mechanical arm scrapes at the walls of a pink tunnel. The surface gives way easily — soft, almost airy.

The camera moves forward, through the flaky matter, pulling the viewer with it. For a moment, it feels more like traveling than viewing.

“It’s like cotton candy,” a low voice remarks from somewhere off-screen.

Except this isn’t a tunnel. And it’s certainly not cotton candy. It’s the inside of a human brain.

Scenes like this define “De Humani Corporis Fabrica,” the immersive film co-directed by Harvard Anthropology professor, Lucien Castaing-Taylor. It’s a film that doesn’t just show the human body, but places the viewer inside. Watching each scene feels less like observation and more like immersion, as if the boundary between subject and spectator has dissolved entirely.

This kind of experience has a name: Sensory Ethnography.

While ethnography, the study of people and their culture, has traditionally relied primarily on textual analysis and interviews to interpret human experience, the approach of “sensory ethnography” shifts the focus toward perception, emphasizing aspects of experience that cannot be captured through academic prose alone.

This style is reflected in Castaing-Taylor’s two-semester “Sensory Ethnography” course, offered jointly through the Anthropology and the Art, Film, and Visual Studies departments and affiliated with Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab.

Open to both undergraduates and graduates, the class demands a significant time commitment: students enroll in two courses simultaneously for two semesters, while also filming an independent project during the summer months. It begins in the spring and stretches into the fall, with its most intensive work unfolding over the summer.

Castaing-Taylor has long been drawn to observing and interpreting cultural differences in the world. While his training as an anthropologist provided a formal framework for this pursuit, over time he became less interested in its stricter textual, academic dimensions.

“I wanted to be able to do work that was more worlded, more grounded, and that my subjects would be invested in,” Castaing-Taylor says. “So that they could contest, they could argue back, and to come up with a representation of them that may or may not be meaningful, but they could dispute or they could engage with.”

From following sheep herders in Montana, to shipping-outwith fishermen in New Bedford, to years of filming inside Parisian hospitals, Castaing-Taylor has built a body of work that captures lives rarely given the spotlight.

In 2006, he founded the Sensory Ethnography Lab — an experimental laboratory that produces ethnographic works of art, pushing students to work creatively with both digital and analog formats, sound and image, and even performance and installation.

Though closely linked, the lab and class operate at different scales. The class brings together ten undergraduate and graduate students from across disciplines each year, offering an entry point into sensory ethnography. The SEL itself, by contrast, is a much larger entity — affiliated with additional classes and serving primarily as a home for postdoctoral fellows and faculty.

The classroom feeds the lab, and the lab, in turn, shapes the classroom. This philosophy influences not only the work produced in both spaces, but also who is invited to take part.

That process begins even before the class starts, with a highly selective application process. Each year, Castaing-Taylor says he receives 50 to 70 applicants and interviews them in rapid succession — often for just a few minutes at a time.

“It’s instinctive,” he says. “You can’t really tell in these 10-15 minute interviews.”

“But it’s really just a group, a group whose disciplinary origins will complement each other,” he adds.

Rather than simply selecting the most technically skilled filmmakers, the goal is to build a cohort that can challenge one another. The class deliberately brings together students from across disciplines — “the hard sciences, the social sciences and the humanities, and the arts” — creating a space where “disciplines that are normally discrete and separate” are forced into dialogue, Castaing-Taylor says.

What matters most, though, is something harder to define: the ability to think independently. Many students, Castaing-Taylor notes, are “super smart because they’re super academic,” and trained to “regurgitate” ideas fluently. What he looks for, instead, are people who are “thinking for themselves,” and able to respond to unfamiliar situations without falling back on old frameworks they’ve already mastered.

Throughout the course, students complete seven projects, submitting a deliverable every two or three weeks. With names like “Portrait of a Stranger,” “Syncing with Desire,” “Sublime Souls,” and “Sonic Situation,” each assignment is designed to challenge familiar ways of observing, pushing students beyond traditional analytical frameworks. Whether engaging with the more-than-human world or grappling with questions of religion and spirituality, students must portray complex aspects of the human experience in authentic, unstaged ways.

