inspiring collection of academic as well as literary sources carefully extracted from a seemingly endless reservoir of writings on the subject of touch across cultures and times.
The Book of Touch is definitely a book that invites its readers to rummage through – an eminently tactile practice that corresponds to the sensory value of books as described by Classen in her introductory remarks (7). It is a precious collection for anyone interested in the formation of the senses yet might be dissatisfying for readers who expect a systematic overview of the topic. At times, The Book of Touch appears like a random compilation of aphorisms whereas at other times it gives the impression of a profound hotchpotch that makes the evasive and often inarticulate sense of touch tangible. The editor herself describes The Book of Touch as “a compilation of the expected and the unexpected” (4) – meaning, I
suppose, that the book occasionally refers to the obvious whilst also holding a number of truly imaginative and surprising sections. In short, this is a superb and infuriatingly diverse anthology.
Michaela Schäuble, University College London
References cited:
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books,
1997.
Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. MacKendrick, Karmen. Counterpleasures, Albany: State University of New York Press,
1999
Sennett, Richard: The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press (forthcoming 2007)
In 1900, when the British biologist and anthropologist W. Baldwin Spencer was prepar- ing his now-famous anthropological expedition to Central Australia, he received a letter from his colleague Alfred Cort Haddon, in which the latter strongly advised him: “You really must take a cinematograph or biographer or whatever they call it in your part of the world. It is an indispensable piece of anthropological apparatus” (cited in Griffiths
2002, 151). Two years earlier and just three years after the invention of the cinemato- graph in 1895, Haddon had himself led an expedition by the University of Cambridge to the Torres Strait Islands, north of Australia, and filmed the world’s first ever on-location ethnographic footage with a Lumière camera. The surviving four and a half minutes of footage show Torres Strait Islander men performing three dance sequences, including the spectacular Malu-Bomai ceremonial mask dance, followed by a demonstration of traditional fire-making practices. The Torres Strait expedition is considered the birth of modern anthropology, and that it coincides with the first film footage not only indicates that the two forms of data and knowledge acquisition are highly compatible but also shows that the pioneers of the discipline recognized the potential of the film and photo camera as a technical extension of the ethnographic eye very early on (see Edwards
1998; Griffiths 1996–97; Grimshaw 2001, 16–25). In any case, Spencer followed the advice of his Cambridge colleague and, together with amateur photographer Frank Gillen, shot over eighty minutes of 35-mm film and took numerous photographs. He also produced the first wax-cylinder sound recordings of the (largely secret) rituals of the Aranda. The recordings were first publicly shown in 1902 and were enthusiastically received by the audience. Large parts of the filmic material are well preserved, but today the uninitiated do not have access to the recordings of the sacred and secret Aboriginal rites anymore.
That the film and photo camera actually advanced to become as indispensable an ethnographic tool as proclaimed by Haddon, however, cannot be attributed to its early use as “a mute recording device … a transparent method of visual note taking” (T. Wright 1991, 41) by researchers such as Alfred C. Haddon, W. Baldwin Spencer, and later also Bronisław Malinowski and Margaret Mead. They appreciated film and photography as a means of authentication and classification and ultimately of preservation of practices, costumes, rituals, and languages that were “threatened with extinction.” Using visual media primarily in the service of salvage anthropology, however, does not do justice to the manifold dimensions and capacities of visual or pictorial communication.
The anthropological study of visual culture(s) consists of both the production and the analysis of images and also includes the reflexive analysis of ways of seeing as a
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.
form of knowledge production. Hence, first, the term “visual anthropology” refers to the scientific study of visual manifestations of culture; this includes the anthropology of art, of material culture, and of ritual form. Second, “visual anthropology” also denotes the—often reflexive and dialogical—use and production of images by which people are represented and/or represent themselves, employing technological media such as film and photography.
Since the 1970s, visual media productions—among them the British television series Disappearing World—have contributed to popularize anthropology, but at the same time they have been reduced to mere didactic and illustrative purposes in classroom teaching by many representatives of the discipline, which has led to a trivialization of the field and its methods of research and analysis. Yet, as a subdiscipline, visual or audiovisual anthropology adds a significant new dimension to mainstream sociocul- tural anthropology that reaches far beyond positivist (and instrumental) assumptions of an objective, observable reality that prevailed in the nineteenth and possibly well into the twentieth century. The distinctive expressive structures of visual media as film have been persuasively argued as best suited to explore “(a) the topographic, (b) the temporal, (c) the corporeal, and (d) the personal” dimensions of social experience (MacDougall
2006, 271). This reconceptualization of visual anthropology also implies that the use of photography and film does not (solely) serve the visual representation of otherwise collected ethnographic data but generates its own innovative theoretical, analytical, and methodological approaches, which often reach beyond common conventions of scien- tific verifiability and objectivity. In other words, visual ethnographic practices comprise reflexive, interactive, and participatory techniques that provide access to specific local and/or embodied forms of knowledge and perception that would otherwise be difficult to access or that remain invisible.
While in the social sciences the articulation and transmission of scientific thought has traditionally been restricted to the printed and spoken word, anthropology con- stitutes a rare exception. Within anthropology vision has always enjoyed a privileged status as the principal source of knowledge about the world. The exact reciprocal observation—seeing and being seen—and the subsequent description of the observed constitute the basis of anthropological knowledge production and transfer, whereby the description is not necessarily limited to the written word. The concept largely refers back to Michel Leiris’s 1930 article “L’œil de l’ethnographe” (“The Ethnographer’s Eye”), in which he terms seeing as the essential experience for relating to one’s surroundings. Leiris compares the eye of the anthropological observer to the skin and ascribes to it the function of a layer between the self and the other through which one’s vision of the world can be mediated both ways.
Despite this obvious correlation, images or image-based media have traditionally been mainly used for descriptive or illustrative purposes, while textual media were (and often still are) preferred to represent complex analytical issues and to generate ethnographic knowledge. This “iconophobia”—which is usually based on naive realist theories of visual representation and the anachronistic claim to an operational and objectifying veracity of documentary pictures—neglects the constitutive role that photographic and cinematic images continue to play in the acquisition of data and the formation of anthropological theory (Taylor 1996). At the same time, representatives
of the discipline such as Johannes Fabian criticize the apparent equation between seeing and understanding on which the crucial role of observation in anthropology is based as “visualism.” According to him, anthropology’s “visualist bias” contributed an overestimation of visible physical attributes in the construction of the “cultural Other” (Fabian 1983, 60).
The relationship between image and text has a long conflicting history in anthropol- ogy, but it was not until the 1980s that the conditions of ethnographic text and image production were systematically scrutinized. The so-called crisis of ethnographic rep- resentation, or “writing culture debate” brought about an epistemological turn that is commonly referred to as a “postmodern,” “interpretive,” or “reflexive” turn. This pro- cess was initiated by the 1986 publication of the eponymous volume Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, in which the authors radically questioned ethnographic authority and referred to the situatedness of ethnological knowledge production, and which greatly influenced the development of new, experimental forms of ethnographic data collection and styles of writing. Interestingly, however, none of the contributors in the volume acknowledged visual methods and representations as alternatives to textual means, and none of them mentioned that the debates on reflexivity, multivocality, and participatory and dialog- ical anthropology had already been anticipated in visual anthropology and applied by filmmakers such as Jean Rouch two decades earlier, in the 1960s.
In the introduction to their collected volume Made to be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology the editors Marcus Banks and Jay Ruby (2011) attempt to establish an independent historic account of the discipline of visual anthropology and to roughly divide it into three phases. According to them, the first phase, ranging from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, was characterized by a largely unsystematic collecting of photographs of “bodies, weapons, house-building, etc.” without a consistent theoretical agenda. During this period, images were considered self-evident documents or served as picturesque background illustrations (Banks and Ruby 2011, 13–14). The second phase, which they date to the early 1960s extending into the 1980s, was dominated by the production of ethnographic films and writing about film. Ethnographic photographs and films were no longer understood as transparent documentation, and this phase saw the elaboration of narrative structures that helped to contextualize the social lifeworlds of the protagonists and to make them engaging for an international lay audience. The third phase, which according to Banks and Ruby is still in progress, started in the 1990s with the pictorial turn in anthropology and is characterized by its interdisciplinary and participatory approach, the use of new (digital) media, and the consideration of all the senses (Banks and Ruby 2011, 14).
Image-based technologies and image analysis
Sociocultural anthropology is historically intertwined with the colonial context that gave birth to it as an academic discipline. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the (mostly material) data that anthropologists used and referred to in their studies was in general provided by colonial officials, missionaries, and explorers—data and
images that were simultaneously a result and a trigger of colonial fantasies and interests.
In the course of the nineteenth century and inspired by subjects such as zoology, botany, or geology, image-based technologies played an increasingly important role in anthropological data gathering, and ethnographies were adorned with drawings and photographic images. Physical anthropologists especially had an interest in registering and classifying indigenous populations through anthropometric measurements. They used photographs to create physiognomic–biological classification schemes of differ- ent “tribes of men.” The parallels between these photographs, in which the “object” is shown against a neutral background, preferably nude, frontal, and in profile, and the methods of criminology used in the registration and classification of criminals at the time is obvious. Such typologies were also known as “racial doctrine” and referred to evolutionary schemes that in turn were largely based on visual indicators, such as phys- ical characteristics, for example. At a later point the focus of anthropological interest shifted to observable elements of culture such as body decoration or hair styles, tangi- ble objects such as jewelry or weapons, and customs and ritual practices that were used as visual aids to describe the “foreign worlds” as vividly as possible. Scientific inter- est in “premodern” non-European cultures went hand in hand with the reevaluation of observation and recording technologies.
What all ethnographic sketches and photographs from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century had in common was their belief in the precision and unques- tionable accuracy of pictures; skepticism about the scientific objectivity, evidential value, and veracity of photographs emerged later on. But, even though these images were an integral part of the colonialist discourse and doubtlessly contributed to the exoticization and sexualization of colonial subjects, they depicted a world that was far more complex and versatile than the evolutionist understanding of science allowed for at that time. Even during the very early stages of anthropology visual representations never just illustrated or consolidated prevailing scientific discourses; even back then they had the potential to challenge common worldviews and to shape new paradigms. Within the scientific discipline of anthropology, however, alternative pictorial forms such as diagrams, charts, statistical figures, and graphs gradually replaced pho- tographs. This development illustrates that the nature of pictorial representations changes and mainly depends on the respective notions of scientific procedures in a given period.
Ethnographic photography
For nineteenth-century traveling naturalists photography provided an oppor- tunity to transport the visible as seen back home. Colonial photographs and museum artifacts were meant to substitute for the physical absence of the “sav- ages.” Photographic recording technology became an important research tool in anthropology, as “authentic” recordings could be interpreted and evaluated in undis- turbed laboratory settings far from the original locations. But soon these images brought about their own genre; in 1844 the photographer E. Thiesson took the first
anthropological photographs of two Brazilian Indians in Paris; this early form of studio photography, which commonly depicted “indigenous subjects” in front of palm trees or wearing animal skins, contributed greatly to the populist construction of racial stereotypes.
