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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
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.