ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned less with the limitations of written, indigenous texts than with those of the spoken word in conveying a people's changing and past experience. It focuses on knowledge beyond language, less as extrasensory perception than as that which comes from all the senses, both of the fieldworker and of the subjects. The earlier belief that all knowledge could be traced back to immediate sense data, fails to recognize the way in which the senses are mediated, interpreted and conceptualized. Since sensory knowledge cannot be the direct reflection of reality, even members of the same culture cannot claim a complete correspondence in experience, instead they may creatively construct correspondences between themselves. The comprehension by the anthropologist of the experience has to be approached through the full range of sensory knowledge and a new intuition learned in fieldwork. The total experience of fieldwork is used in unarticulated and unconscious ways to make sense of fieldnotes long after the events.