Disapproval of anthropometric photography followed soon, though. Critics such as the colonial governor, botanist, anthropologist, and explorer Everard im Thurn, for example, addressed the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain as early as in 1892 to advocate the photography of “unposed native subjects under ‘natural’ conditions” (M. Young 1998, 4). His plea to treat the portrayed as living individuals gradually led to a more naturalistic style in ethnographic photography, and roughly twenty-five years later the most famous representative of the discipline, Bronisław Malinowski started to use the camera as a tool to take “visual notes” (Edwards 1992). But Malinowski, who is gen- erally considered the founder of participant observation, struggled with the technology. His diary contains several complaints about the shortcomings of the medium and bears witness to his technical clumsiness. In hindsight, Malinowski considered it a serious mistake to treat photography as a “secondary occupation and a somewhat unimportant way of collecting evidence” during his fieldwork on the Trobriand Islands (Malinowski [1935] 1965, 461–62; M. Young 1998, 7). Initially, photography was for Malinowski a tool in the service of scientific research, documenting visual material culture in its social context; this understanding of ethnographic photography corresponded to his func- tionalist theory of culture. The promise and development of photography as a research tool in anthropology is exhaustively covered in the revised and expanded edition of Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method (Collier and Collier [1967]
2004). In the framework of the so-called “crisis of representation,” photography played a crucial role in replacing the visual as a method of data collection and analysis by a (reflexive) anthropology of visual systems (Edwards 2011, 171).
At the same time, these early photographs are also an important part of the visual heritage of the discipline; they provide insights into the colonial European view of the other and bear witness to the construction of ethnographic knowledge and its inherent politics of representation. In current scientific practices the material and sensory prop- erties of photographs come to the fore (again) and are classified as “critical, reflexive, and collaborative micro-histories of visual, cross-cultural encounters” (Edwards 2011,
160). Furthermore, the critical debate on ethnographic photography has increasingly shifted from the Euro-American model to examining how photographic practices are understood and perceived in different cultural contexts (Pinney and Peterson 2003; C. Wright 2013).
Ethnographic film
American tradition
In contrast to photography, which mainly operates and represents people and events retrospectively, film—including ethnographic documentary film and video—works via anticipation. Filmic narratives are structured in such a way that the viewer is
curious to find out what comes next. This attribute initially made it more difficult for ethnographic film to be considered a more serious social research instrument than photography. However, positively, the film medium created space for fantasies and subjective interpretation and could reach a much broader audience—attributes that make the assumption that anthropology’s aim was to provide objective studies of culture a questionable endeavor from the outset.
Robert Flaherty’s (1884–1951) wild romantic nature epos Nanook of the North, released in 1922, is widely, albeit controversially (leading anthropologists of the time, such as Franz Boas, disregarded the film’s scientific value altogether), considered the first documentary film as well as the first ethnographic film in history. While it tells the story of only a single protagonist, works with fictional elements, and makes use of reenactments, reconstructions, and slapstick elements, nevertheless Nanook provides impressive insights into the culture and lifestyle of the Canadian Inuit and is of great documentary value. Actually, the term and genre “documentary” was coined by John Grierson in 1926 in a review of Flaherty’s follow-up film Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age (1926), which was filmed in Samoa and made use of reconstructions of traditional techniques such as tattooing and hunting. Such problems of definition are long-standing, with discussions about whether Nanook can be considered an ethnographic film, illustrating that there is no universal definition of what makes a film “ethnographic” and all attempts to define an ethnographic genre comprehensively or establish a canon ultimately fail (Crawford and Turton 1992; Heider [1976] 2006; Loizos 1993; Ruby 1975).
In 1967 the release of another Inuit documentation, the Netsilik Eskimo Series of films by Canadian Bulgarian anthropologist Asen Balikci, caused a sensation in North America. Strongly influenced by the narrative and filmic style of Flaherty, the series, which consists of twenty-one half-hour parts, made use of reconstructions in depicting the traditional way of life, hunting techniques, and economic system of the Netsilik of the Pelly Bay region in the Canadian Arctic. Local actors collaborated in the reenact- ments set at about 1919, before rifles were introduced in the region. The parallels are so striking that some critics flippantly stated that “Asen Balkci films Nanook.” Mainly con- ceptualized as an educational tool, the episodes have no commentary or subtitles and follow the annual cycle of the Inuit. The series was initially part of the widely used ele- mentary social studies curriculum, “Man: A Course of Study,” and was produced under grants from the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation in the United States and the Education Development Center in association with the National Film Board of Canada. But the filmic style, the unmediated content, and the sense of cul- tural relativism it conveyed caused quite a stir with conservative politicians and church representatives in the United States who claimed that the films undermined patriotism, American values, and Judeo-Christian morality. Eventually, after a nationwide contro- versy, the funding was withdrawn and the curriculum reorganized.
Within US academic anthropology it was mostly Margaret Mead (1901–78) and Gregory Bateson (1904–80), a student of Alfred C. Haddon, who experimented with “authentic” ethnographic photo and film recordings in the 1940s and 1950s. They primarily filmed the development of children and conducted national character studies in Bali and New Guinea to show that (and how) culture is learned during childhood
and adolescence, as was the prevailing dictum of the culture and personality school at the time.
The first US documentary to become an internationally acclaimed classic was John Marshall’s (1932–2005) The Hunters (1957), a film that documented a five-day giraffe hunt with bow and arrow of the Ju|’hoansi. Marshall followed the Ju|’hoansi (also known as Bushmen or !Kung San) of the Kalahari desert with his camera for almost fifty years and created a unique long-term documentation that culminated in the six-hour retrospective A Kalahari Family (2004). Marshall documented the struggle for survival and the struggle for land and political participation, as well as the sociopolitical changes that a Namibian Bushman family experienced from 1951 to 2000.
In the course of Marshall’s ethnographic long-term study, film and sound technology developed considerably. From the 1960s onwards, technological innovations enabled simultaneous sound recording (or, rather, the desire for new, less ponderous styles of filmmaking prompted technical innovations); sync-sound shooting and lightweight handheld cameras had a huge impact on the mobility of the filmmakers and their access to informal contexts. Thenceforth, local people could be directly spoken to and could speak directly to the camera, rather than only being spoken about. This also brought about a lack of control on the part of the director, and in 1961 Richard Leacock (1921–2011) published a manifesto entitled “For an Uncontrolled Cinema,” in which he outlined the principles of a new style of documentary filmmaking that today is commonly known as American direct cinema. Representatives such as Donn Alan Pennebaker (b. 1925), Frederick Wisemen (b. 1930), Albert Maysles (1926–2015) and David Maysles (1931–87), and Richard Leacock himself introduced a new notion of proximity between filmmaker and pro-filmic subject, thus evoking notions of authenticity and a new reality effect in the viewers. Films like Primary (1960), produced by Robert Drew, shot by Leacock and Albert Maysles, and edited by Pennebaker; Titicut Follies (1967), directed by Wiseman and filmed by John Marshall; or Don’t Look Back (1967) by Pennebaker, however, were not so much intended as scientific research tools but pointed to social injustices, looked behind the scenes of mass events, and experimented with interactive filmmaking modes. Direct cinema’s attempts to capture the unmanipulated essence of reality was often misunderstood as a naive and/or essentializing notion of the filmic medium and is occasionally confused with cinéma vérité, a filmmaking approach and style that developed around the same time in France but differs considerably from its American counterpart.
French tradition
In France, anthropologist Marcel Griaule (1898–1956) had already systematically used photography, film, and sound recordings since the 1930s in his ethnographic studies of the Dogon in Mali. In 1938 he released two 35-mm films (Au pays dogon [In the Land of the Dogon] and Sous les masques noirs [Under the Black Masks]) and established a circle of anthropologists who were to continue his research, and especially the mytho-poetic filmic work on the Dogon. The most famous of Griaule’s successors is undoubtedly Jean Rouch (1917–2004), who is widely considered one of the founding fathers of ethnographic film. Even today Rouch remains one of the most original and prolific
representatives of the genre. Best known for his innovative improvisational filmmaking praxis and his idea of “shared anthropology” (anthropologie partagée), Rouch was also a formative influence on the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave). In films such as Les maîtres fous (The Mad Masters, 1955), a documentation of a Hauka possession cult in today’s Ghana, or his “enthnofictions” such as Jaguar (1965) or Petit à Petit (Little by Little, 1971), Rouch worked closely with his protagonists, thus initiating a research method that currently enjoys great popularity in the social sciences under the label of “participatory approach.” The influence of Flaherty on Rouch’s films is evident and, thanks to the technological innovation in the film industry (e.g., sync sound, portable camera, etc.), Rouch succeeded in establishing a more flexible and thus more interac- tive style of cinematography. He never considered the camera to be a passive scientific recording device but rather a catalytic instrument “whose mere presence could pro- voke the subjects into producing a performance that revealed the beliefs, sentiments, attitudes and dreams that lay beneath the everyday surface of things,” as his chronicler Henley poignantly remarks (2009, 340). With Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961), the well-known and groundbreaking documentary on French postwar society that he created in collaboration with the sociologist Edgar Morin, Rouch had recourse to the Soviet avant-garde director and film theorist Dziga Vertov (1896–1954). Rendering Vertov’s notion of kino-pravda (cine-truth) into the concept of cinéma vérité, Rouch used the camera as agent provocateur, thus exploring the way the cinematic process simultaneously creates knowledge about and also transforms the world.
Italian tradition
A chapter that has unjustifiably been neglected or entirely overlooked in previous writ- ings on the history of visual anthropology is the Italian case. About the same time as Rouch started to shoot in France and West Africa,a group of young Italian filmmakers were inspired by the work of Italian philosopher, anthropologist, and historian of reli- gion Ernesto de Martino (1908–65) and set out to the Mezzogiorno, the Italian south, to capture the remnants of archaic rituals in a forgotten part of their own home country. The phenomena they were most interested in were funeral rituals and tarantism, a rural southern Italian possession cult that is believed to cause a nervous disorder through the (imaginary) bite of the tarantula spider and that is cured through music and trance dancing by the afflicted women.