By the time summer arrives, the focus shifts. Drawing on the methods and experiments of the spring, students begin work on a bigger project that attempts to translate lived experience into an immersive piece of longer-form work.

For J.P. Sniadecki, one of the earliest students of Sensory Ethnography when the course was first offered in 2006, this process was both refreshing and transformative. Sniadecki came to Harvard as a master’s student in 2005 from a more conventional filmmaking background, but, in the class, was pushed beyond the familiar structures of documentary storytelling.

“It kind of frees you from feeling like you have to follow the expectations of the dominant mode of nonfiction filmmaking,” Snidaecki says. “It gives you that kind of space, or that license, to allow the form of the films to emerge from the encounter you have.”

That approach became tangible that summer when Snidaecki centered his film on daily life along the Songhua River in Harbin, the capital of a province in Northeast China. Working with minimal equipment, Sniadecki immersed himself in the activities along the water, building a project grounded in locals’ “relationship with the river.”

Another former student of the sensory ethnography course is Joana C. Pimenta, an award-winning filmmaker and now an assistant professor in the AFVS department.

Pimenta believes her experience in the sensory ethnography course was “formative,” and says it continues to inspire her work to this day. But 15 years ago as a Ph.D. student enrolled in the class, Pimenta says she did not feel like she understood what it meant to make a film — at least not in the way she understands filmmaking now.

“I thought I was making an assignment for class,” Pimenta says. “It wasn’t clear to me that I was making a film. Like I was making a project that was being prompted by this space.”

For her summer project, Pimenta traveled to Madeira, the Portuguese island where her mother was born. Pimenta filmed as her mother showed her the island, capturing both the landscape and their shared moments along the way.

As a way to intertwine fiction into her sensory ethnography project, Pimenta also printed photographs as postcards, dipping them in tea to age them. Ultimately, she was aiming to construct an imagined archive detailing Portuguese colonial history and self-censorship — a way to explore migrants like her mother, who moved from Madeira to the Portuguese colony, Mozambique, where she grew up.

Pimenta remembers being unable to make sense of Castaing-Taylor’s feedback for quite some time.

“Your camera is too diffident,’” he had told her. Diffident — meaning hesitant, or distanced in the filmmaking world — was a word she had to look up at the time, but one that has stayed with her ever since, shaping the way she films today. “Once I started working as a filmmaker, the only thing in my mind is just like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m too far — that’s why this is not working.’”

At the time, Pimenta recalls, “I never got the sense that he liked the film I was making. It was just like, ‘Oh, this is not working.’ And I’d be like, ‘Okay, I’m making the worst film in the world.’”

Still, she submitted the project to a small festival in Lisbon — almost as an afterthought. “I had such low expectations that I didn’t even go to the premiere,” she says.

It won the festival’s main award.

Then came invitations — from Toronto, from New York, from festivals she hadn’t even applied to. “I was really puzzled by it,” she recalls. “How did they get to the film?” The project had seemingly taken on a life of its own.

Six months later, in an elevator in the Carpenter Center, the pieces fell into place. When Castaing-Taylor asked Pimenta — now a TF for the course — which student submissions to send to an international film festival, everything clicked.

“Oh my God,” she remembers thinking. “It was you.”

After Professor Castaing-Taylor confirmed his role in her film’s success, Pimenta remembers being confused by the seemingly negative feedback he once gave the project. In response, Castaing-Taylor simply stated “You don’t listen to compliments,” he told her. “So I gave you what you needed.”

“It took me a long time to make sense of what was being said,” Pimenta explains. Yet, the class provided “the feedback that stayed with me the most from everything I’ve done in my life.”

