Paper short abstract:

My poster will seek to demonstrate the ways in which sound and song-making can and should be recognized by the discipline of ontological anthropology as ways that displaced and nomadic people know and relate to their environments.

Paper long abstract:

In exploring the field of ontological anthropology, I have found many traces of song and sound in several scholars' works, which speak to musical ways of knowing and being in the world. The aim of my poster will be to provide new modes of imagining how ontological ways of being are affected by the displacement of peoples. My aim is to intervene at the intersection of these two academic fields and argue that sound and song-making can and should be taken into account within an ontological framework. Not only will this enrich anthropological studies of different ontologies, it will also provide new ways of imagining how ontological ways of being are affected by migration among displaced peoples for whom sound plays an important role. If the ontological turn in anthropology is being used for the purposes of understanding how people relate to non-humans in the face of ecological crisis, then it must account too for those who have been moved by climate change and its narratives. I contend that acknowledging the constituting of the world through sound means we can ask new questions about the omissions of sound and mobility in ontological anthropology.