Sound, Anthropology of

Abstract

The anthropology of sound asks and describes what it means to identify the physical phenomenon of vibration through a transmitting medium as an aspect of experience, conveying both particular forms of knowledge and social, political, and economic significations. It explores the possible relationships between the capacities for speech and hearing and modes of social and cultural organization as formulations of difference. It considers how it may be possible to invoke a conceptualization of sound that is irreducible to linguistic and musical structures but is conditioned by ecology, matter, and media. In this field, which draws from the anthropologies of music and language and intersects with ethnomusicology and the anthropologies of media, science, space, and the senses, sound is both a subject of study and a means of representation, with the main proponent of the field, Steven Feld, advocating sound‐recording practice as a necessary, sensory resource for ethnographic communication.

Glacial Sensing: Entanglements of Sound and Vision

“…On the one hand, an extensive discourse of multisensory experience exists in visual ethnography that addresses how filming and editing methods in ethnographic film and photography represent and invoke broader sensory experiences—for example, expressing “noise” or a haptic sense of “having been there” (Grimshaw 2001, 93–96; MacDougall 1997, 222; Pink 2006, 42). On the other hand, there have been calls for an anthropology of sound and acoustic space (Cox 2018, 6; Feld and Brenneis 2004; Helmreich 2007, 622) that is developed enough to be on par with visual anthropology. Amid this, there has also been an ongoing discourse calling for a more multisensory anthropology—arguing that sight and sound are already dominant senses within Euro‐American culture.…”

Introduction

“…Feld has also produced many albums as part of his work. Already in the 1970s, he recognized the need for ethnographies in different modes: sound recordings that are ethnographies (Cox 2018). His most recent production, Voices of the Rainforest (Feld et al 2019), is an immersive film offering ambient soundscapes.…”