A generation of scholars in multiple disciplines has investigated sound in ways that are productive for anthropologists. We introduce the concept of soundscape as a modality for integrating this work into an anthropological approach. We trace its history as a response to the technological mediations and listening practices emergent in modernity and note its absence in the anthropological literature. We then trace the history of technology that gave rise to anthropological recording practices, film sound techniques, and experimental sound art, noting productive interweavings of these threads. After considering ethnographies that explore relationships between sound, personhood, aesthetics, history, and ideology, we question sound's supposed ephemerality as a reason for the discipline's inattention. We conclude with a call for an anthropology that more seriously engages with its own history as a sounded discipline and moves forward in ways that incorporate the social and cultural sounded world more fully.

Although anthropological and critical social theory have a long interest in sensory experience, work on the senses has intensified within the past 20 years. This article traces three sensory genealogies within anthropology: the work of Ong and McLuhan as critiqued and advanced by David Howes and the Concordia Project; phenomenological studies as advanced by Paul Stoller; and a focus on materialities as advanced by Nadia Seremetakis. Studies of individual senses, which we survey, led to calls for a more integrated approach to the senses, both within anthropology and from cinema and media studies. In various ways, the senses are constituted by their imbrication in mediated cultural practices, whether mediated by technology, discourse, or local epistemologies. We argue that integrating language and discourse into the study of the senses along with new media insights more fully articulates the significance of body-sensorial knowledge.

In this article, I explore the inherent ambiguity of cultural identities through a discussion of placenames around the San Carlos Apache reservation in southeastern Arizona. The Western Apache residents of San Carlos live in a colonized landscape. Residents maintain an attachment to Apache history and cultural sovereignty, not only by preserving and maintaining placenames in the Western Apache language, but through the performance arenas of speech play, verbal art, and code-switching puns. In this article, I concentrate on the placenames compiled by Britton Goode (1911-81), a Western Apache linguist and historian. These language practices problematize the question of identity by reading culture into and through the contingencies of everyday experience, [placenames, verbal art, identity, Western Apache, language and culture] So every day I wove on the great loom, but every night by torchlight I unwove it; and so for three years I deceived the Achaeans.-Homer, The Odyssey 19: 150-152 (Fitzgerald 1963) Penelope's "weaving trick" (Katz 1991) presents the opening and organizing image for the article that follows. Penelope's weaving and unweaving of Old Laertes's funeral shroud implicates a political practice-a kind of crafted (and crafty) filibuster. As a subaltern practice, Penelope takes to a literal end point her son Telemachus's admonition that she tend to her own (female) tasks, "the distaff and the loom" (Fitzgerald 1963:1.410). She uses the gendered practice of weaving to sabotage the desires and expectations of her untiring, unwanted suitors. It is also, I think, a fruitful anthropological image-one that highlights "the indeterminacy of rhetorical action" (Battaglia 1995:4) and the productivity of loose threads in cultural practices. As such, it makes a powerful metaphor for cultural semiosis, playing against the constructionist tropes of weaving, tapestry making, and web spinning that have dominated a certain version of cultural interpretation that often locates the meaningfulness of culture in its internal coherence. 1 American Ethnologist 28(2):277-302.

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