Postures of listening

What is the shape of institutions? Materializing the cycles of life in an East African age class society

“…Over the past decade, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have devoted increasing attention to the study of instrumental music and songs as manifestations of human and nonhuman entities with autonomous agency and identities (Brabec de Mori 2017 a ; 2017 b ; Prévôt 2014; Stoichita 2011). These spirits, gods, animals, and living or dead humans that appear in the musical form are referred to as ‘sonic beings’ or ‘sonic agents’ (Bonini Baraldi 2017; Stoichita & Brabec de Mori 2017). My proposal differs on a fundamental element: in the case of the Samburu, ensoundment and choreographization concern institutions, that is, abstract normative entities reified by the body and the voice of performers.…”

“…The study of the role of nonhuman actors in the processes of social production has inspired, over the last forty years, a vast literature that now extends across several fields of the social sciences, from sociology to philosophy, from archaeology to anthropology (Fassin 2017; Harman 2017; Hodder 2012; Latour & Woolgar 1979). However, it is only recently that songs have been included in this category and analysed as ‘entities’ or ‘objects’ endowed with an ontological connotation somehow freed from its human origin (see Brabec de Mori 2017 a ; 2017 b ; Stoichita & Brabec de Mori 2017). This reflection is in line with the work of authors like Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (to name just two) who, over the last fifteen years in particular, have questioned – through different approaches and orientations – the anthropological theorizations of ‘otherness’ as a plurality of points of view on a uniform world, whose monistic nature is subject to a multiplicity of representations according to societies and eras (Henare, Holbraad & Wastel 2007).…”