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- Convenors:
-
Walther Maradiegue
(Freie Universität Berlin)
Laura Malagón Valbuena
Elizabeth Gallon Droste (Freie Universität Berlin)
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- Format:
- Lab
- Transfers:
- Closed for transfers
Short Abstract:
This lab explores the role of listening in anthropology, focusing on how sonic ethnography can reshape fieldwork, writing, and positionality. It critiques colonial legacies and technologies of sonic inscription, examining the political significance of sound drawing on experiences from Latin America.
Long Abstract:
The Listening–Writing Sonic Ethnographies Lab critically examines how anthropologists listen and how listening shapes fieldwork, positionality, and ethnographic writing. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's (2006) concept of "uncommon orientations," the lab challenges traditional ethnographic approaches and repositions listening from acoustics to phenomenology, inspired by Tim Ingold’s idea of sound as atmospheric. This promotes deeper engagement with sound and emphasizes the sonic agencies (LaBelle 2020) that shape affective relations during fieldwork.
Participants will explore sound as a way of knowing (Feld 2015), considering how it articulates socio-cultural relations with more-than-human ecologies and uncommon worlds. The lab critiques reliance on audio recorders and photographic cameras (Robinson 2020) for capturing "indexical" experiences and advocates for broader methods of listening and writing.
Scholars working with Black, Indigenous, and peasant communities in Latin America, as well as in contexts of migration, violence, and threatened territories, will share how listening intersects with positionality and can serve as acts of resistance in politically charged contexts. Through sonic listening and writing exercises, participants will co-create ethnographic practices that challenge normative anthropological methods and acknowledge the political connotations from the uncommons to shape, as a constant process, solid commons.
The lab will be held over two days. The first session includes participant experiences on listening in ethnography, followed by collaborative development of multimodal and experimental practices. The second session will focus on deepening sonic ethnography methods during fieldwork, with an emphasis on decentering both audio-video recording and the anthropologist as the only person capable of thinking/writing anthropologically.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Contribution short abstract:
This proposal investigates the relationship between radio and aquifers in the Ranchería River’s floodplain in Southern Guajira, Colombia, delving into the potential of radio as an ethnographic medium to trace the ontological multiplicity of aquifers.
Contribution long abstract:
Engaging with subterranean worlds disrupts many of our sense-making habits, as they demand a retooling of our languages and mediums to oscillating figures, volumetric grounds, and multi-scalar magnitudes. Amidst these worlds, aquifers emerge as distant and phenomenologically elusive intensities, yet they remain critical water sources drawing increasing attention in the face of planetary meltdown.
In the semi-arid peninsula of La Guajira in northern Colombia, aquifers weave the Ranchería River’s floodplain and are enacted through a divergent network of technologies, imaginaries, and affects. Much like aquifers, radio operates as an interconnected tapestry, articulating sonic frameworks of belonging and subjectivity across the region. The current proposal asks how radio might serve as a medium that carries and transmits sonic manifestations of the ontological multiplicity of aquifers,
including the imaginaries, affects, rhythms, choreographies, and repertoires through which they come into socio-material presence.
Drawing from the resonances between these two networks, the proposal of a radiophonic ethnography of aquifers inquires upon the possibilities of radio as an ethnographic medium to make sense of aquiferous worlds. It reimagines radio
broadcasting as an apparatus that not only mimics and performs the conductive capacities and elusive dynamics of aquifers but also mediates them through divergent shapes above the surface, akin to discerning water forms within radio fields.
Contribution short abstract:
This presentation examines if audio production techniques, like montage, sonic modulations, and reverberations, can both initiate and evoke the process of anthropological knowledge production. We will discuss the case of collaborative radio-plays and experiment in practice.
Contribution long abstract:
This presentation examines how audio production techniques can both initiate and evoke the process of ethnographic knowledge production that occurs between researchers and their collaborators. In this understanding, all technological elements, including embodied techniques, are not merely functional tools but socially distingued mediations. On one hand, they represent diverse hearing, body, voice techniques, and cultured tools and their use during the fieldwork enables "experimenting with the other's audiovisual systems" (paraphrasing Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier). On the other hand, technologies as programmed and designed actors are encoded within Western-centric logic that reflects the historical relationships between center and periphery (Greene, Porcello).
To illustrate this, I will present an analysis of radio plays recorded and edited during fieldwork in northern Malawi in collaboration with local performance artists and sound engineers from small recording studios (Wave Diamond Records, Black Kings Records, Crunch Vibez).
Through the presentation of edited fragments from coulisse perspective - that is, from within the digital audio workstation - I will retrace situational ethnographic-artistic practices that resulted in audio recordings. Specifically, I will focus on production choices made in cooperation with local producers, including utilized sonic effects, editing choices, and overdubs.
