Introduction: "Are you blind?"

In mid-January 2007, I sat down at the side table near the entrance to my apartment, preparing to make the first phone call to a blind woman who was a potential subject for my research. As a young graduate student in anthropology, I was nervous about the call, in which I was going to present, for the first time, my research to a woman from the "field," asking her to share her personal story with a total stranger. Haya, 2 a 57-year-old blind woman, answered my call. After reciting the short introduction to my research topic and explaining the interview structure in the most welcoming yet confident voice I could manage to produce, I heard a long pause. I held my breath, feeling the sweat dripping down my chest. A few seconds passed before Haya threw her first question at me: "are you blind?"

Haya's question was the opening shot of what became my ethnographic journey into new methodological grounds, as my "sightedness" (Michalko, 1998) and "temporary able-bodiedness" (Whyte & Ingstad, 1995) had not yet become components of my theoretical or methodological lens. In this paper, I address these kinds of methodological lacunas—voids my work with blind participants compelled me to recognize—through critically examining "blindness" and "sight" both as cultural concepts and lived identities, and by employing a reflexive sensibility both to my position in the field as a sighted-woman-ethnographer and to my research methods. I argue for the ways my encounters with both sight and blindness allow the deconstruction of typical researcher-researched power relations, and the creation of a "sensory knowledge" applicable for qualitative work in general.

Despite the central role of "reflexive orientation" (Murphy & Dingwall, 2001) within both ethnographic writing (see Davis, 2000) and disability studies (e.g., Colligan, 2001; Oliver, 1996; Shuttleworth, 2001), and the prominent critique of "visual primacy" in ethnographic methods (Clifford, 1983), the ethnography of blindness has rarely been examined in relation to central anthropological concepts and methods such as the researcher's gaze, the use of observations, and the production of insights from the field (Dundes, 1980). This article, then, not only addresses this gap, but also argues for the specificity of an ethnography of blind and visually impaired participants in challenging the "visual-centrism" (Keating & Hadder, 2010) of the anthropological endeavor (Classen & Howes, 1996; Dundes, 1980; Fabian, 1983; Kaplan-Myrth, 2000; Stoller, 1984), promoting a multi-sensory approach to social research (Classen, 1997; Feld, 1996; Howes, 2003; Pink, 2009; Stoller, 1989).

Before diving into the analysis, I will offer a methodological summary, presenting the structure of the interview and the observation sites, and locating the discussion in the "reflexive" theoretical framework I contribute to. Hence, discussion of the analytical themes that emerged from the data and their relation to the participants' social affiliations is outside the scope of this article, and addressed elsewhere (Hammer, 2012).

Methodological Settings

This article is based on ethnographic research conducted between 2007 and 2010 as part of a wider project that focuses on the gender identity of blind women and the representations of sight and blindness in the Israeli public sphere. It relies on two main methods: in-depth interviews with 40 women, most of whom are congenitally blind, 3 from varied social backgrounds in terms of age, marital status, ethnicity, geographic location, and profession; and three years of ethnographic observations in sites offering services to blind and visually impaired people and/or presenting aspects of blindness to the general public.

The semi-structured interviews followed the participant's life story, eventually focusing more specifically on gender, femininity, and sexuality in everyday life. Interviewees were obtained through word of mouth and prior to meeting I had at least one phone conversation with the participant, explaining the confidentiality of the study, the interview structure, and the general topic—which I defined as blind women's concepts of gender and femininity and social attitudes toward the blind. The location of the interviews was determined based on the interviewee's preference. Twenty-four interviews were conducted in the participant's home, six took place in the participant's work place, and ten in public spaces such as a coffee shop, a shopping center, a university, or a center for the blind. These settings allowed me to absorb various aspects of blind women's personal lives; interviews in the home at times included food, family, and the opportunity to see personal items relevant to our discussion such as clothes and items of feminine grooming, education, and professional diplomas, Braille books, computer software, and a color identifying device; interviews taking place in the public sphere occasionally included a walk, clothes shopping, a bus ride, or a stroll through the grounds of a university, allowing me to experience public space with a woman using a guide dog or a white cane and therefore observe the reactions of others toward us, and to share physical intimacy with the interviewee as she held my arm in unfamiliar environments.

The interviews were documented using a tape recorder I verbally described to the interviewee during the meeting. The interviewees were asked for their permission to be taped, urged to request that the device be turned off whenever they wished, and informed that they could stop the interview at any time or withdraw from specific questions. Twenty-six women received full transcripts of their interviews upon request, and the participants were also invited to hear, read, respond to, and attend conference presentations and university classes where I presented segments of the work.