De Martino appointed an interdisciplinary team that included ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitella (1924–90) and several visual documentarians, the photographer Franco Pinna (1925–78), and filmmakers such as Gianfranco Mingozzi, Cecilia Mangini (b. 1927), Vittoria de Seta (1923–2011), and Luigi Di Gianni (b. 1926). The result was unusually rich audiovisual recordings of southern Italian magico-religious practices and rural lifestyles; in Italy their films are commonly referred to as cine- matografia demartiniana (de Martinaian cinematography). These directors, who were strongly influenced by German expressionism, made use of montage, reenactments, staged encounters, and tragic and melodramatic film music and employed commentary written by renowned writers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–75). Whereas some of the filmmakers, such as Mangini in Stendalì—suonano ancora (Stendali—They
Figure 1 Film stills of Il culto delle pietre (The Cult of Stones) by Luigi Di Gianni (1967, 18 minutes), about an annual ritual in a cave in the Abruzzo, central Italy, whose stones are said to have therapeutic properties.
Still Sound, 1960) highlighted the staged character of their films, others, such as Di Gianni in Magia Lucana (Lucanian Magic, 1958) did not reveal whether their material was staged for the camera or “authentic” (see Figure 1). In every case the respective directors were not so much interested in the mere representation of an encountered reality as in the creation of a highly formalized and aestheticized mise en scène that highlights the “expressive codes” of the primarily female protagonists. As a rearguard and, to a certain extent, also as a critical response to the documentarian feature films of Italian neorealism, which also tried to convey the harsh living conditions of the subaltern classes, these documentaries never abandoned the depicted reality in favor of a moralizing melodrama. Workers and peasants are not portrayed as a negative social force or as a “proletarian mass,” in the midst of which one heroic individual
fights injustice. Instead, the films are experimental ethnographies, combing aesthetic and ethnographic elements that are committed to a humanist, poetic realism. It is the synthesis of documentary realism, staged elements, and uncompromising aestheticism that characterizes the Italian documentary films and makes them so significant, way beyond the epoch and the region with which they are associated.
Observational cinema
Influenced by innovative directions in fiction and documentary film such as direct cinema, cinéma vérité, the French Nouvelle Vague and late Italian neorealism, and initiated by a dialogue between anthropologists and documentary filmmakers, a new style, or rather genre of anthropological filmmaking evolved in the United States during the 1970s; it is commonly known as “observational cinema,” after an article by Colin Young published in 1975 that soon evolved to become the manifesto of the movement (C. Young 1975). Herb Di Goia and David Hancock, and also David MacDougall, were pioneers of this approach which constituted a break with earlier anthropological approaches to filmmaking in the sense that they were modest and “painstakingly built from an amassing of detail” (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009, 7). Ideologically, observational cinema borrows heavily from French film theorist André Bazin (1918–58), who pleaded for a purist style, long takes, and continuity and who preferred directors who tried to make themselves “invisible” over experiments in editing and visual effects. Films such as Peter Murray (1975) or Peter and Jane Flint (1975) are part of a Vermont People series of Hancock and Di Goia where the filmmakers are situated in close physical proximity to the films’ protagonists. With handheld cameras and through long takes, they closely follow the rhythms of people’s embodied actions, using the camera as an animated tool of exploration.
Although repeatedly declared to be outdated, observational cinema currently expe- riences a revival as a “sensuous, interpretive, and phenomenologically inflected mode of inquiry” (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009, ix). Many films by graduates and staff of the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, for example, work creatively with the principles of observational cinema and include them in their experimentation with new filmmaking techniques. Furthermore, Anna Grimshaw’s four-part series Mr Coperthwaite: A Life in the Maine Woods (2014), which explores the “handmade life” of Bill Coperthwaite over the course of a year and is structured by the rhythm of the changing seasons, stands in the tradition of Hancock and Di Goia and is a contemporary example of consequential observational filmmaking technique.
Beyond observational cinema and participatory approaches
Among the most important contributors to and innovators of ethnographic film (theory) are Judith and David MacDougall whose observational, reflexive approach has influenced a whole generation of younger ethnographic filmmakers. Propagating
an unprivileged camera style, defined as “a style based on the assumption that the appearance of a film should be an artefact of the social and physical encounter between filmmaker and the subject” (MacDougall 1998, 203), the MacDougalls have their roots in the observational cinema tradition but also acknowledge that “an observational approach to documentary exists not in contradistinction to participatory or ‘reflexive’ propensities, but rather as their consummation,” as Lucien Taylor (1998, 3) writes in his introduction to David MacDougall’s groundbreaking Transcultural Cinema (1998). They were the first to include subtitles of conversations and commentaries of local protagonists and, with their early films such as To Live with Herds (1972), Lorang’s Way (1979), and The Weddings Camels (1980), the so-called Turkana Trilogy, they revolutionized visual anthropology. Recent projects primarily focus on educational institutions and schooling in India, and in 1997 David MacDougall began conducting a study of the Doon School, an elite residential school in northern India. This resulted in five films: Doon School Chronicles (2000), With Morning Hearts (2001), Karam in Jaipur (2001), The New Boys (2003), and The Age of Reason (2004). His three-hour documentation of a shelter for homeless children in New Delhi, Gandhi’s Children (2008), forms a striking companion piece to his previous films and complements his writings on corporeality and social aesthetics that is marked by its theoretical rigor, sensitivity, and empathy.
The most controversial ethnographic filmmaker within the discipline of visual anthropology to date probably remains Robert Gardner (1925–2014). His films, such as Dead Birds (1964), a film about warfare in New Guinea with a poetic voice-over commentary, which purports to know the thoughts and dreams of the local protago- nists, or Forest of Bliss (1986), a meditation on the Indian town Benares, which forgoes any commentary, explanation, or subtitles, poses a challenge for viewers and audiences, who are used to austere, explanatory commentary and instructive voice-overs. Gardner himself was never interested in an objective scientific stance in filmmaking. He was (and still is) widely criticized for his “artistic vision” and/or dismissed as a “lightweight anthropologist,” yet his approach triggered a discussion that is still ongoing of the role of experimental approaches to the ethnographic as well as of the parallels between artistic and anthropological practices and ethical issues.
Experimental film formats
The disruption of the realist–observational narrative is not restricted to Robert Gardner. Visual anthropology in general, and ethnographic film in particular, has a long tradition of experimental approaches to recording and editing styles, formats, performativity, and collaboration. As early as the 1940s, filmmakers from rather diverse national and intellectual backgrounds started to radically challenge the notion that the realistic potential of film was grounded in the materiality of photographic technology. Almost ten years prior to Les maitres fous, the Ukrainian American avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, for example, received the first Guggenheim fellowship for creative work in motion picture to realize an artistic ethnographic film on Haitian ritual. Between 1947 and 1952 she recorded 20,000 feet of film, taped fifty hours of
Figure 2 Maya Deren: photograph possibly of a boat ceremony for Agwe, taken on one of her visits to Haiti, 1947–52.
audio recordings, and photographed over a thousand stills of Vodoun possession ritual, dance, and music (see Figure 2). As early as 1946 Deren describes film as a “new man-made reality” ([1946] 2001, [20]) and in her 1960 article “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality” she refers to the dialectics between realism and creative arrangement as “the art of controlled accident” (Deren 1960, 157). She never intended to merely register an already-existing reality but rather to generate a novel form of perception with her filmmaking. This interest in exhausting the contingencies of the film medium, in creating new experiences through filmmaking, and in eventually transforming reality is what links Deren’s aesthetics to Rouch’s later work. Both experimented with performative and fictional elements in their documentaries and both can be regarded as precursors of corporeal cinematography in their emphasis on the body and movement—of both the protagonists and the filmmaker.
This legacy is continued by many experimental filmmakers to this day; anthropolo- gist and experimental filmmaker Kathryn Ramey, for example, blends found footage, documentary photography, ethnographic inquiry, and personal travelogue with exper- imental film techniques such as hand processing, optical printing, and hand-conducted time lapse to detour and derail the various approaches to history making in her films (www.rameyfilms.com/movies.html).
Other experimental formats that combine anthropological research with artistic audiovisual approaches include photo-film, such as the ethno-poetic photo-films and radio features of German writer Hubert Fichte, and photographer Leonore Mau (e.g.,
Figure 3 Photograph from the photo-film Der Fischmarkt und die Fische (The Fish Market and the Fish) by Hubert Fichte and Leonore Mau (1968, 9 minutes) about the everyday lives of fish- erman at the time of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal.
Der Tag eines unständigen Hafenarbeiters [Day of a Casual Dock Worker], 1966), as well as interactive and (applied and collaborative) multimedia ethnographies, such as the works of Peter Biella or the collaborative projects of Wendy James and Judith Aston (see Figure 3).
In the French context, directors influenced by auteur theory and/or feminist theory such as Agnès Varda (also frequently referred to as grandmother of the Nouvelle Vague) and Chris Marker, who made use of series of filmed photographs, photomon- tage, and sound effects in their documentary essay-films, and filmmakers with a German-speaking background including Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, and Harun Farocki, to name only a select few, all employ experimental approaches that combine (ethnographic) research with documentary realism and poetic fictional narrative styles.
Anthropologists who do ethnographic work in and through the medium of sound such as Steven Feld, Ernst Karel, Angus Carlyle and Rupert Cox, Tom Rice, and many others, are currently drawing attention (back) to the auditory aspects of culture. In different ways they explore sonic sensibilities (acoustemology), making use of and analyzing location recording and composition as a means to better understand the experiental significance of sound and to convey ethnographic knowledge. Their employment of experimental nonfiction media practices and anthropologically informed audio works explore culture through sound in combination with images or without. Acoustical approaches in the field of anthropology are concerned with urban sound cultures, listening practices, acoustic identities, aural media practices, the music industry, technological conditions, and sounding history and are a part of the growing subdiscipline of the anthropology of the senses.
