Walking with impaired vision: an anthropology of senses, skill and the environment

This thesis develops anthropological conceptualisations of the sensory perception of the environment through an ethnography investigating the perception and experience of Stanmer Park in East Sussex, UK, for seven people who have impaired vision. Fieldwork took place over eighteen months (2012-2014), using a case study methodology of walking one-to-one with participants as their sighted guide in the park. Sensory anthropology has been largely concerned with ‘senses’; following critiques of vision and its dominance in the discipline, counter-occularcentric approaches have prioritised ‘non-visual senses’1. I advocate investigation of activities of perception, rather than ‘senses’, and develop an inclusively sensorial approach which endeavours to avoid inductively associating anatomy with specific capacities or compartmentalising experience into ‘senses’. This marks a shift from passively receiving information sensorially to active engagement. I propose that the abstraction of ‘senses’ or sensation from the environment and the capacities of the perceiver affording this has been a central issue in sensory anthropology. I coin the term sensorial emplacement to refer to the way in which any perceptual activity or sensory experience is afforded by, and specific to, the form of the environment and capacities of the perceiver. The ethnography demonstrates that the environment is not merely “out there” to be perceived, but that perception is an active comingling of the perceiver and the environment, which prompts questions regarding relationality and the boundedness of the body. These questions extend to the relationality of the perceiver and an ‘other’, acknowledging inter-subjective and intercorporeal perception with human and non-human species. I propose that activities of perception are activities of objectification, which produce and sustain distinctions of ‘self’, ‘other’ and ‘environment’ – but that it is in these activities that these distinctions also dissolve experientially. This thesis contributes to the anthropological study of perception; sensation; the body; apprenticeship methodologies; walking methodologies; human-environment relationality; conceptions of the environment; and intercorporeal relationality.

1 Jay developed the term ‘occularcentric’ to refer to a privileging of the visual over other senses (1994).