Alongside the interviews, my work consists of ethnographic observations conducted from various positions in the field, which varied in context and duration. The short-term observations typically involved my role as an outsider observer of events created, initiated, or performed for and/or by blind and visually impaired people, such as a dance class at a municipal center for the blind, a "beauty class" in an educational institute, and a museum exhibit where visitors are led through a dark space by blind and visually impaired guides. Concurrently, I conducted long-term participant observations in sites offering services to blind and visually impaired people, including three months in a "radio-drama class" in which blind and visually impaired people write and perform radio scripts, six months in a "life-skills" class for blind and visually impaired adults in a rehabilitation program, 12 months participating in a tandem cycling group which pairs blind and sighted cyclists, and 12 months in a medical massage training course in a national center for physical education and sports.

The diversity of this ethnography as a whole offered the opportunity to closely examine blindness, sightedness, and the sensory body of sighted, blind, and visually impaired people (as well as my own) in the field. Whether I was discussing nature and the landscape while riding a tandem bicycle in the Negev desert; practicing cooking, sewing, folding laundry, and shopping with participants in the life skills class; creating plots and characters in the radio drama course; or learning the nuances of physiology, anatomy, and orthopedics in medical massage training—my body was the locus though which questions regarding gender, blindness, and culture were examined and scrutinized. By positioning these sensory experiences in my work, I recognize them as suitable for scholarly discussion, understanding sight and alternative sensory experiences within anthropology as "sensuous experience."

Theoretical Framework

The discussion presented in this article is situated within a "reflexive" theoretical tradition I acknowledge and build upon, combining the sensibility to methodological issues in anthropology (e.g., Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Davis, 2000; Denzin, 1997; Denzin & Lincoln 2005; Marcus & Fischer, 1986; Okely, 1994; Shuttleworth, 2001), and disability ethnography (Ablon, 1990; Battles & Manderson, 2008; Colligan, 2001; Davis, 2000; Deegan & Willett, 2001; Frank, 2000; Oliver, 1996; Phillips, 1990; Shakespeare, 1996; Shuttleworth & Kasnitz, 2004; Stone & Priestley, 1996; Whyte & Ingstad, 1995). Scholars in these lines of research proposed new ways of writing the textual product, making an effort to reflect upon concepts of authority, empowerment and truth, the sources and uses of their knowledge and methods, the researcher's multiple positions in the field, and his/her interaction with the informant's subject positions. Within disability studies, this approach influenced empowering and emancipatory research paradigms (Barton, 2005, Morris, 1992 in Petersen, 2011; Oliver 1992) expressed in qualitative research with blind and visually impaired people (Almog, 2011; Asch & Sacks, 1983; Deshen, 1992; Duckett & Pratt 2001; Fahd et al., 1997; Goldin, 1984; Hess, 2010; Jenks, 2005; Kaplan-Myrth, 2000; Kef & Bos, 2006; Macpherson, 2009; Scott, 1969; Sentumbwe, 1995), as well as in the employment of an "autoethnography" (Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Keating & Hadder, 2010). 4

Taking into consideration this scholarly tradition, my work intertwines disability ethnography and anthropology, highlighting the ways these scholarships inform each other, rethinking the role of sight within research methods and the researcher's position. Although methodological sensitivity within the "reflexive turn" in anthropology has resulted in greater attention to the subjects of power relations and the researcher's gaze—addressing, for example, "micro-relations between informants and ethnographers" (Rabinow, 1985), the interrelationship between observer and observed (Krieger, 1985), power relations between researcher and researched (Murphy & Dingwall, 2001), a "confrontation" between the ethnographer and "his informants" (Crapanzano, 1997), and the ethnographer's position in "a web of intersubjective relation" (Favret-Saad, 1977 in Clifford, 1983)—these discussions have typically referred to the gaze literally, taking for granted both the researcher's and participants' ability to see, and interpreting sight as a disciplinary act of power inflicted upon the observed. Rather than understanding sight as always-already power, this article deconstructs the visual notion of power relations, simultaneously considering the richness and complexity of staring and visual dynamics (Garland-Thomson, 2009), addressing vision and sight as "sensorially integrated, embodied and experienced" (Edwards & Bhaumik, 2008, p. 3), as well as the role of senses other than sight within the researcher-researched relations in the field. In addition, while most of the auto-ethnographies in this context are conducted by researchers with disabilities (Brueggemann, 2000; Colligan, 2001; Mitchell, 2000; Murphy, 1990; Neville-Jan, 2004; Zola, 1982), my position as a sighted researcher broadens the reflexive meaning that can be attributed to both blindness and sight as legitimate sources for inquiry through examining the ethnographer's gendered and sensory body, and bringing into fruitful conversation feminist writing on the body, anthropology of the senses, and research in visual culture.