Concerning the representation and evocation of multisensory experience, the
Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard University, an experimental laboratory
that stands in the tradition of Robert Gardner and is directed by filmmaker and anthropologist Lucien Castaing-Taylor and managed by sound engineer Ernst Karel, is presently producing substantial work in film, video (installations), still photography, hypermedia, and/or sound with a focus on the aesthetic–sensual. The description on the SEL’s website proclaims the use of
analog and digital media to explore the aesthetics and ontology of the natural and unnat- ural world. Harnessing perspectives drawn from the arts, the social and natural sciences, and the humanities, the SEL encourages attention to the many dimensions of the world, both animate and inanimate, that may only with difficulty, if it all, be rendered with propositional prose. Most works produced in the SEL take as their subject the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human and animal existence. (https://sel.fas.harvard.edu)
While the focus on animal existence and the “ontology of the unnatural world” are a relatively new addendum, this manifesto illustrates that SEL projects aim at explor- ing the “aesthetic tension” between visual and auditory perspectives, offering the audi- ence a sensory experience that reflects on the actual experiences of others. Ilisa Bar- bash and Lucien Taylor famously claimed that “more than any other art form, film uses experience to convey experience” (Barbash and Taylor 1997, 1) and, in accordance with this maxim, they realized the film Sweetgrass (2009), a minimalist immersion in human–animal relations between cowboys and sheep in Montana (Figure 4), as well as Hell Roaring Creek (2010) and other audio-video installations that emerged from the project. Three years later, in 2012, Castaing-Taylor (previously Taylor), in collabora- tion with Véréna Paravel, directed the much acclaimed film Leviathan, an experimental
Figure 4 Production still of Sweetgrass by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (2009, 101 minutes).
work about the North American fishing industry, about which the New York Times wrote that it looks and sounds like no other documentary in history. Other conceptual SEL films include the 16-mm film Manakamana (2013), directed by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez, which is composed of eleven cable car rides to a temple in Nepal, each of them a ten-minute single take corresponding to the length of a 400-foot 16-mm spool, and People’s Park (2012) by Libbie D. Cohn and John Paul Sniadecki, a 78-minute single-shot documentary filmed in an urban park in Chengdu, China. People’s Park and Leviathan are strongly influenced by Dutch filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich’s aesthetics and his intuitive method of Single Shot Cinema, a technique that enables film- makers to move freely in a space with a camera and to take long, uninterrupted shots (http://singleshotcinema.com). Although not a trained anthropologist, Retel Helmrich in his films, notably his Indonesian trilogy—Eye of the Day (2001), Shape of the Moon (2004), and Position among the Stars (2010)—which won him the World Documen- tary Award at Sundance twice, closely documents the political changes by following an Indonesian family in one of Jakarta’s slums (see Figure 5). Helmrich stands in the combined tradition of observational cinema and cinéma vérité. Considering the recent success of such films at international film festivals and their rave reviews from film crit- ics worldwide—not least the controversial but widely received and highly acclaimed companion films about the Indonesian killings of 1965–66 by Joshua Oppenheimer The Act of Killing (2013), which was nominated for an Academy Award, and The Look
Figure 5 Film still of Stand van de Zon (Eye of the Day) by Leonard Retel Helmrich (2001,
92 minutes), the first film of his trilogy about a three-generation family in the slums of Jakarta,
of Silence (2014)—it is safe to say that ethnographic cinema has left the niche of dusty education films of “exotic” locations and/or marginal topics and has advanced (once more) to a major source of inspiration for avant-garde cinema and artistic practices.
Montage, drawing, and multisensory approaches
In addition to multisensory approaches, new developments and tendencies in visual anthropology also includea rediscovery of the principle of montage as artistic, cultural, and academic practice (Suhr and Willerslev 2013), as well as a recourse to drawings and animation. The reason drawings, cartoons, and animated images are so appealing for anthropology is their capacity to visualize situations and events for which no actual images exist. This also includes states of mind such as fantasies, dreams, hallucinations, and, above all, memories, which are otherwise impossible to grasp or to portray visually. The subtlety of the approach also facilitates access to testimonies that might otherwise have remained hidden. Examples are the first feature-length animated documentary film Waltz with Bashir about the filmmaker Ari Folman’s autobiographical search for his lost memories as a soldier in the 1982 Lebanon War (Schäuble 2011, 213–14), or the visual ethnographic work of Michael Atkins (2013) on public sex encounters between men in Manchester. Atkins’s fabulous and at times disturbing “ethno-graphics” incor- porate testimony, experiences of fieldwork, and recounted stories from informants. In addition to respecting the need to anonymize the identities of informants, the drawings also provide a representative tool that is potentially useful to policy makers, outreach workers, and informants themselves.
In recent years, anthropologists such as Tim Ingold and Michael Taussig have com- mended drawing as a visual strategy and technique of anthropological documentation and also as a form of embodied and dialogic practice in which “the drawn line can unfold in a way that responds to its immediate spatial and temporal milieu” (Taussig
2011, 239). Taussig, a famous “sketcher” himself, also acknowledges the role of drawing in the formulation of anthropological knowledge and conceptualizes field sketches as a form of homeopathic (and surrealist) magic that pays attention to the specific materiality and historicity of specific visual traditions. From an ethical viewpoint, “graphic anthropology” also facilitates a more sensitive approach to issues such as sex or crime in which the protagonists do not want to be recognized or need to conceal their identity—this enables a filmic and/or photographic treatment of themes and of particular social phenomena and subcultures that would otherwise be impossible to document visually. Such methods and tools are particularly suitable for conducting research on themes such as emotion, time, the body, gender and sexuality, and the senses.
New and digital media
New, affordable, and easy-to-handle video technologies have contributed to the development of new styles within ethnographic filmmaking, and access to media
technologies is no longer restricted to Western-trained anthropologists. In many cases, indigenous people use film and photography along with new social media and web presences to make their own voices heard and decide themselves how they would like to be represented and perceived. Since the 1980s so-called indigenous media—community-based documentary production and/or collaborative research and filmmaking projects—has become an increasingly important topic within visual anthropology that is best described as a form of cultural activism. What started in 1973 with the series Navajo Film Themselves by Sol Worth, John Adair, and Richard Chalfen, who trained several Navajo Indians in camera and editing technology to record the “natives’ point of view” without mediation, is a common phenomenon today, as indigenous people have globally gained control over video and film. A number of archival websites and local radio and TV stations worldwide—such as Aboriginal’s Peoples Television Network and Nunavut Independent TV Network in Canada, Maori-TV in New Zealand, and National Indigenous Television in Australia—provide alternatives to commercial mainstream TV, where indigenous groups successfully produce their own media (Ginsburg 1991). Simultaneously, many indigenous activists are committed to increasing the media presence of their respective groups and thus to effectively campaigning for their needs and rights—both in collaboration with and without anthropologists.
A relatively new phenomenon is the genre of “world games,” such as the recently released video game Never Alone. Upper One Games, the “first indigenous-owned video game developer and publisher in US history” (as stated on its website), developed the game also known as Kisima Inŋitchuŋa (I Am Not Alone) in collaboration with the Cook Inlet Tribal Council, a nonprofit organization that works with indigenous groups in Alaska. It is a puzzle video game in which the player shifts between an Iñupiat girl named Nuna and her Arctic fox and completes puzzles in a story based on indigenous Iñupiat mythological narratives. This is the latest output of a number of very successful indigenous Inuit media projects, including the epic film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), directed by Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk and produced by his production company Isuma Igloolik Productions, which was internationally acclaimed and won a Golden Camera award in Cannes.
In recent years, the distribution of anthropological knowledge through digital media and the internet has led to greater public visibility and an increase in the application-oriented relevance of the discipline, for example, in the educational and administrative sectors, the digital humanities (ranging from curating online collections to data mining large cultural data sets) and digital heritage studies, or marketing and design research. The publication of multimedia or hypermedia projects on CD-ROM and DVD, the development of new software (e.g., for the graphic representation of kinship diagrams) and interactive platforms generate more complex classification and/or storage systems, help to creatively link a broad variety of data material, and eventually enable new forms of communicative participation and knowledge transfer within the academic community and beyond (Pink 2006).
With the formation of the Comité du Film Ethnographique at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 1953 and the Film Study Center at Harvard in 1958, the institutionaliza- tion of ethnographic film progressed, yet visual anthropology was not established as an
independent subdiscipline within social and cultural anthropology until the 1970s. The collected volume Principles of Visual Anthropology, first published by Paul Hockings in
1975, is, after several extended editions, still considered a standard reference work. But contrary to its title, the volume conveys a fairly conventional understanding of visual anthropology, essentially equating it with the production and analysis of ethnographic films and thereby leaving little room for alternative forms of audiovisual ethnographic work. Nevertheless, in subsequent years the majority of publications in the field of visual anthropology referred to this volume in trying to concretize and to expand the princi- ples of the discipline established therein (Banks and Ruby 2011; Crawford and Turton
1992; Loizos 1993).
The mid-1980s saw a boom in the production of ethnographic films; several ethno- graphic film festivals were launched, written publications on various aspects of visual culture(s) were on the rise, and an increasing number of anthropology institutes world- wide included courses on visual anthropology in their curricula. Despite this ongoing trend, Lucien Taylor (1996) detected a profound “iconophobia” in anthropology, mainly referring to perplexed commentators such as Kirsten Hastrup, who described the capacities of ethnographic film and photography as “thin description,” or Maurice Bloch, who voiced the opinion that anthropologists who turned to filmmaking had “lost confidence in their own ideas” (cited in Taylor 1996, 67–68). Such reservations, based on the outdated equation of visual anthropology with material culture and folklore, illustrate that the research topics, intentions, and methodologies of visual anthropology are still largely underestimated or misunderstood within mainstream sociocultural anthropology. To avoid such misunderstandings, David MacDougall draws on Ruby’s (1975, 109) initial distinction between anthropological films and films about anthropology and distinguishes them by their attempts “to cover new grounds through an integral exploration of the data, or whether [they] merely report … on existing knowledge” (MacDougall 1998, 76; emphasis original). He further states that
Films about anthropology, by and large, employ the conventions of teaching and journalism; anthropological films present a genuine process of inquiry. They develop their understandings progressively, and reveal an evolving relationship between the filmmaker, subject, and audience. They do not provide a “pictorial representation” of anthropological knowledge, but a form of knowledge that emerges through the very grain of filmmaking. (MacDougall 1998, 76)
MacDougall leaves no doubt that only anthropological films are able to make genuine and original contributions to the discipline.
In sum, as an independent research method with its own modes of represen- tation, visual anthropology maintains the full capacity to convey complex facts, theoretical reflections, and multisensory experience and reveals something different from what gets revealed in writing. Cinematic, photographic, drawn/animated, and digital images will also in the future be effectively used as field records, studied and employed as sites of cross-cultural social interaction (Edwards 2011, 187), and, last but not least, appointed as means of evocation and knowledge production beyond the written word.
SEE ALSO: Acoustemology; Activism; Anthropological Knowledge and Styles of Publication; Anthropology, Careers in; Anthropology: Scope of the Discipline; Art and Agency; Art, Anthropology of; Artifacts; Authenticity, Cultural; Canadian Anthropology Society / Société Canadienne d’Anthropologie (CASCA); Chile, Anthro- pology in; Color; Contemporary Art; Corporeal Vision; Cross-Cultural Aesthetics; Design, Anthropology of; Digital Anthropology; Display, Anthropological Approaches to; Ethno-Fiction Film; Ethnographic Film; Ethnography, Experimental; Fiction, Anthropological Themes in; Filmmaking, Collaborative; France, Anthropology in; Gardner, Robert (1925–2014); Geertz, Clifford (1926–2006); Gender and Ethnographic Film; Gender and Visual Arts; Griaule, Marcel (1898–1956); Iconography and Style; Indigenous Media; Interviews with Eminent Anthropologists: An Online Resource; Lines; MacDougall, David (b. 1939) and Judith (b. 1938); Malinowski, Bronisław (1884–1942); Mead, Margaret (1901–78); Media Anthropology; Montage; Multimodal- ity; Netherlands, Anthropology in the; Observational Cinema; Photo-Ethnography; Photography, Anthropology of; Postcolonialism; Reflexivity; Religion and Media; Representation, Politics of; Rouch, Jean (1917–2004); Russia, Anthropology in; Senses, Anthropology of; Shimmer; Skilled Vision; Social and Cultural Anthropology; Sound, Anthropology of; Sound Recordings; Tactility; Television, Anthropology on; United States, Anthropology in
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Atkins, Michael. 2013. “Cruising the Village: A Visual Ethnography of Public Sex between Men in Manchester City Centre.” PhD thesis, University of Manchester. Accessed July 5, 2017, https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:
216020&datastreamId=FULL-TEXT.PDF.