Today, Pimenta specializes in blending fiction and nonfiction filmmaking. In this blurred boundary between invention and reality, her work engages non-professional actors, real settings, and impactful issues — just through a fictional lens.

“It’s this game of creating a fiction we can believe in and then shooting it as a documentary,” Pimenta explains.

Due to the unpredictability of her more nonfictional filmmaking techniques, Pimenta finds herself constantly improvising, making a fictional world but shooting it like a documentary. She describes this blended fictional and nonfictional method as “constructing a memory practice of shooting that responds to the urgency of the day to day: what’s happening in our lives, in the actors lives, in the life of the country, in the politics of the country.”

“It’s about being fully present in the moment of shooting and training your body to react to the moment of shooting,” she says. “That was what was so formative for me as a filmmaker, and what I still take from the class into my professional work 15 years later.”

Given its influence on both her filmmaking and teaching, Pimenta continues to recommend the sensory ethnography course to Harvard students. “It is the class that will give you the closest experience to the experience of being a filmmaker,” she explains.

One such student is Iliana Stavropoulou ’27, an undergraduate student at the College pursuing a double concentration in Applied Mathematics and AFVS.

Interested in nonfictional filmmaking, Stavropoulou spent the fall semester in a different class filming a documentary on a woman from Connecticut claiming to be in a relationship with ChatGPT – a topic which happened to connect to a mathematical modeling course she took at the same time. She joined sensory ethnography the next semester.

This summer, Stavropoulou plans to head back home to Athens, Greece to film her sensory ethnography deliverable. There, her project will focus on the construction of a new and ambitious Athens metro line, which begins in her own neighborhood and connects to other districts that reflect stark economic and political divides.

“There’s a lot of political weight in the construction itself,” she explains. It is a project which she hopes will serve as a “portrait of Athens through the metro line.”

Despite the demands of her coursework in both Applied Mathematics and AFVS, Stavropoulou believes the two operate in harmony: “I really like the balance of having a pset and also to make a movie in my semester.”

That sense of intellectual duality is not unique to Stavropoulou. Students arrive to the class from vastly different academic backgrounds by design. Yomi C. Folaranmi — a current graduate student in the course — serves as another example of this interdisciplinarity.

A former undergraduate of comparative literature at University College London and a current PhD student in the History of Art and Architecture department, Folaranmi enters the sensory ethnography class with a unique perspective and skillset. In his work, his literary and historical interests have been able to shine through, including his love for poetry.

For instance, in one of the sensory ethnography course’s smaller assignments, entitled Natives of Nature, Folaranmi chose to focus on rain. While shooting, he was propelled back to a childhood memory of rain, which he had written a poem about. So, he decided to merge his works of art together, and recorded himself reading the poem as the main audio of the film.

“Film is sight and sound, but it can also be so many other things,” Folaranmi explains. He sees sensory ethnography as a practice that “provokes empathy,” pushing viewers to reconsider their “relationship between us and the rest of the world: the natural world and the non-natural world.”

Although the course is open to both undergraduates and graduates, Folaranmi notes the lack of hierarchy. Instead, he describes the student dynamic as feeling like King Arthur’s “Knights of the Round Table.”

“We sit around the table and critique each other’s work, sometimes quite brutally, but also with lots of care and attention,” he says.

“And I think having this shared experience, it’s almost like — I mean anthropologically, it is — a ritual,” Folaranmi adds. “And at the end of the ritual, you’re transformed, and you do form a sense of kinship with other co-participants.”

For Stavropoulou, that transformation is both intangible and ongoing. “I compare it with math all the time,” she says. “I learned how to do a single integral, and now I can do a double integral.”

“But you can’t do that with sensory ethnography,” she admits. “To me, it’s more like building muscle. You don’t understand it from time to time, but there will be a point where you can lift more than you could last time.”

— Magazine writer Christie E. Beckley can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @cbeckley22.

—Magazine writer Valerie I. Ogboi can be reached at [email protected].