Power relations and the researcher's gaze are also extremely relevant to the research of blind people, yet rarely documented. Even research specifically focused on the analysis of embodiment among blind people (Kaplan-Myrth, 2000) or the ways research with visually impaired people "should be conducted" (Duckett & Pratt, 2001) has not critically considered the researcher's or the participants' sensory experiences, nor their influence on micro-interactions in the field and on knowledge production. By studying the researcher's location in the context of the ethnography of blindness I not only identify the lack of research on this issue, but also address the reflexive call for researchers to "transform ourselves from… spectators into seers" (Stoller, 1984, p. 94), albeit examining it from the standpoint of a "blind study" (Almog, 2011, p. 50).

In addition to this paper's integration of "blind ethnography" with the wider reflexive orientation in the social sciences, it addresses the critique made by anthropology of the senses regarding the visual focus of anthropological theory and ethnographic methods. Scholars such as Classen (1997), Clifford (1983), Howes (2003), and Stoller (1989), criticized the rise of the fieldworker-theorist in the 1920s, "marked by an increased emphasis on the power of observation" (Clifford, 1983, pp. 124-5), and Geertz's later development of culture as text (1973), rather than as a dynamic multisensory event (Classen & Howes, 1996; Howes, 1991). By analyzing the role of my sensory body in the field, I address this critique, shifting the focus of the discussion from the eye and the gaze to the sensory experiences that blindness raises, and examining the concept of "observation": its theoretical legacy and the empirical framework it obliges researchers to work in. Moreover, by focusing on the meanings of sight and blindness and the researcher's sensory body both in everyday life and in the research process, this paper builds on key arguments within the anthropology of the senses, understanding the senses as organized within a culturally and socially interpretive context (e.g., Classen, 1997; Geurts, 2002; Howes, 1991; Seremetakis, 1994), continuing the development of sensory-conscious "ethnographic epistemology" (Helmreich, 2007) which is tuned to the conditions that allow and produce anthropological metaphors and accounts (p. 633).

Getting Started: De-Familiarization with Sight

Who is actually the blind one here? Who is the one that doesn't see the other? Who has a deficiency of his/her senses? And who enacts a richer sensory embodiment? (Fieldwork Journal, May 2007).

My interest in the gendered body within visual culture shaped my choice of research topic. I vividly recall the moment my decision to research blind women emerged. At the end of a long day, I had collapsed on my living room sofa with my eyes closed, the television on in the background. A commercial I had seen before came on, advertising an international fast food corporation. It featured smiling, blonde, Barbie-like, barely dressed women, moving around on skates, serving slabs of meat. The women did not speak, serving merely as an unmistakable metaphorical connection to the piece of meat on their trays. Listening to the male narrator, I wondered what messages I would be receiving if I were unable to actually see the commercial. As a woman living in a visual culture saturated with images of the female body and sexuality, I could easily imagine the beauty ideal displayed on the screen, but how, I wondered, do blind women interpret it through sound rather than sight, and in which ways does this beauty ideal affect them?

This moment on the sofa integrated my theoretical interest in the gendered gaze with my own body experience, raising an awareness of both my gendered and sighted body and de-familiarizing my own social affiliation and the "natural" meaning of sight. I embraced this awareness and continued to employ it in my empirical and theoretical work and also in the field, which caused me to rethink the visual framework of my work, and reexamine the definitions of terms such as blindness and sight, ability and disability, body function, and movement. Within my theoretical considerations, it guided me to contextualize the research within the framework of feminist disability studies, which integrates the feminist interest in women's bodies with disability studies' critique on bodily norms, function, and appearance (e.g., Garland-Thomson, 2002; Gerschick, 2000; Hall, 2011).

Nevertheless, my awareness of blindness and sight at that moment was informed by a somewhat naïve, simplistic division between sight and blindness as two worlds of meanings. As the next sections reveal, examining day-to-day encounters in the field, specifically the challenges and interactions with interviewees, and engaging in dialogue with people in the field complicated my understanding of sight and blindness, as I came to realize that the visual dimension indeed exists in the lives of both blind and sighted women who are being seen. Developing this acknowledgment, I formulated the nuanced perception I ask to employ in my methodological lens, which is to address the ways blind women "do gender" (West & Zimmerman, 1987) in their everyday lives, as active interpretive subjects.

