Introduction

Abstract

To change settler colonial perception requires reorienting the form by which we share knowledge, the way we convey sound, song and music." -Dylan Robinson (2020, 28) This special section explores song from a fundamental but unexplored perspective: as a way of knowing for anthropology. The themes touched upon include ontological politics and their relationship with anti-or decoloniality, the other-than-human, and the senses. Feld ([1982] 2012) has long argued for anthropology to attend to the epistemic importance of songs and sound, above all in his proposal for a synesthetic acoustemology (Feld 2015). However, the question of how this could apply to anthropological onto/epistemologies beyond projects focused on sound has yet to be addressed. Much anthropological work on songs or singing is, in the terminology of Tim Ingold (2013), on or about. What we are interested in is anthropological knowing with, from, or through song. Therefore, we ask: How can anthropologists take seriously the ways of knowing that constitute different practices of singing for shaping research? Rather than considering song solely as an object of ethnographic study, what possibilities arise if song is explored as an onto/epistemic practice for the recursive reformulation of anthropological work more broadly?The ways of knowing by singing explored in this special section are relevant across anthropology for two reasons. First, they highlight the logocentrism that continues to underpin the bulk of anthropological knowledge production, despite sensory, process, ontological, and multimodal turns.