Shoot the sergeant, shatter the mountain: The production of masculinity in zulu ngoma song and dance in post-apartheid South Africa

Choreographing Cape Town through Goema music and dance

“…You hear the goema sound. Th e band plays, the team is coming from District Six and they move down into Adderley, past the Castle of Good Hope, right in front of the City 16 An emphasis on the body might be particularly pertinent in the context of South Africa, as several scholars have noted the body as an important means of asserting presence and value aft er state-sanctioned dispossession (Hamilton 2009;Meintjes 2004;Nuttall 2004).…”

Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology

“…Anthropologists working with sound, however (Feld 1996a,b;Hirschkind 2006;Meintjes 2004), question the epistemic foundation of histories that claim an ocularcentricity of modernity through fieldwork that explores the acoustic construction of knowledge.…”

The Reorganization of the Sensory World

“…Ethnographies that explore local distinctions among the natural, human, and spiritual worlds note that the transformation between worlds often occurs through acts of listening to songs, sounds, and noises (Descola 1994, Lévi-Strauss 1969, Seeger 1987, Stoller 1997, Taussig 1993, Viveiros de Castro 1992. Work on politics of the production of recorded sound has addressed listening as a cultural practice, in the auditory practices of recording studio engineers (Meintjes 2003, Porcello 2005 No sense has been more thoroughly interrogated by anthropologists than sight. Visual anthropology has a more explicitly elaborated metadiscourse than do anthropologies of the other senses.…”

“…The anthropological discourse-centered approaches to culture have yielded sophisticated analyses of aesthetic aspects of expressive culture that can be intertwined with sensorial modes of knowing and embodied expressive-sensorial practices (Basso 1985, Feld 1996, Fox 2004, Kapchan 2007, Meintjes 2004, Novak 2008, Porcello 1998, Samuels 2004. Furthermore, the deconstruction of discourses of the body (Foucault 1988, Lock & Farquhar 2007, of the sensorial practices of colonialism (Seremetakis 1994, Taussig 1993, of the politics of media circulation (Meintjes 2003), and of the notion of personhood (Descola 1994, Desjarlais 1992, Geurts 2002, Straight 2007) have been foundational for enabling us to think about the senses. It is more productive to treat discourse as part and parcel of processes of embodiment and knowledge and sense-making, rather than to dichotomize bodily sensorial knowledge and linguistic expression.…”