Deconstructing Power Relations: Day-to-Day Ethnography in the Field

The ethnography of blindness raises specific complexities resulting from the potential of emphasizing imbalanced power relations and the researcher's gaze, replicating the participants' social location as "spectacles"—a position which characterizes their everyday lives as blind and disabled (Brueggemann, Garland-Thomson, & Kleege, 2005; Garland-Thomson, 2009). As previously mentioned, my research required me to develop an alternative sensory-sensitivity which challenges typical researcher-researched relations and the common association of knowledge with seeing and sight. The following discussion consists of two sections, one referring to the ways interviewees challenged my position as a sighted researcher, inquiring about my method and position in the field, and the other to the ways a heightened awareness of verbal communication, bodily intimacy, and the role of the researcher's body as a source of knowledge has developed in my work.

"It's really scary, like, what am I, a tribe that you research?": Researcher-Participant Power Relations

Research participants often expressed concerns and judgment about my methods, role, and body appearance, repeatedly expressing queries about my methodology and position in the field, and challenging my "privileged" sighted position, as I often occupied the role of the outsider, the sociological "stranger" (Schuetz, 1944; Simmel, 1950), who does not read Braille or use a cane or a guide dog nor utilize the non-visual codes of social interaction. Aviva for example, a 27-year-old woman, blind from age 6, posed several inquiries before allowing the interview to begin, raising concerns about the theory with which I "come to the field," my general knowledge about blind women, the number of women with whom I had already met, the interview structure and the nature of the questions, and my privacy policy. Neta, a 36-year-old congenitally blind woman, criticized more specifically some of the interview questions. After asking her about the ways she manages and performs her femininity in her everyday life, she sighed, saying: "It's really general what you're asking. It's hard for me to answer." At the end of the interview, Neta continued:

Look, I can tell you that your questions are very-very good, but, again, they're very general. I think it's… I mean, I don't know if you want to get to something more specific, there're many questions it's hard to answer…. I think that you need questions a little bit narrower… it needs to be broken down into more concrete things, less abstract. But this is only my personal opinion. Do whatever you'd like.

Ayelet, a 33-year-old congenitally blind woman, also raised concerns, asking, "so… what are you taking from all this? Not only from my interview, from all of us?" In response, I elaborated on the "life-story" format of the interview, and the "grounded theory" I employ in analyzing my research materials from the field. Ayelet asked, unsatisfied: "And what do you mean by a field, a research field? What is this 'field'?" I addressed the varied meanings of a "research field" in contemporary anthropology, which, I told her, in the past might have included a remote tribe, but today is more likely to relate to a specific social, religious, or ethnic group. Ayelet replied angrily: "But that's really scary, it's like, what am I, a tribe that you research? You understand?"

As the conversation continued, I explained my sensitivity to power relations which had emerged from my interest in gender and women, as I began to fear losing one of the most interesting interviewees I had met. Ayelet raised her final question, directing it toward my own identity in the field, inquiring:

"Are you a feminist?"

Surprised, and unsure what the "right" answer might be, I quietly said "yes," simply delivering the truth. To my relief, Ayelet responded, "well done."

Whether it was conscious or not, the women often made me the object of study, putting themselves in the place of the researcher, as frequently happens within ethnographic research when the object of study takes an active role in navigating the terms and settings of the empirical process (e.g., El-Or, 2010; Krumer-Nevo, 2006). Some of the participants enacted this role reversal with subtlety, seemingly inspired by sincere curiosity, while others, such as Ayelet, approached it with a sense of challenge, to gauge whether I was worthy of their time and trust.

"As soon as you gave me your hand I felt that you were very slim": Sensory Awareness in the Field

Conclusion: Sensory Knowledge and Carnal Experiences

My encounters with research participants challenged traditional power relations and multiple meanings of the researcher's gaze, highlighting what I identify as "sensory knowledge" which emphasizes everyday "carnal experiences" (Wacquant, 2004) of the lived body, and serves as a significant source of scholarly knowledge. My discussion of this term is located within the contemporary "embodied" approach to the research of social life, expressed in "carnal sociology" (Wacquant, 2005), which promotes "visceral know-how" skills and knowledge (p. 467), as well as in anthropology of the body, directing attention to the performative aspects of human and cultural experience (Kohavi, 2007). These scholars have emphasized the "necessity of a sociology not only of the body, in the sense of object, but also from the body, that is, deploying the body as a tool of inquiry and vector of knowledge" (Wacquant, 2004, p. viii), addressing the researcher's body as the location through which he/she inhabits, comprehends, inquires, and interprets the field.

