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Music, Language, and Texts: Sound and Semiotic Ethnography

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Music, Language, and Texts: Sound and Semiotic Ethnography AN41CH31-Faudree ARI 16 August 2012 16:37 Music, Language, and Texts: Sound and Semiotic Ethnography Paja Faudree Department of Anthropology, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912; email: [email protected] Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012. 41:519–36 Keywords First published online as a Review in Advance on chronotope, circulation, soundscape, subjectivity, textuality, voice July 9, 2012 The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at Abstract anthro.annualreviews.org This review surveys recent research on language-music: the unified This article’s doi: expressive field comprising sounded and textual signs whose seg- by Brown University on 11/05/12. For personal use only. 10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145851 mentation into “language” and “music” is culturally constructed. I Copyright c 2012 by Annual Reviews. argue that approaching language-music semiotically will promote— All rights reserved alongside the discipline’s emergent “auditory turn”—greater holism in 0084-6570/12/1021-0519$20.00 anthropological practice if coupled to the joint effort of attending to Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:519-536. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org textuality while decentering its primacy. I discuss recent scholarship that demonstrates, if often implicitly, the merit of this approach. I organize this work into three overlapping themes of active research: scholarship on chronotopes and soundscapes exploring processes that reconfigure time and place; work on subject creation focusing on voice, emotion, intersubjectivity, and listening; and scholarship on the social dimensions of object creation, including technological mediation, authentication, and circulation. I conclude by discussing future directions in research on language-music and the promise such work offers of furthering the call to broaden anthropology’s holism while loosening adherence to its text-centered practices. 519 AN41CH31-Faudree ARI 16 August 2012 16:37 INTRODUCTION: ON SIGNS, competing, overlapping, mutually influencing BOUNDARIES, AND PROCESSES signs essential to human societies. Indeed, many scholars discussed here are employing such an “Our language is like music”: That senti- approach—though not always explicitly—to ment is frequently expressed when people take us further down the path of “viewing discuss Mazatec, an indigenous tonal language the precise ways that music and language on which I conduct research. Spoken in are phenomenally intertwined and socially southern Mexico, Mazatec is best known for dialogic” (Feld et al. 2005, p. 340). By viewing its “speech surrogate”—a whistled register the boundary between language and music as (Cowan 1948)—and its use in chants during even more thoroughly constructed and placing medicinal ceremonies involving hallucinogenic the burden of analysis on signs regardless of mushrooms (Rothenberg 2003, Wasson et al. categorical distinction, we not only move away 1974). Similar to lament (Wilce 2009), whistle from our own assumptions about the division speech and mushroom chants hover at the between language and music, but also heighten boundary between music and language. Al- the visibility of boundaries between different though there are numerous ways to interpret expressive categories as ethnographic facts such speaker statements, the relevant point is supported by specific cultural practices, insti- that for people expressing them the boundaries tutions, and ideologies. Furthermore, viewing between language and music, between speech music and language as part of a full semiotic and song, are not particularly meaningful field will further ongoing conversations about and do not map onto standard categorical how to decenter texts as a core unit of analysis, distinctions between “music” and “language.” while providing the tools for examining them Nor is this an isolated case: The ethnographic holistically and assessing their relative impor- record provides abundant evidence of soci- tance (and unimportance) by positioning texts eties worldwide where the division between alongside other collections of signs, sonic and language and music is differentially salient and otherwise. contingent on local practices. What lies behind There is a rich history of research on lan- such statements is not merely the culturally guage and music, a subject others have treated different ways of conceptualizing divisions at length (Feld & Fox 1994, 1999; Feld et al. between language and music, nor the variances 2005). This history has built, recently, toward among their ideologized meanings. Rather, increased interest in analyzing sound, reflected music and language are socially determined by the recent founding of the AAA music and by Brown University on 11/05/12. For personal use only. constructs that arbitrarily divide, in fundamen- sound interest group (Black 2011). Several an- tally cultural ways, a communicative whole. thropologists of music have recently called for Yet, one persistent difficulty, which I do not greater focus on neglected sonic dimensions of Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:519-536. