Introduction: The sense of the senses - Rupert Cox, Andrew Irving and Christoper Wright1. Appropriations across disciplines: the future of art and anthropology collaborations - Arnd SchneiderPHOTO-ESSAYS2. Spiti: some notes on the practice of documentary photography - Patrick Sutherland3. Random Manhattan: thinking and moving beyond text - Andrew Irving4. Exile, the sorrow of time and place - Lydia Nakashima Degarrod5. Looking for Libeskind in Sri Lanka - James Thompson6. The saving face of death: anthropology and the scene of knowing - Paul CarterSOUND7. Transplant (excerpt) - John Wynne and Tim Wainwright8. Ochlophonic Study #3: Hong Kong (excerpt) - John Levack Drever9. The Castaways ProjectSteven Feld and Virginia Ryan10. Air Pressure: a sound film - Angus Carlyle and Rupert Cox11. Sounds from Dangerous Places: Chernobyl - Peter Cusack12. Contest Behaviour (excerpt) - Louise K. WilsonFILM13. Films about ordinary people: the Japanese home drama and virtual ethnography - Catherine Russell14. Balkan Rhapsodies: 78 Short Films - Jeff Daniel Silva15. Sweetgrass: 'Baaaaaaah. Bleeeeeeet.' - Lucien Castaing-Taylor16. Cottonopolis: cinematography, ethnography, historiography and texture - Cathy Greenhalgh17. Christmas with Wawa: a video experiment with Yolngu aesthetics - Jennifer Deger18. Sensing cultures: cinema, ethnography and the senses - David Howes19. After cultural theory: the power of images, the lure of immediacy - Janet WolffAppendix: DVD contentsBibliographyIndex

This book addresses a series of questions concerning the relationship between anthropological understandings of the world, sensory perception and aesthetic practices. It suggests that if different sensory experiences embody and facilitate different kinds of knowledge, then we need to develop new methods and more appropriate forms of representation that are not based solely around text or on correspondence theories of truth. As such, Beyond text? brings together leading figures in anthropology, visual, sound and film studies to explore how knowledge, sensation and embodied experiences can be researched and represented by combining different visual, aural and textual forms - for example text and image, image and sound, body and voice. What - the contributors ask - is the relationship between the interiority of a person's experience and its exteriority that is present to the eye, the ear and other sense organs that make the experience open to anthropological forms of documentation, theorisation and representation? Beyond text? argues that there is a necessary, critical development in our ways of knowing that must take place not merely at the level of theory and representation but also through innovative fieldwork methods and media practices. The collected papers and audio-visual materials presented on the enclosed DVD explore the potential for a more sensorially grounded, critically aware and creative approach to cultural analysis, media production and field research.