Banks, Marcus, and Jay Ruby, eds. 2011. Made to be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual
Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Barbash, Ilisa, and Lucien Taylor. 1997. Cross-Cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Doc- umentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Collier, John, Jr., and Malcolm Collier. (1967) 2004. Visual Anthropology: Photography as a
Research Method. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Crawford, Peter Ian, and David Turton, eds. 1992. Film as Ethnography. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Deren, Maya. (1946) 2001. “An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film.” In Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, edited by Bill Nichols, appendix. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Deren, Maya. 1960. “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality.” Daedalus 89 (1): 150–67. Edwards, Elizabeth. 1992. Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920. New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press.
Edwards, Elizabeth. 1998. “Performing Science: Still Photography and the Torres Strait Expe- dition.” In Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition, edited by Anita Herle and Sandra Rouse, 74–95. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press.
Edwards, Elizabeth. 2011. “Tracing Photography.” In Made to be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology, edited by Marcus Banks and Jay Ruby, 159–89. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ginsburg, Faye. 1991. “Indigenous Media: Faustian Contract or Global Village?” Cultural Anthro- pology 6 (1): 92–112.
Griffiths, Alison. 1996–97. “Knowledge and Visuality in Turn of the Century Anthropology: The Early Ethnographic Cinema of Alfred Cort Haddon and Walter Baldwin Spencer.” Visual Anthropology Review 12 (2): 18–43.
Griffiths, Alison. 2002. Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century
Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
Grimshaw, Anna. 2001. The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grimshaw, Anna, and Amanda Ravetz. 2009. Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film, and the
Exploration of Social Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Heider, Karl G. (1976) 2006. Ethnographic Film. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Henley, Paul. 2009. The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hockings, Paul, eds. 1975. Principles of Visual Anthropology. The Hague: Mouton. Leacock, Richard. 1961. “For an Uncontrolled Cinema.” Film Culture 22–23: 23–25.
Leiris, Michel. 1930. “L’oeil de l’ethnographe (à propos de la Mission Dakar-Djibouti) [The
Ethnographer’s Eye (concerning the Dakar–Djibouti Mission)].” Documents 7: 404–14. Loizos, Peter. 1993. Innovation in Ethnographic Film: From Innocence to Self-Consciousness,
1955–1985. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
MacDougall, David. 1998. Transcultural Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press. MacDougall, David. 2006. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Malinowski, Bronisław. (1935) 1965. Coral Gardens and Their Magic. Bloomington: Indiana Uni- versity Press.
Pink, Sarah. 2006. The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses. London: Routledge. Pinney, Christopher, and Nicolas Peterson. 2003. Photography’s Other Histories. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Ruby, Jay. 1975. “Is an Ethnographic Film a Filmic Ethnography?” Visual Communication 2 (2):
104–11.
Schäuble, Michaela. 2011. “‘All Filmmaking Is a Form of Therapy’: Visualizing Memories of War Violence in the Animation Film Waltz with Bashir (2008).” In Violence Expressed: An Anthro- pological Approach, edited by Maria Sixt-Hohenbalken and Nerina Weiss, 203–22. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
Suhr, Christian, and Rane Willerslev, eds. 2013. Transcultural Montage. New York: Berghahn
Books.
Taussig, Michael T. 2011. I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Taylor, Lucien. 1996. “Iconophobia: How Anthropology Lost It at the Movies.” Transition 6 (1):
64–88.
Taylor, Lucien. 1998. “Introduction.” In David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema, 3–21. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wright, Christopher. 2013. The Echo of Things: The Lives of Photographs in the Solomon Islands. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Wright, Terence. 1991. “The Field Photographs of Jenness and Malinowski and the Begin- nings of Modern Anthropology.” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 22 (1):
41–58.
Young, Colin. 1975. “Observational Cinema.” In Principles of Visual Anthropology, edited by Paul
Hockings, 65–80. The Hague: Mouton.
Young, Michael W. 1998. Malinowski’s Kiriwina: Fieldwork Photography 1915–18. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
rising in continental Europe at the start of the twentieth century, phenomenology is a way of understanding that emphasizes the description and interpretation of human experience, awareness, and meaning, particularly their unnoticed, taken-for-granted
A
dimensions (Moran 2000; van Manen 2014). The German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–
1938) was the founder of phenomenology, which he envisioned as “the descriptive, non- reductive science of whatever appears, in the manner of its appearing, in the subjective and intersubjective life of consciousness” (Moran 2005: 2). Over time, other European philosophers, including Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), shifted their phenomenological explications beyond “consciousness” toward related philosophical topics such as the nature of human being, the various modes experientially by which human meaning arises, and the central role of bodily presence and action in human life. Examples of questions relevant to architecture that might be explored phenomenologically include the following:
▪ In what ways does architecture nurture or disrupt human life, whether via everyday, ordinary experience or via intense, extra-ordinary encounter?
▪ How do qualities of the designable world—materiality, spatiality, tectonics, aesthetic qualities, and so forth—contribute to human well-being and aesthetic sensibilities?
▪ How does the design of a particular building play a role in sustaining or undermining the
lives, actions, and needs of that building’s users?
▪ Have the everyday uses, experiences, and meanings of specific buildings and building types (e.g., places of residence, work, education, worship, incarceration, and so forth) changed over historical time? How are those uses, experiences, and meanings alike or unlike for different places, cultures, lifeways, social groups, and historical eras?
▪ What impact do advances in digital technology and virtual reality have on the lived nature of architecture and real-world places?
▪ If virtual reality is eventually able to simulate “real” reality entirely, will this shift
radically transform the lived nature of places, buildings, and everyday human life?
In this chapter, I encapsulate the complex, shifting relationship between phenomenology and architecture by speaking of an architectural phenomenology, which I tentatively define as the
descriptive and interpretive explication of architectural experiences, situations, and meanings as constituted by qualities and features of both the built environment and human life (Otero-Pailos
2012; Seamon 2017). In demonstrating that architectural phenomenology has significant research and design value today, I first describe the phenomenological approach more fully, highlighting two key phenomenological concepts relevant for architectural understanding—lifeworld and natural attitude. Second, I overview the thread of theoretical and practical events whereby architects and architectural thinkers became interested in phenomenology. Third, I discuss two phenomenological topics that have come to have value for architecture and architectural theory: (1) lived embodiment; and (2) architectural atmospheres. Last, I suggest what value phenomenology might have for the future of architecture, particularly in regard to the imminent arrival of virtual reality, virtual places, and virtual buildings.
The Nature of Phenomenology
The phenomenologist’s primary aim is to strive for a mode of openness whereby the phenomenon studied can be understood and described in an accurate, comprehensive way unencumbered by any pre-given theoretical, speculative, or common-sense points of view. One of Husserl’s descriptions of phenomenology was “back to the things themselves,” by which he meant setting aside personal, societal, ideological, and conceptual understandings, assumptions, and prejudices so that one might offer the phenomenon a supportive venue in which it can be known most clearly, appropriately, and thoroughly (Moran 2005: 9–17).
Most broadly, phenomenologists direct this mode of openness toward generating clear-sighted explications of concrete human experience and the lived reality of everyday life. Using the word “lived” in phrases like “lived reality” or “lived experience” may seem tautological, since, obviously, experience is always lived. For phenomenologists, however, “lived” is an integral descriptor because it “announces the intent to explore directly the originary or prereflective dimensions of human existence: life as we live it” (van Manen 2014: 28). “Lived” in this sense refers to the wide-ranging spectrum of human experiences, meanings, situations, and events—the mundane or exotic, the dull or penetrating, the unquestioned or surprising. How, for example, do we experience the everyday buildings of our ordinary lives and are there moments when we experience those buildings in a deeper, more memorable way (Pallasmaa 2005)? What delineates experientially the special moment when we encounter a great architectural work, and might such exhilarating moments of architectural engagement be better understood by drawing on phenomenological principles and methods (Bermudez 2015)?
Phenomenologists claim that human consciousness, experience, and action are always intentional—i.e., necessarily oriented toward and finding their significance in a world of emergent meaning. Human beings are not just aware but aware of something, whether an object, living thing, idea, feeling, environmental situation, or the like.. As described by Merleau-Ponty (1962: xvii), the distinguishing feature of intentionality is that “the unity of the world, before being posited by knowledge in a specific act of identification, is ‘lived’ as ready-made or already there.” The concept of intentionality leads to a central phenomenological claim crucial for
understanding human experience: that human beings are always already inescapably immersed and entwined in their worlds (Casey 2009; Moran 2011; van Manen 2014). How, phenomenologically, do we describe the way in which, existentially, selves and world are reciprocally related and mutually dependent? How, phenomenologically, do we locate and understand the complex, multivalent ways in which we, as human beings, are intertwined, intermeshed, entrenched and submerged in the worlds in which we find ourselves?
The everyday, intentional structure through which human-immersion-in-world unfolds is what Husserl identified as the lifeworld—a person or group’s day-to-day world of taken-for- grantedness normally unnoticed and, therefore, concealed as a phenomenon: “As conscious beings, we always inhabit—in a pre-theoretical manner—an experiential world, given in advance, on hand, and always experienced as a unity” (Moran 2005: 9). One aim of phenomenological study is to identify and describe the various lived structures and dynamics of the lifeworld, which always includes spatial, environmental, and place dimensions. Unless it shifts in some unusual way, we are almost always, in our typical human lives, unaware of our lifeworld, which we assume is the only way that life can be. This typically unquestioned acceptance of the lifeworld is what Husserl called the natural attitude, a mode of awareness “that obscures itself and remains unknown to itself. It is an attitude with blinkers on, as Husserl often said” (Moran 2011: 69). Because of the natural attitude, any lifeworld is transparent in the sense
that it is normally tacit and just happens, grounded in spatial-temporal situations and events more or less regular (Moran 2005: 9–17; 2011; van Manen 2014).
In applying the concept of lifeworld to architecture, one realizes that there are the individual lifeworlds of all users associated with a building as, at the same time, there is the more complex lifeworld of the building itself generated by those individual lifeworlds. The lived dynamic and character of the building’s lifeworld may support or interfere with the individual lifeworlds housed within that the building (Seamon 2017). Later in this chapter, I make further reference to architectural aspects of lifeworlds, but first I delineate how, beginning after World War II, phenomenology came to have significance for architects and architectural thinking.