Subsequently, we will discuss how this modus can become part of the ethnographic encounter. We will discuss the affect of the montage techniques (Suhr, Willerslev), sonic modulations (Meintjes), and reverberation (Kuhn, Wees). Finally, we will collaboratively experiment by mixing varied sound sources - recorded voices and soundscapes with samples from databases - and examine how these effects influence the potential for evoking anthropological knowledge.
Contribution short abstract:
Drawing on my fieldwork with violin makers and "tonewood" trees in Germany and Brazil, my contribution presents listening practices as ways of knowing the more-than-human other. Furthermore, it explores how colonial sound aesthetics are connected to environmental exploitation in Brazil.
Contribution long abstract:
Instruments of the violin family are predominately made of the wood of two trees: Sycamore maple (acer pseudoplatanus) and European spruce (picea abies). Whilst these species are comparatively common in Europe, it is far from every tree that has the necessary affordances to become an instrument. Rather, particular properties that equip the wood with good resonating qualities are required to make the cut. In the selection of these woods and the crafting of the instruments, listening to trees and to wood is an essential method used by tonewood farmers, violin makers, and finally by musicians choosing their instrument.
Through the use of Pernambuco (paubrasilia echinata), a threatened tree endemic to the Brazil Atlantic Rainforest that is the main resource from which violin bows are made, these contexts are furthermore linked to Brazilian colonial ecologies and land rights concerns. Exploring how colonial sound aesthetics are connected to environmental exploitation in Brazil, I address different forms of listening here: to the voices of indigenous environmental activists, to the absences and presences in the soundscapes of one of the world's most threatened habitat, to the sound of the violin bows, which is at the core of a variety of social and environmental conflicts.
This contribution draws on fieldwork conducted at both sites, with a focus on the more-than-human listening practices that are part of violin making. It also addresses some benefits and downsides of using audio technology as part of a multispecies ethnographic methodology.
Contribution short abstract:
This contribution highlights the experience of noise in women commuters on Karachi’s roads. It argues that attending to urban noise requires an intersectional lens to draw out how existing inequalities come to bear on sensory experiences and produce an urban ground that is acoustically uneven.
Contribution long abstract:
This contribution reflects on ethnographic accounts of women’s experiences of noise in the city of Karachi. Urban noise to an extent imports ideas of productivity and liveliness, while its excesses conjure a host of urban governance forms for abatement and management in many cities. In many others, however, such as Karachi, noise comes to be tolerated and accepted as a mundane facet of urban life. Karachi’s sonic landscape is dominated by sounds of road traffic and remains ungoverned. Traffic noise, therefore, permeates all boundaries: of private homes, schools, hospitals and remains unchecked by governance institutions. In this presentation, through interviews and auto-ethnography, I delineate how noise frames acoustic experiences of women on Karachi’s roads. I argue that noise touches women’s bodies in ways that engender experiences of fear. As noise of the city’s roads take over the hearing capacities of women commuters, it generates embodied experiences of “being trapped” and unable to sense danger. Attending to urban noise and its subjective experiences, therefore, requires an intersectional lens to draw out how existing inequalities come to bear on sensory experiences and produce an urban ground that is acoustically uneven.
Contribution short abstract:
Listening with frackquakes via geophones, thumper trucks, mineral dowsing, interferometry and USGS felt reports reveals differences of describing vibrating, trembling and shaking. In these descriptions, tremors complicate calculable thresholds of toxicity that separate human from milieu.
Contribution long abstract:
Frackquakes caused by oil and gas operations near the nuclear Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (Permian Basin) create uncertainties of threshold theories of pollution and containment.
Listening with frackquakes in ethnographic moments via geophones, thumper trucks, mineral dowsing, interferometry and USGS felt reports, with ordinary people attuning to tremors reveals differences of describing vibrating, trembling and shaking. Listening is indefinite, creating tensions around the interpretability and accessibility of data. In these descriptions, tremors complicate calculable thresholds of toxicity that separate human from milieu.
A sonic materialism disturbs the apparatus of measurement and monitoring that determines legal policies for nuclear waste disposal, seismic prospecting for oil and gas, as well as citizen science efforts to incite urgency. Through transduction and sonification techne, attuning to infrasound destabilizes what or how a subject forms, or listens. A more-than-human listening includes geological grammars or a “matterphorical” (Gandorfer et al) relation of infrasonic pressure, compressibility and heat describe fluid dynamics. In and of air, sand itself “listens” as folds of matter affected by sonic energy, and as nuclear memory, i.e., “the sand melted into glass” used for blast effects.
Literalizing phonography to mean "writing sound," I argue that descriptions of sensation problematize both event and perception to ask after prefigurative and incomplete forms of political relation in confronting oil and gas’ regimes of imperceptibility. This work uses both field recordings and compositional sound writing as a sonic ethnographic form.