Seeing otherwise: Landscape change and sensory experience in the West African savannah

Abstract

Seeing landscapes change seems to be an inevitable and ubiquitous experience in times of global warming. Yet, landscape change is often underestimated, depending on how that change is perceived, experienced, and articulated over time. Like other agriculturalists in the West African savannah, Senufo farmers of Côte d’Ivoire have a pragmatic relationship to land as the existential ground of their lifeworld. Their experience of landscapes is based on the entire human sensorium and deeply embedded in bodily practices. Moving and walking are closely intertwined with seeing and aesthetic experience. Sedimented over many years, such bodily practices engender a subtle, immanent, but rarely articulated understanding of landscape and its changes. Landscape change becomes an issue of conscious, discursive articulation when the farmers as social actors refer to it through the medium of photographs taken over the past four decades, allowing them to assess the difference between now and then. Photos isolate acts of seeing from other bodily senses and the broader experience that constitutes landscapes for Senufo farmers. They instigate processes that re-embed past and present landscapes in another, monosensory experiential and propositional framework. Recognizing landscape change and experiential aspect change are two sides of the same process.