Abstract
The kind of anthropology practised by the sensory ethnography project blurs the boundaries between ethnographic filmmaking and contemporary art. Contemporary art has, through documentary photography since World War II, been merging with social science just as social science has been making friends with ethnography. Photographic representation has, as Walter Benjamin predicted, become a means through which new knowledge about human communities and culture has been created and accumulated and from which new analysis of the human condition has been steadily emerging. These mergers between different fields have something very elegant about them, culminating in something now called convergence in the digital era, but it does present some problems which can be seen in the extensive discussion of the films Sweetgrass (2009) directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilsa Barbash and Leviathan (2012) directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel and their connection with the project of sensory ethnography at the University of Harvard.