More than visual: The apprenticeship of skilled visions

Abstract

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.