Sensory Environmental Relationships: Between Memories of the Past and Imaginings of the Future

Blaž Bajič, Ana Svetel

Vernon Press, 2023 - Nature - 204 pages

Sensory environmental relationships - understood as dynamic, embodied, and emplaced affective sensory perceptions in (and of) the environment - invite us to remember the past, infuse our experiences of the present, and entice us to imagine the future. Ethnographically specific, socially and culturally nuanced approaches to environmental relationships require considerable conceptual and practical flexibility and inventiveness. Reflecting this commitment, 'Sensory Environmental Relationships' aims to offer a new anthropological understanding of how, in our individual and collective lives, senses, places, and temporalities intersect. While anthropologists have been studying the sensory environmental relationships in connection to people's pasts and presents, futures remain conspicuously absent. By bringing different timeframes into the foreground of the analysis, this volume contributes to filling in the gap in our understanding of the human experience.

The volume's ethnographically based contributions address the questions of how embodied and emplaced practices of sensing, while moving or staying in place in diverse environments, engender, inform, and affect the processes of remembering (and forgetting) the past, experiencing the present, and imagining the future. Drawing on the fields of environmental anthropology, sensory studies, studies of movement and mobility, memory studies, and other related (sub)disciplines, as well as diverse, epistemologically and methodologically experimental approaches, the volume explores the ways in which sensory environmental relationships "touch" upon our pasts, presents, and futures.

About the author

Ana Svetel is a researcher at the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Arts and at the Institute for Innovation and Development of the University of Ljubljana. She completed her PhD, titled "Weather, Time, Light and Darkness in Social Dimensions of Icelandic Landscape," in 2023. Her research interests include anthropological studies on landscape, environment, perception, remoteness, seasonality, weather, luminosity, and naming. She conducted ethnographic fieldwork in northeastern Iceland and Slovenian Alps. As an assistant, she teaches practical classes in various anthropological courses at both the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana. She is a co-chair of the Young Scholars Working Group in the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF), editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Slovene Ethnological Society Library series, and a member of the editorial board of the journal Svetovi / Worlds. In 2022, Svetel was awarded the Emerging Scholar Award for outstanding early-career researchers by the OnSustainability Research Network. She is also a published poetry and short-prose author.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Sensory Environmental Relationships: Between Memories of the Past and Imaginings of the Future; Vernon series in anthropology
• Authors: Blaž Bajič, Ana Svetel
• Editors: Blaž Bajič, Ana Svetel
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Vernon Press, 2023
• ISBN: 1648896936, 9781648896934
• Length: 204 pages
• Subjects: Nature / General; Social Science / Anthropology / General; Social Science / General