Learning to see

Global Challenges (FSW

Re-tooling craft

Global Challenges (FSW

Markets to support sustainable food production: potentials and challenges of alternative provisioning

Global Challenges (FSW

From branding to solidarity: the COVID-19 impact on marketing Strachítunt cheese from Val Taleggio, Italy

Global Challenges (FSW

Collaboration, mediation, and comparison: epistemological tools from theory-driven fieldwork practice

Horizon 2020(H2020)Global Challenges (FSW

Crafting futures through cheese-making in Val Taleggio (Northern Italy)

Horizon 2020(H2020)724151Global Challenges (FSW

Ecologies of Belonging and the Mugshot Aesthetics

Based on an ethnographic approach as well as on cultural critique of relevant digital projects, this article confronts visual ‘ecologies of belonging’. Building on my ‘skilled visions’ approach, I propose a critical study of everyday visual apprenticeship of social and cultural stereotypes about looking. The main finding is that the act of looking and categorizing self and others should be understood as a form of relational and situated learning, rather than as a problem of (facial) recognition. The self-assertion with which we orient ourselves in a social environment on an everyday basis is telling of the enchanted quality of ‘making-believe’, as our own skilled vision makes us believe that it is indeed possible to sort and chart sociocultural groups on the basis of phenotypic classifications. However, the evidence of such ‘mugshot aesthetics’ is at best ambivalent. The mugshot view reduces our social abilities of reading complex and cultural cues to standard mechanisms, and ‘makes us believe’ that a perspicuous view of human types is achievable and indeed operationalizable in technologies of vision. The article proposes a more complex attitude to this issue based both on ethnographic interaction – including fieldwork, in-depth interviews and visual analysis.Horizon 2020(H2020)724151Global Challenges (FSW

Ecology of vision and economy of citizenship: an anthropological perspective

Inaugural lecture by Prof.dr. Cristina Grasseni on the acceptance of her position as professor of Anthropology at the Universiteit Leiden on Monday October 30, 2017Horizon 2020(H2020)724151Inaugural lecture by Prof.dr. Cristina Grasseni on the acceptance of her position as professor of Anthropology at the Universiteit Leiden on Monday October 30, 2017Global Challenges (FSW

More than visual: the apprenticeship of skilled visions

Skilled vision is more-than-visual because the enskilment of vision happens in intersensorial contexts and because it pertains to the broader formation of aesthetic and ethical sensibilities. Sensory and social apprenticeship coexist in practice. I dwell on the intersensoriality of learning to see in an analytical way and on the sociality and morality of skilled visions, using ethnographic examples from my fieldwork with food gardeners in the Netherlands and from other scholars who use a skilled-visions approach, notably Judith Willkomm on skilled listening in bioacoustic field research in Germany, Tom Martin on craft learning as perceptual transformation in maritime carpentry in the United States, and Jonathan Hankins on the apprenticeship of traditional upholstery in the United Kingdom. Each example shows how the realignment of visual perception in one's learning environment (with other senses, with technical apparatuses, and with human and nonhuman others) mediate the acquisition of perspicuity, namely the perceptual and aesthetic realization of each detail in their proper function and as appropriate to their context.Global Challenges (FSW

Ethnographic Responsibility.: replies to Herzfeld (Anthropology Today 39[3])

Global Challenges (FSW