Beyond the human: A sensory ethnographer’s gaze on sportfishing practice

This chapter explores the act of gazing at the performance of a water-based leisure activity. The examination of sportfishing introduces the use of a practice-based sensory ethnography in considering the gazing act in ways that recognize the role therein of embodied, multi-sensuous movement, particularly the agency of bodies other than humans. The method enables us to investigate the sportfishing practice and the embodied and sensuous material encounters of human and non-human entities in the water environment, both above and below the surface. It illuminates the complex intra-actions within sportfishing between the anglers, the fish, the water, and the weather. The chapter aims to make sense of the entanglement of senses, mobility, and rhythms—to gain sensory wisdom. The aspiration here is to create an embodied connection and sensorial understanding of how mobile human and non-human bodies “do” practice, as well as what dynamic practice does to those bodies.