Sound, Anthropology of
Bibliography
Abstract
The anthropology of sound asks and describes what it means to identify the physical phenomenon of vibration through a transmitting medium as an aspect of experience, conveying both particular forms of knowledge and social, political, and economic significations. It explores the possible relationships between the capacities for speech and hearing and modes of social and cultural organization as formulations of difference. It considers how it may be possible to invoke a conceptualization of sound that is irreducible to linguistic and musical structures but is conditioned by ecology, matter, and media. In this field, which draws from the anthropologies of music and language and intersects with ethnomusicology and the anthropologies of media, science, space, and the senses, sound is both a subject of study and a means of representation, with the main proponent of the field, Steven Feld, advocating sound-recording practice as a necessary, sensory resource for ethnographic communication.
Notes
Sound, Anthropology of
- Go to annotation“Model” (Cox, 2018, p. 1)
- Go to annotation“Metaphor” (Cox, 2018, p. 3)
- Go to annotation“Material” (Cox, 2018, p. 5)
- Go to annotation“Media” (Cox, 2018, p. 6)
- Go to annotation“Meeting place” (Cox, 2018, p. 7)
Notes
- in the early days of anthropology, sound was modeled onto theories of cultural relativism and evolution. it was believed that the ability to hear was relative to culture
- that led to the employment of sound-recording devices which were then taken up by the colonial nation-states to engaging in othering, through the devices neutrality
Go to annotation“he phonograph carried the promise of cultural neutrality and the power of preservation but was used in ways that objectiied ideas about what sounds were more or less meaningful to listeners because of their cultural and racial designations. his is a way of thinking about the perception of sound as a means for classifying diference and, following on from this, of the classiication of sounds that are signiicant because they are distinguishable from noise.” (Cox, 2018, p. 1)
- this also raised questions on what is noise
- noise was seen as subversion, disorder and dystopia in a marxist historiographical analysis
- through communication theory, noise was seen as something negative, because it’s in the way of communication
- Tim Ingold criticized the concept of soundscapes, because sound is not an object, but the medium of perception
- Steven Feld went into another direction with his research and shifted the discipline Go to annotation“from the study of music and language in culture, society, and history to the study of music and language as culture, society, and history, creating the possibility for a performative, poetic anthropology” (Cox, 2018, p. 3)
- Go to annotation“acoustemology, meaning their sonic way of knowing and being in the world” (Cox, 2018, p. 4)
- Go to annotation“how the sound of words express an auditory sense of place, in what he calls “phonological iconicism”” (Cox, 2018, p. 4)
- Feld0s and Gell’s work point to an anthropology that is not tied to language or the social
Go to annotation“it is in sound’s inability to merge with or directly encode the meanings attributed to language that it similarly becomes meaningful for human beings, allows them to listen to themselves as vectors of meaning through a medium that is not meaning. hose who wish to ground meaning in language are disposed to imagine the “sign” through a magical precision bridging sound and sense, but such a coding, to the degree it were precise and exhaustive, would render impossible the “play” or ambiguity, the irony of sound and meaning “would nullify sound’s echolocative possibilities.” (Wagner 2001, 137)” (Cox, 2018, p. 4)
- ethnography of t sound is related or predated the multimodal turn, as it frees anthropology from it’s fixation on language and moves it closer to the sensual
- Go to annotation“Transduction is deployed as a metaphor for the cognitive, afective, and social efects of sound and aims to explain how technology changes perception and how bodies become entwined with machines in immersive soundscapes in the world of oceanographic research.” (Cox, 2018, p. 6)