The Development of Architectural Phenomenology
The progressive influence of phenomenology in architecture is a complex narrative involving several different disciplines, professional efforts, and intellectual events. Beginning in the 1940s, philosophers working phenomenologically explored a wide range of themes implicitly relevant
to architecture. Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) demonstrated how the lived body plays a key role in human spatiality (Hale 2017; McCann and Locke 2015), and Heidegger (1952/1971) contended that human-being-in-the-world is always human-being-grounded-in-place, especially as that place sustains and is sustained by engaged caretaking—what Heidegger identified as dwelling
(Sharr 2007; Malpas 2006; Mugerauer 2008). Other thinkers produced phenomenological studies that incorporated architectural topics directly. In Poetics of Space, philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1957/1964: 8) delineated a research focus he called topoanalysis,” the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.” In Sacred and the Profane, phenomenologist of religion
Mircea Eliade (1957/1961) examined hierophany, the lived ways that spiritual reality can break through into lifeworlds, including through place and architecture. In Human Space, phenomenological philosopher Otto Bollnow (1963/2011) developed a phenomenology of space as experienced, including the lived dialectic between “the wide world” and “the security of the house.”
In the late1940s and 1950s, architects became interested in phenomenology directly. In his book- length historiography of architectural phenomenology during this post-war period, architectural theorist Jorge Otero-Pailos (2010) highlighted several key figures, beginning with the Italian modernist architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers (1909–1969), who promoted “some of the earliest contacts between architects and phenomenologists” and gathered around himself “a small but influential group of young European architects… who explored phenomenology as an
intellectual framework for rethinking modernism” (2010: xxiv). Another key figure discussed by Otero-Pailos is the French-American architect Jean Labatut (1899–1986), who saw phenomenology as a conceptual tool for envisioning innovative designs arising from and aiming to enhance human experience (2010: 35–40). For example, Labatut designed a series of architectural and environmental works that generated a sense of participatory exhilaration and architectural sacredness through visual, acoustic, and tactile encounter. One such effort was Labatut’s “Lagoon of Nations,” a 1,400-nozzle fountain designed to create a nightly spectacle for the 1939 New York World’s Fair (2010: 40–57).
As founder of the first American Architecture doctoral program at Princeton in 1949, Labatut played a critical role in promoting architectural phenomenology academically (2010: 95-99). One of the most influential doctoral students under his direction was American architect Charles Moore (1925–1993), who completed in 1957 one of Princeton’s first Architecture dissertations, which focused on a Gaston-Bachelard-inspired “Water and Architecture.” Frustrated that, at the time, architectural scholarship was largely controlled by architectural historians, Moore (and
Bloomer 1977) worked “to legitimatize a notion of intellectuality based on different standards of competency, including visual proficiency and the ability to grasp the historical essence of buildings experientially” (2010: 100).
In the transformational 1960s, academic and professional interest in architectural phenomenology continued, partly via the development of “environment-behavior studies” (“EBS”), an interdisciplinary research and design field that became an important component of many American, Canadian, and British architecture programs in the 1970s and early 1980s (Sachs 2013). Identified variously as “architectural psychology,” “behavioral geography,” “environmental psychology,” or “human factors in design,” this movement was driven by the work of such innovative thinkers as architects Christopher Alexander (1964), Kevin Lynch (1960), and Oscar Newman (1973); anthropologist Edward Hall (1966); psychologist Robert Sommer (1969/2007); and urbanists Jan Gehl (1987), Jane Jacobs (1961) and William Whyte (1980). Though much of the EBS research was positivist, quantitative, and limited to the cognitive dimensions of architectural and environmental behavior, thinkers like Alexander (et al.
1977) and Jacobs (1961) produced work that was qualitative, interpretive, and implicitly phenomenological. Also appearing during this time were the writings of so-called “humanistic geographers” like Edward Relph (1976) and Yi-Fu Tuan (1974). Strongly influenced by EBS but drawing directly on phenomenological concepts like place, rootedness, dwelling, and placelessness, these geographers provided one academic reference point for later phenomenological efforts examining architectural embodiment, environmental atmospheres, and architectural design as it might facilitate place and place making (Casey 2009; Malpas 1999; Mugerauer 1994; Shatzki 2007).
One important architectural theorist considerably influenced by EBS was the Norwegian
Christian Norberg-Schulz (1926–2000), who, during the 1970s and 1980s, played a crucial role
in keeping phenomenology in sight for architects. Like Rogers and Labatut before him, Norberg- Schulz sought to re-conceptualize how architects understood architecture, partly through phenomenological reformulations of the work of EBS researchers like Kevin Lynch and Edward Hall. Norberg-Schulz aimed for “a return to the roots of modernism by visualizing the self- renewing origin of architecture,” which he located in foundational lifeworld patterns and structures such as lived-space, home, at-homeness, and environmental ambience (Otero-Pailos
2010: 146). In his first major phenomenological work, Existence, Space and Architecture (Norberg-Schulz 1971: 14, 37), he contended that a comprehensive architectural understanding requires “a theory where space is really understood as a dimension of human existence…” Architectural space, therefore, is best envisioned as “a “concretization” of existential space.” In his many later books and articles, he explored the architectural and environmental dimensions of human “lived space,” including place (Norberg-Schultz 1988, 2000a), dwelling (Norberg-Schulz
1985), and sense of place and genius loci (Norberg-Schulz 1980).
Particularly because of Norberg-Schulz’s work, architectural interest in phenomenology continued through the 1990s into the 2000s, though the perspective began to be challenged in the
1980s by newer conceptual approaches, including poststructuralism, deconstruction, and feminist and critical points of view (Mugerauer 1994; Otero-Pailos 2010, 2012; Parella 1988). Although these and other “cutting-edge” perspectives have come to dominate architectural theory today, consequential phenomenological work continues to appear, including the writings of
philosophers Edward Casey (2009), Karsten Harries (1997), Jeff Malpas (1999, 2006), and Robert Mugerauer (1994, 2008); and architectural theorists David Leatherbarrow (2002), Rachel McCann (McCann and Locke 2015), Juhani Pallasmaa (2005, 2009, 2016), Alberto Pérez- Gómez (2016); Jorge Otero-Pailos (2010, 2012), Thomas Thiis-Evensen (1989), and Dalibor Vesely (2004). At the same, time, the design work of such eminent architects as Alvar Aalto, Tadao Ando, Stephen Holl, Louis Kahn, Aldo Van Dyke, and Peter Zumthor has come to be associated with an explicit or implicit phenomenological sensibility (Hale 2017; Holl, Palasmaa,
and Pérez-Gómez 1994; Malgrave and Goodman 2011: 210–214; Norberg-Schulz 2000b; Rush
2008; Sharazi 2015; Sharr 2007).
In describing architectural phenomenology as it is practiced today, architectural theorists John Macarthur and Naomi Stead (2012: 127) wrote that the approach “proposes to explain directly how the spaces we inhabit make us feel.” Otero-Pailos (2012: 136) extended this understanding when he defined architectural phenomenology as “the study of architecture as it presents itself to consciousness in terms of so-called archetypal human experiences, such as the bodily orientation of up and down, the perceptions of light and shadow, or the feelings of dryness and wetness.” Highlighting the perceptual, sensuous, and affective aspects of buildings and architectural experience, these two definitions of architectural phenomenology are a useful starting point, though it is important to recognize that phenomenological research can probe other relevant dimensions of architectural experience. For example, other recent phenomenological studies
have examined such topics as environmental wholeness (Alexander et al. 1977); pre-reflective and symbolic languages of architectural experience and meaning (Alexander 2002–2005; Harries
1997; Janson and Tigges 2014); and the phenomenological contribution to cognitive science, particularly in relation to architectural behaviors, aesthetic sensibility, and environmental wayfinding (Hale 2017: 50–54; Mallgrave 2013; Mallgrave and Goodman 2011: 229–230; Robinson and Pallasmaa 2015).
In short, phenomenology continues to be an important conceptual and practical force in contemporary architecture and architectural theory. To illustrate this claim, I highlight two phenomenological topics often drawn upon in architectural thinking today—environmental embodiment and architectural atmospheres.
Environmental Embodiment and Architecture
Environmental embodiment refers to the lived body in its unself-conscious perceptual awareness as it encounters and coordinates with the world at hand, especially its environmental and architectural aspects (Casey 2009; Pallasmaa 2005, 2009; McCann and Locke 2015; Mallgrave
2013). Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) contended that the taken-for-granted foundation of human experience is perception, which he interpreted as the typically unnoticed, immediate givenness of the world undergirded by a lived body that is conscious of, acting in, and experiencing a world that automatically reciprocates with familiar pattern, meaning, and contextual presence. Merleau- Ponty argued that perception incorporates a lived dynamic between the body and world such that aspects of the world are understood because they instantaneously evoke in the lived body their corresponding experienced qualities. For example, one “sees the springiness of steel” or “hear[s] the hardness and unevenness of cobbles in the rattle of a carriage” (1945/1962: 229, 230). Through bodily perception, we immediately engage with and are aware of the world because it immediately engages with us to offer a reciprocating, pre-reflective sensibility and signification.
In the last several years, there has appeared an expanding body of studies considering what Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of perception might mean for architectural thinking and design (Hale 2017; McCann and Locke 2015; Rush 2008). Central here is the work of Finnish architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa (2005, 2009), who drew partly on Merleau-Ponty to argue that much contemporary architectural design is dominated by sight with the result that buildings
may be striking visually but have largely lost any expression of plasticity and multivalent sensuousness. For Pallasmaa (2005: 71), architects must aim to “create embodied and lived existential metaphors that concretise and structure our being in the world.” He argued that “Significant architecture makes us experience ourselves as complete embodied and spiritual beings” (2005: 11). He found examples of such rich, afferent design in the buildings of architects like Alvar Aalto, Glenn Murcutt, Steven Holl, and Peter Zumthor (2005: 70–71).
More recently, Pallasmaa (2009) examined the relationship between the lived body and the process of architectural design. He contended that architectural education today places too much emphasis on cerebral and verbal knowledge at the expense of embodied processes, particularly the importance of the hand in envisioning and actualizing design possibilities:
Architecture is… a product of the knowing hand. The hand grasps the physicality and materiality of thought and turns it into a concrete image. In the arduous processes of designing, the hand often takes the lead in probing for a vision, a vague inkling that it eventually turns into a sketch, a materialization of an idea (2009: 16–17).
