Susanne Schmitt

Susanne Schmitt received her M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Munich (2007) where she is now a PhD student and visiting lecturer. Her research interests include the anthropology of the Body and the Senses, Science Studies, and Gender and Sexuality.

In recent years, sociocultural anthropology has become increasingly aware of the human senses. Not only are we being challenged into engaging the senses further in our usually text- and sight-based ethnographic research (David Howes, Paul Stoller), but into looking at sensory formations themselves as utterly cultural products. Consequentially, our own sensorium, consisting of five senses dominated by sight, turns out to not be a precultural order, but merely another folk model (Kathryn Linn Geurts). My PhD research is based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in German science museums exhibiting knowledge about the body, the senses, and human perception. Using participant observation, narrative interviews and “fieldwalks”, a method borrowed from sensory anthropology, as approaches I am following the ways in which meanings about the senses are being locally constructed and shared.