Moving Through the Light of Other Perspectives

ABSTRACT: Vision gets a bad rap, largely because of the ways it has been recruited into western philosophical and cultural projects of objectivity and domination and then repudiated by their critics (Jay 1993). Accordingly, common metaphors of perspective unfold in just this problem-space of subjective location and object-knowledge: what I see from where I am. If such notions of perspective position vision as a self-defining abstraction from the visual signal, then this paper argues for an expanded and realistic approach—one that re-inscribes the moving/seeing body within its ambient environment—yielding a notion of perspective as process and ground for registering the presence of others. This paper draws on ethnographic scenes from hospitality interactions in the Dhofar mountains of Oman to track how the infrastructural reorganizations of the built and social landscape that incorporated Śeḥret speakers into the modern state refigure visibility and participation in everyday gatherings at the home. Through Maurice Merleau-Ponty and James Gibson’s theories of vision, this paper explores the role of moving and seeing in practices organizing engagement and participation in hospitality interactions, foregrounding movement as a useful ethnographic horizon for both linguistic anthropologies of interaction and broader inquiries into perception.