To argue for the continuing importance of the hand in architectural design and fabrication, Pallasmaa reviewed the lived quality of craft and the importance of manual tactility in architectural drawing whereby the hand is in a “direct and delicate collaboration and interplay with mental imagery. It is impossible to know which appeared first, the line on the paper or the thought… (2009: 91). In this sense, the process of drawing is a “pulling out” in which the hand “feels the invisible and formless stimulus, pulls it into the world of space and matter, and gives it shape” (2009: 92). Pallasmaa contrasted this embodied way of designing with architecture’s current emphasis on digital technology, which differs from previous design instruments because it largely unfolds in an abstract, mathematized space that bypasses the “direct haptic connection
between the object, its representation, and the designer’s mind” (2009: 95–96). Pallasmaa argued that computer-aided design is a valuable architectural tool but should not be introduced in design education until students have first mastered hand drawing and physical-model making: “[T]he computer probably cannot do much harm after the student has learned to use his or her imagination and has internalised the crucial process of embodying a design task” (2009: 99).
Environmental Embodiment, Body-Subject, and Place
Merleau-Ponty also demonstrated that, besides its more passive perceptual dimension, the lived body incorporates a more active, motor dimension of perception—what he termed body-subject, or pre-reflective corporeal engagement expressed via action and typically in sync with the spatial and physical environment in which the action unfolds (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1962). Emphasizing that everyday, taken-for-granted actions and behaviors are grounded bodily rather than cognitively, Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962: 138–139) wrote that “Motility… is not a handmaid of [cognitive] consciousness, transporting the body to that point in space of which we have formed
a representation beforehand. In order that we may be able to move our body towards an object, the object must first exists for it, our body must not belong to the realm of the ‘in-itself’.”
Integrally related to the lived body, body-subject, and environmental embodiment is the phenomenological concept of place, which can be defined as any environmental locus that draws human experiences, actions, and meanings together spatially and temporally (Casey 2009, Malpas 1999, Relph 1976, Seamon 2013). In discussing the lived relationship between place and environmental embodiment, the phenomenological philosopher Edward Casey emphasized that “lived bodies belong to places and help to constitute them” just as, simultaneously, “places
belong to lived bodies and depend on them” (Casey 2009: 327). Through corporeal actions and encounters, individuals contribute to the constitution of a place as, at the same time, those actions and encounters contribute to the person or group’s sense of lived involvement and identification with that place. In short, lived bodies and places “interanimate each other” (2009: 327). This interanimation of lived bodies and places is significant because the habitual, unself-conscious familiarity of body-subject is one way by which individuals and groups actualize a taken-for- granted involvement with place.
Drawing on the concepts of environmental embodiment and place-body interanimation, phenomenological researchers have considered the spatial and environmental versatility of the lived body as expressed in more complex corporeal ensembles extending over time and space and contributing to a wider lived geography (Casey 2009; Jacobson 2010: 223). One such ensemble is body routines—sets of integrated gestures, behaviors, and actions that sustain a particular task or aim, for example, preparing a meal, mastering the use of carpentry tools,
building a stone wall, and so forth. Another such bodily ensemble is time-space routines—sets of more or less habitual bodily actions extending through a considerable portion of time, for example, a getting-ready-for-work routine, or a Sunday-afternoon-going-to-the-park routine (Seamon 2013).
Particularly pertinent to architectural design is the possibility that, in a supportive spatial and physical environment, individuals’ bodily routines converge and commingle in time and space, thereby contributing to a larger-scale environmental ensemble identified as place ballet—an interaction of individual bodily routines rooted in a particular environment, which often becomes an important place of interpersonal and communal exchange, meaning, and attachment such as a well-used office lounge, a vibrant city plaza, or an exuberant urban neighborhood (Jacobs 1961; Oldenburg 1999). A major phenomenological question is how environmental design might generate thriving place ballets, whether at architectural or wider environmental scales (Alexander et al. 1977; Jacobs 1961; Seamon 2013).
Atmosphere and Architecture
In the last several years, the phenomenon of atmosphere has become a major topic in architectural and phenomenological research (Borch 2014; Böhme, Griffero, and Thibald 2014; Griffero 2014, 2017; Pallasmaa 2016; Pérez-Gómez 2016; Zumthor 2006). Atmosphere refers to the ineffable architectural presence and ambience of a building that make it unique or unusual as an environment and place. Several phenomenological philosophers have linked atmosphere with
feelings and the tacit emotional tone of environments, spaces, or places. Gernot Böhme (2014:
43, 56), for example, explained that atmospheres involve “a spatial sense of ambience” and the “total impression that is regarded as characteristic” of an environment or place. Tonino Griffero (2014: 37) defined atmospheres as “spatialized feelings” and “the specific emotional quality of a given ‘lived space’.” One important lived aspect of atmosphere is its ambivalent, liminal quality: it belongs to neither the experiencer nor the situation experienced; it varies in its lived intensity, for different experiencers in the same moments and for the same experiencer in different moments. As Böhme (1993: 122) explained:
[A]tmospheres are neither something objective, that is, qualities possessed by things, and yet they are something thinglike, belonging to the thing in that things articulate their presence through qualities…. Nor are atmospheres something subjective, for example, determinations of a psychic state. And yet they are subjectlike [and] belong to subjects in that they are sensed in bodily presence by human beings, and this sensing is at the same time a bodily state of being of subjects in space.
Several architects and architectural theorists have examined the lived relationships between atmosphere and buildings. Alban Janson and Florian Tigges (2014: 26), for example, claimed that atmosphere is “the expressive force through which a situation that has been engendered by architecture seizes us in affective terms all at once and as a totality.” In proposing atmosphere as a creative vehicle for an architecture that is more than “pictorial image,” Alberto Pérez-Gómez
(2016: 21, 24) contended that “good architecture should be primarily concerned with creating the moods appropriate to positive emotions that support ethical human action….” In asking why some buildings seem more pleasurable, enticing, or comfortable than others, Peter Zumthor (2006: 13) argued that one defining feature is atmosphere: “I enter a building, see a room and— in a fraction of a second—have this feeling about it.” Zumthor (2006: 10, 19) described atmosphere as “a beautiful natural presence” and the “magic of things, the magic of the real
world.” Juhani Pallasmaa (2014: 20) defined atmosphere as “the overarching perceptual, sensory, and emotive impression of a space, setting, or social situation. It provides the unifying coherence and character for a room, space, place, and landscape….” In proposing that all buildings,
whether prosaic or monumental, project some degree of ambience and mood, Pallasmaa (2016:
132–133) went so far as to suggest that atmosphere, rather than visible building form, is usually the most important dimension of architectural experience for non-architects and the lay public: “All buildings, monumental or commonplace, ritual or utilitarian, create atmospheres through which we experience the world and ourselves. This unconscious orientation and articulation of mood is often the most significant effect of a space or a building. I believe that non-architects sense primarily the atmosphere of a place or building, whereas attention to visible form implies a distinct intellectual and theoretical position.”
Atmosphere, Natural Symbols, and Architectural Archetypes
If architectural atmosphere is as important as Pallasmaa claimed, then two provocative questions arise, the first of which is whether there are heuristic means whereby one might become more
sensitive to the ineffable qualities of architectural atmosphere. Can we, asked Pallasmaa (2014:
29) generate “a deepened sense of materiality, gravity, and reality?” A second related question is whether architectural atmospheres can be created directly? Can architects and other responsible parties “bring about the conditions in which atmospheres of a particular character are able to develop” (Böhme 2014: 58)?
In answering these two questions, the phenomenological work of philosopher Karsten Harries (1988, 1997) and architectural theorist Thomas Thiis-Evensen (1989) offers helpful guidance. Focusing on the visceral, pre-reflective, bodily aspects of environmental experience and meaning, both thinkers developed revealing conceptual languages for becoming more alert to architectural atmospheres. Harries proposed a “natural language of space” (Harries 1997: 125) that draws on natural symbols—normally taken-for-granted, experiential qualities integrally associated with essential qualities of human nature and life, for example, lived qualities of materiality, of weight, of light, of temperature, of direction, of sociability, of privacy, and so forth. Harries suggested that the experiential structure of any natural symbol incorporates some manner of lived binary—for example, experiences of moving or resting, lying down or standing up, sensing lightness or heaviness, or feeling inside or outside. In his work, he explored such natural symbols as vertical and horizontal, up and down, light and darkness, and down, and inside and outside.
One example is Harries’ explication of how the lived binary between verticality and horizontality arises from the upright human body’s postural uprightness as it exists in lived relationship with the earth’s horizontal plane (Harries 1988: 40–45; 1997: 180–192). There is the vertical’s anchoring power of dwelling and rootedness existing in tension with the mobility and the horizon’s lure of open spaces. There is the vertical’s skyward movement toward sacredness and spiritual presence, which contrasts with the horizon’s expression of material extension and worldly success. Different cultures, historical eras, and architectural styles express the vertical- horizontal tension in a wide range of ways but, whatever the particular manifestation, it “presupposes an understanding of the meaning of verticals and horizontals inseparable from our being in the world” (Harries 1988: 45).
As an interpretive means for pondering Harries’ natural symbols as they might be actualized in specific buildings, one useful guide is Norwegian architect Thomas Thiis-Evensen’s Archetypes in Architecture, a phenomenology of architectural experience as encountered through the lived body and originally his doctoral dissertation done under the direction of Norberg-Schulz (Thiis- Evensen 1989). Thiis-Evensen’s aim is to understand “the universality of architectural expression”; his interpretive means is what he called architectural archetypes—“the most basic elements of architecture,” which he identified as floor, wall, and roof (1989: 8). He argued that the lived commonality of floor, wall, and roof is their making an inside in the midst of an outside, though in different ways: the floor, through above and beneath; the wall, through within and around; and the roof, through over and under.
Thiis-Evensen proposed that a building’s relative degree of insideness and outsideness in relation to floor, wall, and roof can be clarified through what he called the three “existential expressions” of architecture: motion, weight, and substance (1989: 21). Motion refers to an architectural element’s lived sense of dynamism or inertia—i.e., whether the element seems to expand, to contract, or to rest in balance. In turn, weight refers to the element’s lived sense of heaviness or lightness, and substance involves the element’s lived sense of material expression—whether it seems hard or soft, fine or coarse, cold or warm, and so forth. Using examples from architectural history as descriptive evidence, Thiis-Evensen generated an intricate lived language arising from and describing the corporeal and sensory dimensions of architectural experience and meaning.
For example, he discussed stairs as one kind of directed floor and explored how a stairs’ material and spatial qualities of slope, breadth, form, and relative connectedness to the ground contribute to varying sensuous and bodily experiences of motion, weight, and substance (1989: 89–113). Thiis-Evensen’s architectural interpretation offers one inventive heuristic means for detailing the tacit, pre-predicative perceptual relationship between experiencers and the built world (Seamon
2017).
Both Harries’ natural symbols and Thiis-Evensen’s architectural archetypes provide perceptive architectural languages that offer discerning interpretive means to locate and understand less effable, unself-conscious, haptic qualities that contribute to a building’s architectural atmosphere. In turn, an awareness of these normally tacit, taken-for-granted architectural qualities might help architects better to envision an appropriate “fit” between what a building
needs to be lifeworld-wise and what it might be as a field of ambient presence. As this discussion of architectural atmosphere indicates, a large portion of architectural experience is pre-cognitive, corporeal, and hidden from conscious awareness. In this sense, the insightful languages of
Harries and Thiis-Evensen bring direct intellectual attention to architectural qualities and situations that are otherwise unspoken and concealed in the natural attitude of architectural experiences and meanings.
