Paper short abstract:

What of the hunger for quiet associated with lake tourism? “Listening otherwise” offers a way to think critically about the “hunger for quiet” that I have come across in my fieldwork in the Okanagan Lake tourism region, in unceded and ancestral territory of the Syilx (Okanagan).

Paper long abstract:

What of the hunger for quiet or near-silence associated with lake tourism? Particular sonic atmospheres in lakes that serve as recreational sites in the warm summer months in southern Canada are seen both as individual desires and a humanistic drive. More than an aesthetic to be enjoyed by individuals though, lakes are affective, material, corporeal, climatic, sensory, and ‘haunting’ atmospheres for tourists who enjoy them, as well as for tourists who are not authorized to enjoy them. Lakes, and beaches, private piers, and other geographies by which humans unequally access them, emit different sounds, and are heard differently, according to human bodies, bodies of matter, etc., that co-inhabit them. Robinson’s “listening otherwise” (2020) offer ways to think about the “hunger for quiet” that I have come across in my fieldwork in the Okanagan Lake tourism region, in unceded and ancestral territory of the Syilx (Okanagan). Listening otherwise is an anticolonial mode of listening to counteract the single-sense, fixating, consumptive, and “hungry” listening practices underpinning settler positionality. This approach to listening relationally complicates the otherwise dominant settler-tourist narrative about summer lake tourism in southern BC, Canada, and the normative desire for a naturalize quiet. Other actors and listening subjects complicate and also turn my attention to the politics of sound in tourism spaces, including quiet, that can disturb “forms of coloniality that remain unchallenged in touristic relations” (Harewood 2019).