ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 of this book makes the epistemological claim that video ethnography is a distinct form of aesthetic knowledge that provides a specific way of knowing through sensorial encounters and contact with people, objects, animals, and/or situations. In this chapter I explore the ideas of several theorists, including Merleau-Ponty (1965), Dewey (1934), Sobchack (1992), Marks (2000), and MacDougall (2006), within a continuous overarching thematic frame that focuses on the characteristics of lived experience to discuss how certain aspects and properties are best cinematically evoked and understood. An experiential approach acknowledges the researcher’s corporeality as part of the flesh (experience) and therefore does not start from a general theory or external position to survey it. Rather, video ethnographers attempt to refract, record, and evoke experiential phenomena inside a field of sensed-sentience. Video ethnography recouples sentience with the sensory, what Merleau-Ponty called “Brute Being” with nature, and, like more-than-representational theory, assuming that subject and object are sensorially interconnected. In this subject-object blended field of sensorial relations, video ethnographers record lived experiences, erratic movements, and object relations with intuitive reflexivity, attunement, and sensible skills, using audiovisual technology. These lived experiences can be described as “Brute” encounters.
