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Sawt, Bodies, Species: Sonic Pluralism in Morocco

Jan 23, 20255 min read

Sawt, Bodies, Species: Sonic Pluralism in Morocco

Bibliography

Aubry, G. (2023). Sawt, Bodies, Species: Sonic Pluralism in Morocco.

Notes

Annotations

(4/27/2023, 10:16:54 AM)

Go to annotation“Because seaweed and pollution cannot be heard directly, our listening principally relied on our capacity to” (Aubry, 2023, p. 124)

Go to annotation“The sea does not speak, Boundir commented, but it can tell stories, and one simply has to listen to them. The “voice of the sea, that’s the best topic,” he concluded.” (Aubry, 2023, p. 124)

Go to annotation“How can notions such as nature, culture, subjectivity, and embodiment be re-examined through such a voice, from the perspective of sound studies and eco-criticism?” (Aubry, 2023, p. 124)

Go to annotation“relate affectively to the world.” (Aubry, 2023, p. 125)

Go to annotation“This raises questions about how human rights can be extended to include extra-human lives, without automatically depoliticizing differences in positions between humans themselves.” (Aubry, 2023, p. 125)

Go to annotation“Boundir also introduced me to scientific terms pertaining to the modes of intra- and inter-species interactions, and to their milieu: biotope, substrate, symbiosis, epiphyte, saprophyte, biocenosis, and other terms, which at first sounded like a poem by Donna Haraway, but ultimately helped me to better apprehend the complexity of seaweed life.” (Aubry, 2023, p. 126)

Go to annotation“In order to be considered a voice at all, extra-human manifestations must therefore resonate intimately with the listener, or else they are experienced as noise or static.” (Aubry, 2023, p. 126)

Go to annotation“be modeled and predicted.” (Aubry, 2023, p. 128)

Go to annotation“A similar natural voice of the sea emerges in Younes Boundir’s scientific study on the interactions between seaweed organisms, anthropic pollution, and seawater on the Atlantic coast. Boundir’s article does not go as far as to claim the necessity to reduce pollution in the name of biodiversity and environmental justice. He simply sticks to the facts, as is customary in scientific journals. Here, the natural voice of the sea is not grounded in affective perception; it is a product of scientific methodology.” (Aubry, 2023, p. 128)

Go to annotation“According to Irmgard Emmelhainz (2015), the visuality of contemporary scientific imagery turns images into “signs of cognition,” that is epistemological products that are “indifferent” to the viewer. Through machinic vision, images have become scientific, managerial, and military instruments of knowledge—and thus of capital and power. This involves “a passage from representation to presentation,” through which images no longer relay the subjects of “belief” or the objects of contemplation, instead coming to be perceived as “an extension of the world.” Through data visualization and scientific imagery, seaweed, pollution, and seawater are therefore naturalized into abstract objects of study, whose interactions and evolution can” (Aubry, 2023, p. 128)

Go to annotation“Through social protests, the natural voice of the sea becomes much more “vocal” and audible, full of “grain” (Barthes 1977) and affect.” (Aubry, 2023, p. 129)

Go to annotation“Drawing on Steven Feld’s (2017) “acoustemological” method, I describe these forms of interaction in terms of “embodied,” “relational,” and “cumulative” knowledge. A different voice of the sea emerges from the local ways of engaging with place and space-time, which I call an intimate voice of the sea.” (Aubry, 2023, p. 130)

Go to annotation“As I already suggested, people are not only agents in this process, but also objects, constituted as humans by their environ” (Aubry, 2023, p. 131)

Go to annotation“They also suggest that people in Sidi Bouzid are “made,” or “domesticated,” by the sea through continuous interaction and direct contact with the sea, and via their nutrition. People’s common knowledge gives rise to an intimate voice of the sea, which expresses interspecies co-dependence.” (Aubry, 2023, p. 133)

Go to annotation“For the anthropologist Romain Simenel (2017), vernacular naming practices in Morocco allow for social and semantic continuity between “domestic” and “wild” territories. In Berber Islamic “analogical” cosmology, these territories are symbolically related to “the world of humans” and “the world of spirits” (jnoun) respectively.” (Aubry, 2023, p. 133)

Go to annotation“The natural voice of the sea figures an abstract voice, emerging through modern technological means of visualization, mapping, prediction, and management of life forms; it is a groundless voice, indifferent to its listeners. The second modality, the intimate voice of the sea, pertains to a local history of interaction between humans and marine life; this voice also manifests people’s continuous efforts to adapt to—and sometimes resist—the naturalizing force of capitalist extractivism.” (Aubry, 2023, p. 134)

Go to annotation“Researching together with Younes Boundir and Imane Zoubai became a collective process based on mutual learning. Our approach borrowed from feminist methodology, grounded in positionality, performativity, and micro-political interventions as possible ways of “becoming otherwise” (Neimanis 2016).” (Aubry, 2023, p. 134)

Go to annotation“Sonic pluralism, therefore, is not a “matter of facts, but a matter of concern”” (Aubry, 2023, p. 136)

See also