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org escape in this essay, is that we lack the language social experience through multisensory ethnog- to refer easily to this expressive whole without raphy, thus counterbalancing the discipline’s using terms that artificially divide it, thereby prevailing focus on visuality and textuality reinscribing the divisions they presuppose. (Porcello et al. 2010, Samuels et al. 2010). Although many approaches can advance These authors advocate research oriented to- the cause of moving beyond received divisions ward the “soundscape” concept, designed to between language and music, I take the po- “contain everything to which the ear [is] ex- sition here that viewing music and language posed in a given sonic setting ...[including] as variably constructed distinctions in a total the contradictory forces of the natural and semiotic field is especially fruitful. The musical the cultural, the fortuitous and the com- and linguistic signifiers making up this field posed, the improvised and the deliberately compose an integrated expressive system produced . ...[C]onstituted by cultural histo- whose components are differing, sometimes ries, ideologies, and practices ...soundscape 520 Faudree AN41CH31-Faudree ARI 16 August 2012 16:37 implicates listening as a cultural practice” Thus finding ways to integrate texts with sound (Samuels et al. 2010, p. 330). This “sonic into a unified analytical framework alongside turn” (Ochoa 2006) in the field is repre- the ongoing effort to decenter their primacy sented by scholarship in recent decades stress- has implications for reflexive scholarship, forc- ing an expansive treatment of the sonic as a ing attention to our own expressive practices site for ethnographic analysis and the develop- as bound up in the same processes enveloping ment of social theory (Erlmann 2004, Feld & the entities we study. Finally, paying holistic Brenneis 2004, Fox 2006, Graham 1995, attention to texts involves examining not only Hirschkind 2009, Sterne 2003). their internal qualities and their embeddedness This is a vital movement in the field, one in social practice, but also their materiality as promising to further the holism of anthro- physical objects circulating in social worlds pological research while drawing attention to and phenomenally accessible to the senses (see work under way on sonic aspects of sociality, Myers 2002, Urban 2001; on language including research on sound and the music- materiality, see Shankar & Cavanaugh 2012). language continuum. This shift will have even A semiotic approach offers valuable tools for greater power if it can be harnessed to methods advancing holistic research of this sort, offering exploring sound’s importance without losing a unified framework for analyzing the variety sight of how texts help configure soundscapes. of expressive forms—spoken, sung, written, In particular ethnographic contexts, “musick- etc.—at play in particular social contexts. ing” (Small 1998) and “languaging” are cultur- Many of these concepts are already in use, ally intertwined in ways that often rely crucially if implicitly, in the ethnographies I discuss. on texts, whether written language, musical no- To date, semiotic approaches have gained tation, or other graphical productions of mean- greatest traction among linguistic anthropol- ing.1 Although music and language are jointly ogists: Mertz’s (2007) recent Annual Review of implicated in various expressive practices— Anthropology article, “Semiotic Anthropology,” such as whistle speech and chanting—singing is of necessity focused heavily on linguistic a particularly salient nexus of musical-linguistic anthropological research. Nevertheless, the signification, in turn tied in culturally variable Peircean theoretical foundations on which it ways to written texts. The sounded dimensions is based can be applied to any social signs, not of human experience are intimately tied to merely linguistic ones—including, for exam- graphical ones (see Gitelman 2000) not least ple, those analyzed by archaeologists (Preucel as a reaction to the supposed ephemerality 2006), physical anthropologists (Deacon by Brown University on 11/05/12. For personal use only. of sound, a feature sometimes proposed as 1997), and ethnomusicologists (Turino 1999, a reason for disciplinary inattention (Feld & 2010).2 Discussions of Peircean semiotics— Brenneis 2004, Samuels et al. 2010). This calls augmented by concepts introduced by others, Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2012.41:519-536. Downloaded
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