Architecture, Architectural Phenomenology, and Virtual Worlds
For the future of architecture, the question of virtual worlds becomes increasingly pressing, both theoretically and practically. If virtual places, including virtual buildings, come to be experienced as “real” as their real-world counterparts, does this development mean the eventual demise of many “real” places and “real “buildings as we currently know them? On one hand, there is the optimistic argument that virtuality can extend real reality and improve and amplify the real world in ways impossible before its availability. In envisioning long-term trends that he claimed will revolutionize human life in the next thirty years, futurist Kevin Kelly (2016: 216) included virtual reality and suggested that, within a decade, virtual-reality displays will be so “real” that users will think they are “looking through a real window into a real world. It’ll be
bright—no flicker, no visible pixels. You will feel this is absolutely for sure real. Except it isn’t.” Kelly (2016: 229) contended that, in three decades, virtual reality will be as commonplace as cell phones and used to play “virtual sports,” perform in “virtual plays,” and visit “virtual places” and “virtual historic sites” that are so “real” that the user entirely forgets that they are not:
Cheap abundant VR will be an experience factory. We’ll use it to visit environments too dangerous to risk in the flesh, such as war zones, deep seas, or volcanoes. Or we’ll use it for experiences we can’t readily get to as humans—to visit the inside of a stomach, the surface of a comet…. Or to cheaply experience something expensive, like a flyby of the Himalayas.
On the other hand, there is the less sanguine argument that virtual reality too readily fabricates experiences that might seem real but could never fully happen in actual lifeworlds. For example, phenomenological philosopher Albert Borgmann (1992: 87–102) identified several lived qualities via which virtual reality facilitates distortions, reductions, or embellishments of real reality when recast virtually. One such embellishing quality is pliability, the ways that virtual reality can generate virtual objects and experiences impossible to be had in real reality (for example, the virtual ability to fabricate, reshape, or destroy virtual buildings and places at will). Borgmann also highlighted brilliance, the facility of virtual reality to highlight and enhance an experience’s attractive features and de-emphasize or eliminate any uninteresting, unpleasant, or irrelevant dimensions (for example, virtual places that are always “picture perfect” and never deteriorate, become soiled, or expose untoward or unkind aspects of human life).
Borgmann (1992: 96) pointed out that, underlying these lived aspects of virtual reality is the more basic existential principle that the real world “encumbers and confines.” Though virtual reality may superficially seem real, it can readily escape from and replace the lived messiness of real lifeworlds with more convenient, vivid, or fantastical situations that require no stakes, answerability, or efforts of will. On one hand, virtual reality holds extraordinary promise in that
it may become a welcome means for repairing a good number of the world’s problems. Who, for example, needs an automobile if she can simply put on her virtual headset and “go to” her virtual workplace, grocery store, or favorite recreation place? Who needs a real house, place of worship, or vacation destination if all these “places” and “experiences” might be produced virtually? On the other hand, virtual reality may involve potential risks and problems, including time wasting, titillation, addiction, and withdrawal from most things real. Why make the efforts that an encumbering, confining real world necessitates if virtual reality can provide ease, pleasure, and enhanced vividness without the downside of demands, exertions, obligations, or consequences?
I end this chapter with virtual reality because phenomenology offers singular insights as to its benefits, limitations, and experiential impacts. Phenomenological concepts like lifeworld, natural attitude, intentionality, body-subject, environmental embodiment, place, and atmosphere identify integral constituents of any human experience, whether of the past, present, or future; whether
real or virtual. Human beings are always already immersed in their worlds, even if that immersion becomes virtual. Understanding the many lived dimensions of human-immersion-in- world, including its architectural aspects, is perhaps the most central aim, responsibility, and value of phenomenology broadly and of architectural phenomenology specifically.
Bibliography
Alexander, Christopher (1964) Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Alexander, Christopher (2002–05) The Nature of Order, 4 vols., Berkeley, CA: Center for Environmental Structure. Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein (1977) A Pattern Language, New York: Oxford University Press.
Bachelard, Gaston (1957/1964) The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press.
Bermudez, Julio (2015) Transcending Architecture, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Borch, Christian (ed.) (2014) Architectural Atmospheres, Basil Birkhäuser.
Bollow, Otto (1963/2011) Human Space, London: Hyphen Press.
Borgmann, Albert (1992) Crossing the Postmodern Divide, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Böhme, Gernot (1993) “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics,” Thesis Eleven, 36, 113–
126.
Böhme, Gernot (2014) “Urban Atmospheres,” in Christian Borch (ed.) Architectural Atmospheres, Basil Birkhäuser, pp. 42–59.
Böhme, Gernot, Tinino Griffero, and Jean-Paul Thibald (eds.) (2014) Architecture and Atmosphere, Espoo, Finland: Tapio Wirkkala Rut Bryk Foundation.
Casey, Edward S. (2009) Getting Back into Place, 2nd edition, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Eliade, Mircea (1957/1961) The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Gehl, Jan (1987) Life between Buildings. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
Griffero, Tonino (2014) “Atmospheres and Lived Space,” Studia Phaenomenologica, 14, 29–51. Griffero, Tonino (2017) Quasi-Things, Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Hale, Jonathan (2017) Merleau-Ponty for Architects. London: Routledge. Hall, Edward (1966) The Hidden Dimension, New York: Doubleday. Harries, Karsten (1988) “Voices of Space,” Center, 4, 34–39.
Harries, Karsten (1997), The Ethical Function of Architecture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Heidegger, Martin (1952/1971) “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, Albert Hofstadter
(trans.), New York: Harper and Row, pp. 145–161.
Holl, Stephen, Juhani Palasmaa, and Alberto Pérez-Gómez (1994) “Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of
Architecture,” A&U [special issue], 7.
Jacobs, Jane (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House.
Jacobson, Kirsten (2010) “The Experience of Home and the Space of Citizenship,” The Southern Journal of
Philosophy, 48 (3), 219–245.
Janson, Alban and Florian Tigges (2014) Fundamental Concepts of Architecture: The Vocabulary of Spatial
Situations, Basel: Birkhäuser.
Kelly, Kevin (2016) The Inevitable. New York: Viking.
Lane, Belden (2000) Landscapes of the Sacred, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Leach, Neil (1997) Rethinking Architecture, London: Routledge.
Leatherbarrow, David (2002) Uncommon Ground, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lynch, Kevin (1960) The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Macarthur, John and Naomi Stead (2012) “Introduction: Architecture and Aesthetics,” in C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heyman (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, London: Sage, pp. 123–135. Malgrave, Harry Francis (2013) Architecture and Embodiment, London: Routledge.
Malgrave, Harry Francis and David Goodman (2011) An Introduction to Architectural Theory, Oxford, UK: Wiley-
Blackwell.
Malpas, Jeff (1999) Place and Experience, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Malpas, Jeff (2006) Heidegger’s Topology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962) Phenomenology of Perception, New York: Academic Press.
Moore, Charles and Kent Bloomer (1977) Body, Memory, and Architecture, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Moran, Dermot (2000) Introduction to Phenomenology, London: Routledge.
Moran, Dermot (2005) Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology, Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Moran, Dermot (2011) “Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of Habituality and Habitus,” Journal of the British
Society for Phenomenology, 42 (1), 53–77.
Mugerauer, Robert (1994) Interpretations on Behalf of Place, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Mugerauer, Robert (2008) Heidegger and Homecoming, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Newman, Oscar (1973) Defensible Space, New York: Macmillan.
Norberg-Schulz, Christian (1971) Existence, Space and Architecture, New York: Rizzoli. Norberg-Schulz, Christian (1980) Genius Loci, New York: Rizzoli.
Norberg-Schulz, Christian (1985) The Concept of Dwelling, New York: Rizzoli.
Norberg-Schulz, Christian (1988) Architecture: Meaning and Place, New York: Rizzoli. Norberg-Schulz, Christian (2000a) Architecture: Presence, Language, Place, Milan: Skira.
Norberg-Schultz, Christian (2000b) Principles of Modern Architecture, London: Andreas Papadakis. Oldenberg, Ray (1999) The Great Good Place, 2nd edition, New York: Marlowe & Company.
Otero-Pailos, Jorge (2010) Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Otero-Pailos, Jorge (2012) “Architectural Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern,” in C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heynen (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, London: Sage, pp. 136–151. Pallasmaa, Juhani (2005) The Eyes of the Skin, London: Wiley.
Pallasmaa, Juhani (2009) The Thinking Hand, London: Wiley.
Pallasmaa, Juhani (2014) “Space, Place, and Atmosphere,” in Christian Borch (ed.) Architectural Atmospheres,
Basil: Birkhäuser, pp. 18–41.
Pallasmaa, Juhani (2016) “Place and Atmosphere,” in Jeff Malpas (ed.) The Intelligence of Place, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 129–155.
Perella, Stephen (ed.) (1988) Form; Being; Absence: Pratt Journal of Architecture, 2.
Pérez-Gómez, Alberto (2016) Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Relph, Edward (1976) Place and Placelessness, London: Pion.
Robinson, Sarah and Juhani Pallasmaa (eds.) (2015) Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment, and the
Future of Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rush, Fred (2008) On Architecture, New York: Routledge.
Sachs, Avigail (2013) “Architects, Users and the Social Sciences in Postwar America,” in Kenny Cupers (ed.), Use
Matters, New York: Routledge, pp. 69–84.
Seamon, David (2013) “Lived Bodies, Place, and Phenomenology,” Journal of Human Rights and the Environment
4: 143–166.
Seamon David (2017) “A Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Reading of Rem Koolhaas’s Seattle Central Library,” in Ruth Conway Dalton and Christopher Hölscher (eds.), Take One Building: Interdisciplinary Research Perspectives on the Seattle Central Library, London: Routledge, pp. 67–94.
Sharr, Adam (2007) Heidegger for Architects, New York: Routledge.
Shatzki, Theodore R. (2007) Martin Heidegger: Theorist of Space, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.
Shirazi, M. Reza (2014) Towards an Articulated Phenomenological Interpretation of Architecture, New York: Routledge.
Sommers, Robert (1969/2007) Personal Space, updated edition, Bristol, UK: Bosko Books. Thiis-Evensen, Thomas (1989) Archetypes in Architecture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu (1974) Topophilia, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
van Manen, Max (2014) Phenomenology of Practice, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Vesely, Dalibor (2004) Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Whyte, William (1980) The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, New York: Project for Public Spaces. Zumthor, Peter (2006) Atmospheres, Basel: Birkhäuser.
