Sound has come to have a particular resonance in many disciplines over the past decade. Social theorists, historians, literary researchers, folklorists, and scholars in science and technology studies and visual, performative, and cultural studies provide a range of substantively rich accounts and epistemologically provocative models for how researchers can take sound seriously. This conversation explores general outlines of an anthropology of sound. Its main focus, however, is on the issues involved in using sound as a primary medium for ethnographic research.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Illinois Press and Society for Ethnomusicology are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethnomusicology. n this paper I address two questions: What are the major ways that the classless and generally egalitarian features of one small-scale society reveal themselves in the structure of organized sounds? What are the major ways that these same features reveal themselves in the social organization and ideology of soundmakers and soundmaking? By providing an overview of these areas I hope to illuminate some dimensions of a sociology of sound for the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, a traditionally nonstratified society where egalitarian features seem significant to sound structure, and where inequalities also are clearly represented in the distribution of expressive resources for men and women.My concern with these problems derives from a preoccupation with merging ethnomusicological questions (the cultural study of the shared meanings of musical sounds) with sociomusical ones (the study of musical sounds from perspectives of the social structure and social organization of resources, makers, and occasions). My work of the last few years (Feld 1981(Feld , 1982(Feld , 1983 attempts to understand the most salient lessons about the structure and meaning of Kaluli sounds and ways they are inseparable from the fabric of Kaluli social life and thought, where they are taken for granted as everyday reality by members of this society. My title alludes to a perspective that considers structured sound as "un fait social total," in the sense that sociologists like Durkheim, Mauss, G. H. Mead, and Schutz stress the primacy of symbolic action in an ongoing intersubjective lifeworld, and the ways engagement in symbolic action continually builds and shapes actors' perceptions and meanings.My title also alludes to another paper, Song structure and social structure, one of Alan Lomax's seminal cantometric reports (Lomax 1962). This reference is meant to locate this paper, and the Kaluli pattern it reports, in a larger comparative framework for the sociomusical analysis of classless and egalitarian societies. In doing so I also want to reconsider Lomax's rationale for why we should compare sociomusical systems, and what we can compare from one to the next.For Lomax the "principal message of music concerns a fairly limited and crude set of patterns" (1962:450); as a form of human behavior music should be Final version rec'd: 2/1/84 ? 1984 Society for Ethnomusicology 383 384 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY, SEPTEMBER 1984seen as highly patterned, regular, and redundant in each society, yielding stable structures. Lomax suggested that cantometrics provide profiles for each of these...

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Music has a fundamentally social life. It is made to be consumed—practically, intellectually, individually, communally—and it is consumed as symbolic entity. By “consumed” I mean socially interpreted as meaningfully structured, produced, performed, and displayed by varieties of prepared, invested, or otherwise historically situated actors. How does this happen? What does it mean? How can one know about it? These questions focus on the nature of the music communication process, and to rethink them I turn back to the question posed often by Charles Seeger: what does music communicate? To answer he also needed to ask: what does speech about music communicate? Through diagrams and dense prose, Seeger (1977:16–44) argued that to address the issue of what music communicates requires specifying what it could not communicate. The logical preoccupation with differences between the speech and music modes led to the notion that speech is the communication of “world view as the intellection of reality” while music is communication of “world view as the feeling of reality” (ibid.).

Numerous dimensions of this paper were stimulated by and formulated in response to two of my favorite groove-sters, Robert Plant Armstrong and Charles Keil, to whom it is dedicated. Bob was my main uptown source of inspiration; elegant, visual, heady, abstract, he could contemplate every phenomenological ounce of melody from a sculpted object. I think of Bob as the His Master's Voice of the groove, loving the intensity of form, and the sensuality of witnessing it. Charlie has been my strongest downtown critic, hearing Kaluli ideas and sounds as street-solid critiques of Western modes of musical production and consumption, always ready to help celebrate what liberation or resistance they can inspire. I think of Charlie as the James Brown (“Give it up or turnit a-loose!”) proto-rap-scratcher of the groove, putting pennies on the tone arm, push-press-pulling the record back and forth before digging the spin. Research support for fieldwork with the Kaluli 1976-7, 1982, 1984 was generously provided by the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the American Philosophical Society. For discussion of early variants or versions of these ideas much thanks and no blame to audience participants at lectures/colloquia at the University of Texas Semiotics Colloquium, Rice University Circle, Columbia University Center for Ethnomusicology, American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings, New York University Anthropology Department, Carleton University Conference on Alternative Musicology. As always, it is a pleasure to acknowledge the help of my collaborators and kinsmen, nado Babi (Bambi B. Schieffelin) and nabas Bage (Edward L. Schieffelin), both of whom lifted-up-over several versions of this essay, and Jubi, Kulu, Gigio, Honowo, Ayasilo, and many other Kaluli who have shared song, talk, food, and trail. Thanks too for helpful lift-up-over comments to Dieter Christensen, John Miller Chernoff, Charlie Keil, Gail Kligman, Greg Urban, and anonymous readers. Bikpela thanks to Shari Robertson for her photographs, and to Don Niles of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies Music Department for tracking down the original Krymus Band recording of Wanpela Meri.