Although my research is indeed influenced by this line of research, it offers a unique perspective within the research "of" and "from" the body, integrating the sociology and anthropology of the body together with the attention given to corporeal experiences within disability studies and the study of blindness. The majority of the existing ethnographic literature on the body is culled either from participatory research or observations of a specific group/profession; in the first (participatory research), the ethnographer is an "observant participant" (Wacquant, 2004) in a wide range of activities involving a "high level of embodiment" (Kohavi 2007), such as Lindy Hop dancing (Wade, 2011), Samba dancing (Browning, 1995), practicing Japanese Martial Arts (Bar-On Cohen, 2006), Yoga (Buckingham & Degen, 2012), mountaineering (Lund, 2005), cycling (Spinney, 2006), and boxing (Wacquant, 2004); in the last example (observations of a specific group/profession), the ethnographer focuses on a profession requiring a heightened awareness of the body, such as dance, as in Kohavi's examination of modern-contemporary dance (2007) or Ophir's analysis of female dance teachers (2012).

Unlike these studies, my ethnography of blind women and the cultural representations of sight and blindness does not (and cannot) involve my role as an "observant participant;" throughout my work I neither pretended to "go-blind" nor imagined that I can learn how blindness feels. In addition, the study of blindness does not focus on a specific bodily practice such as dance, cycling or boxing, shared by a closed group of tourists, fans or professionals, but rather examines the everyday life of our sensory body, as shared by sighted, blind, and visually impaired people, deconstructing the "naturalness" of sight by referring to it as a social and cultural "skill" (Kleege, 2005, p. 188) that people "do" in everyday life in the same way that one "does" gender. Moreover, my work is not only atypical in its object of study, it also integrates sociology and anthropology of the body with disability studies. This perspective intertwines existing "embodied ethnography" with the corporeal realities of pain, illness, and impairment in the everyday lives of people with disabilities, accounting for the body as a "bio-social entity" (Thomas, 2002, p. 75) that lies at the intersection of culture, society, and embodiment (Casper & Talley, 2005). By adopting these perspectives, giving special attention to the sensory realities blindness evokes, I conceive my position in the field not simply as a sighted researcher observing blind participants, but as a person with a material body and visual skills, engaging in research with other people of varied corporeal experiences, addressing the "multisensoriality of experience, perception, knowing and practice" (Pink, 2009, p. 1).

To conclude, ethnography of blindness offers important ways of rethinking the researcher's gaze, researcher-researched power relations, and the visual focus of the qualitative inquiry, applicable both to qualitative works in disability studies, and ethnographic research in general. My position as a sighted researcher observing blind participants offers the opportunity to examine core methodological questions within a situation consisting of extreme imbalanced power relations, which nevertheless are surprisingly deconstructed and challenged in multiple ways. Addressing the interactions I encountered in the field allows a fresh perspective on the agency participants express, the (non-visual) meanings of knowledge and knowing, the role of bodily intimacy and physical proximity with those that are being researched, the aspects of otherness and the role of the outsider within the research process, and the researcher's use of his/her senses, promoting the production of "sensory knowledge." The examples described in this paper are only few instances of the presence of the sensory body during my three years of ethnographic research with blind women. This experience heightened my attention to my senses, feelings, and movements within mundane activities and ordinary tasks in and outside the field: While using a knife in the kitchen, crossing a street in the neighborhood, listening to the sound of the needle going through the fabric while sewing, feeling the texture and shape of clothes while folding laundry, sensing temperature, weight, shape, smell, sound, taste, and touch while cooking, accounting for the feelings and sensations of my students while teaching, or acknowledging the sensuous aspects of research materials and the writing experience.

This analytical investigation was also accompanied by an emotional sensory journey I went through during this project. First, I went through a process of "de-familiarization" with sight, getting closer to the experiences of blind people and feeling alienated from sight as I knew it. Five years later, I went through a process of "re-familiarization" with sight, learning to see differently. Sight became thicker, consisting of ranges and nuances, heat and temperature, lights and shadows, concrete and abstract shapes, peripheral and central fields, fused and fragmented landscapes, including colors, shapes, lights, sensations, depth, and movements. It was no longer a mechanical "thing," the "sighted" possess and the "blind" lack. In her book Sight Unseen, Kleege (1998) writes that she "finds it easy to imagine what it's like to be sighted." She "had to write this book to learn what it means to be blind" (p. 3). In my case, I had to conduct this research not only in order to better understand the life experiences of a blind woman, but to learn what it means to be a sighted woman, and more specifically, what it means to experience sightedness. By developing a more nuanced understanding of sight and blindness, of observations, insights, and the researcher's gaze, I ask researchers to practice a sensory embodiment in the field, one that is sensitive to the non-visual interactions and locations from which scholarly knowledge is represented and produced, acknowledging blind people's acute listening to the senses and to their place within the ethnographic research process.