Hearing Cultures W ENNER-GREN INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM SERIES ○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○○ Series Editor: Richard G. Fox, President, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York. ISSN: 1475-536X Since its inception in 1941, the Wenner-Gren Foundation has convened more than 125 international symposia on pressing issues in anthro- pology. Wenner-Gren International symposia recognize no boundaries— intellectual, national, or subdisciplinary. These symposia affirm the worth of anthropology and its capacity to address the nature of human- kind from a great variety of perspectives. They make new links to related disciplines, such as law, history, and ethnomusicology, and revivify old links, as between archaeology and sociocultural anthropology, for example. Each symposium brings together participants from around the world, for a week-long engagement with a specific issue, but only after intensive planning of the topic and format over the previous 18 months. In fulfilling its mission to build a world community of anthropologists and to support basic research in anthropology, the Foundation now extends its distinctive and productive pattern of pre-symposium plan- ning to the preparation and publication of the resulting volumes. Never before has the Foundation taken responsibility for publishing the papers from its international symposia. By initiating this series, the Foundation wishes to ensure timely publication, wide distribution, and high pro- duction standards. The President of the Foundation serves as the series editor, and the symposium organizers edit the individual volumes. Some landmark volumes from the past are: Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth in 1956 (William L. Thomas); Man the Hunter in 1968 (Irven DeVore and Richard B. Lee); Cloth and Human Experience in 1989 (Jane Schneider and Annette Weiner); and Tools, Language, and Cognition in Human Evolution in 1993 (Kathleen Gibson and Tim Ingold). Reports on recent symposia can be found on the foundation’s website, www.wennergren.org, and inquiries should be addressed to [email protected]. Hearing Cultures Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity Edited by VEIT ERLMANN Oxford •New York English edition First published in 2004 by Berg Editorial offices: 1st Floor, Angel Court, St Clements Street, Oxford, OX4 1AW, UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA © Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1 85973 823 0 (Cloth) 1 85973 828 1 (Paper) Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Wellingborough, Northants. Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn. www.bergpublishers.com Contents Acknowledgments vii Participants in the 2002 Wenner-Gren Symposium ix 1 But What of the Ethnographic Ear? Anthropology, Sound, and the Senses Veit Erlmann 1 2 Listening to the Wild Blue Yonder: The Challenges of Acoustic Ecology Bruce R. Smith 21 3 Ambiguous Traces, Mishearing, and Auditory Space Paul Carter 43 4 Language and Nature in Sound Alignment Janis B. Nuckolls 65 5 Raising Spirits and Restoring Souls: Early Modern Medical Explanations for Music’s Effects Penelope Gouk 87 6 Ether Ore: Mining Vibrations in American Modernist Music Douglas Kahn 107 7 Hearing Modernity: Egypt, Islam, and the Pious Ear Charles Hirschkind 131 8 Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing Steven Connor 153 v vi Contents 9 Thinking about Sound, Proximity, and Distance in Western Experience: The Case of Odysseus’s Walkman Michael Bull 173 10 Wiring the World: Acoustical Engineers and the Empire of Sound in the Motion Picture Industry, 1927–1930 Emily Thompson 191 References 211 Contributors 231 Index 233 Acknowledgments The essays gathered here originated in a symposium held on 24–28 April 2002 in Oaxaca, Mexico. The event was generously funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I thank its president, Richard Fox, for bringing up the idea of a conference of this sort and especially for his forbearance when the symposium had to be postponed in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. Special thanks are also due to Laurie Obbink, conference organizer at Wenner- Gren, for making travel arrangements, circulating draft papers, and delicately reminding contributors of deadlines. Not all the papers presented at the symposium were included in this volume. A report on the event itself can be found at http://www. wennergren.org/progisp129.html#129. vii Participants in the 2002 Wenner- Gren Symposium Linda Austern, Northwestern University Michael Bull, University of Sussex Paul Carter, University of Melbourne Steven Connor, University of London Veit Erlmann, University of Texas (Austin) Penelope Gouk, University of Manchester Charles Hirschkind, University of California (Berkeley) Douglas Kahn, University of California (Davis) Janis B. Nuckolls, University of Alabama Hillel Schwartz, independent scholar Anthony Seeger, University of California (Los Angeles) Bruce R. Smith, University of Southern California Emily Thompson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology ix one But What of the Ethnographic Ear? Anthropology, Sound, and the Senses Veit Erlmann In the introduction to Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethno- graphy, one of the most influential and controversial collections of anthropological writing to have appeared in almost two decades, James Clifford asks an unexpected question: “But what of the ethnographic ear?” (Clifford 1986: 12). Given the context in which it appears, the inquiry about the ear appears to be at odds with the idea—by now en- joying a certain, albeit contested, hegemony within anthropology and the humanities more broadly—that culture is ultimately the result of acts of inscription and that anthropology, because it seeks to decipher the meanings resulting from these inscriptions, is best understood as an act of reading and interpretation. So why bother about the ear? Clifford’s answer seems plausible enough. The impact of critiques of “visualism” advanced by Walter Ong and other scholars of orality on the then emergent interpretive anthropology, he suggests, has made us aware of the need for a “cultural poetics that is an interplay of voices, of positioned utterances” (1986: 12). In such a poetics, he claims, “the dominant metaphors for ethnography shift away from the observing eye and toward expressive speech (and gesture). The writer’s ‘voice’ pervades and situates the analysis, and objective, distancing rhetoric is renounced.” One knows what has become of this renunciation of the observing eye and distancing rhetoric, and this is not the place for prolonging a debate over the merits of an intended paradigm shift in anthropology that certainly produced more “utterances” but rather few accounts of 1 2 Veit Erlmann actual listening practices. Not that anthropologists have given short shrift to the body and sensory perception. But few are those who have actually approached the senses as more than just another “text” to be read. Among the notable exceptions are David Howes (2003), Nadia Seremetakis (1994), Michael Taussig (1993), and Paul Stoller (1989).1 In the work of the last two authors, in particular, one gains a clearer sense of the limitations and problems of the “textual” paradigm and of the ways in which attention to the senses might not only yield new and richer kinds of ethnographic data but, perhaps more importantly, also force us to rethink a broad range of theoretical and methodological issues. Thus, Stoller’s long experience with Songhay cultural practice has led him to formulate the outlines of what he calls a “sensuous scholarship.” Similarly, Taussig’s work on the Cuna and their entangle- ment with the forces of Western domination prompted him to question the estranging and authoritarian uses of mimetic technologies and to mobilize mimesis for a more reflexive, mutually empowering kind of representation. The result is a kind of scholarship in which images and sounds—ours and theirs—adhere more to the skin of things and thereby erode the alterity on which so many of our disciplinary practices rest. The scarcity of ethnographic accounts of sensory perception stands in marked contrast to a flurry of recent publications from other disciplines bearing on topics as diverse as the role of auscultation, sound in film, and twentieth-century avant-garde verbal arts—to name just a few examples of work by authors not represented in this volume and published since 2000 (Kassabian 2001; Meyer-Kalkus 2000; Sterne 2003). Even in ethnomusicology and musicology—two disciplines that might lay superior claim to sound and auditory perception as their very birthright—a new thinking seems to be taking hold, one that is increasingly drawing attention away from readings—of scores or meanings that are the result of acts of inscription—and focusing it on the materiality of musical communication, issues of sensuality, and the like. But because important work has recently appeared in these two fields (Austern 2002; Baumann and Fujie 1999; Feld 1996; Wegman 1998a), it seemed reasonable in this book to limit the number of essays devoted to music and instead to focus primarily
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