Hearing Cultures

Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity

Veit Erlmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000213614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

Vision is typically treated as the defining sense of the modern era and a powerful vehicle for colonial and postcolonial domination. This is in marked contrast to the almost total absence of accounts of hearing in larger cultural processes. Hearing Cultures is a timely examination of the elusive, often evocative, and sometimes cacophonous auditory sense - from the intersection of sound and modernity, through to the relationship between audio-technological advances and issues of personal and urban space. As cultures and communities grapple with the massive changes wrought by modernization and globalization, Hearing Cultures presents an important new approach to understanding our world. It answers such intriguing questions as: Did people in Shakespeare's time hear differently from us? In what way does technology affect our ears? Why do people in Egypt increasingly listen to taped religious sermons? Why did Enlightenment doctors believe that music was an essential cure? What happens acoustically in cross-cultural first encounters? Why do Runa Indians in the Amazon basin now consider onomatopoetic speech child's talk? The ear, as much as the eye, nose, mouth and hand, offers a way into experience. All five senses are instruments that record, interpret and engage with the world. This book shows how sound offers a refreshing new lens through which to examine culture and complex social issues.

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But What of the Ethnographic Ear? Anthropology, Sound, and the Senses

Veit Erlmann

In the introduction to Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, 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 enjoying 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 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 entanglement 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 on extramusical sound.

In light of this resurgence of the ear—musically and otherwise inclined—the present collection can offer only a small cross-section of the wide range of topics, methodologies, technologies, historical periods, and geographic areas awaiting further study. Nevertheless, these essays might contribute to an anthropology of the senses in a variety of ways. Most importantly, perhaps, they bring an interdisciplinary perspective to the debates in which anthropologists interested in overcoming the hegemony of textual analogies have been engaged. Thus, although some of the contributors are anthropologists, for the most part they represent other disciplines, including history, communications studies, literary studies, sociology, and the history of science. Despite this variety of backgrounds, all the authors share a recognition of the need for the cultural and historical contextualization of auditory perception. Generalities, as one often encounters them in the literature on the senses (see Ackerman 1990), have no place in this project of charting the cultural production of sensory perception. Hearing—be it the views of eighteenth-century European medics on sound and healing that Penelope Gouk writes about or the place of the ear within the broader framework of a theory of cross-cultural communication as proposed by Paul Carter—is seen to be culturally variable and subject to the prevailing ideologies and power relations of a given place at a given time.

But the essays in this collection do not simply alert us to the significance of one of the less studied senses or open up uncharted ethnographic terrain. Implied in the title Hearing Cultures is the notion that our quest for the ethnographic ear requires more than a metaphorical understanding of ethnography as being in need of more dialogue, more sensitized ears, or a third ear. “Hearing culture” suggests that it is possible to conceptualize new ways of knowing a culture and of gaining a deepened understanding of how the members of a society know each other. It is not only by accumulating a body of interrelated texts, signifiers, and symbols that we get a sense of the relationships and tensions making up a society. The ways in which people relate to each other through the sense of hearing also provide important insights into a wide range of issues confronting societies around the world as they grapple with the massive changes wrought by modernization, technologization, and globalization. In what follows, I outline some of these issues—in an order that does not always follow the sequence of the chapters— beginning with what is arguably the most fundamental: the close and contested relationship between vision and hearing in the West and the significance of this relationship for struggles over the course and direction of modernization in the postcolonial world.

Vision—A Modern Sense?

To assert that modernity is essentially a visual age (Levin 1993) or that bourgeois society rests on technologies of seeing, observation, and surveillance (Lowe 1982) is no longer of much heuristic value. By the same token, the parallel notion that colonial and postcolonial power relations hinge fundamentally on the “gaze,” even though it helped spur the questioning of Western monopolies over knowledge and representation, appears to have generated only more texts and more images. The number of accounts detailing how the West’s sounds are cast back on it is still shockingly small. Even more striking is the absence from current debates of Third World scholars interested in auditory perception.²

Despite this, it seems problematic to make the reverse proposition that, if we are to explore new possibilities for challenging Western hegemony, it will become necessary to map an alternative economy of the senses in which prominence perforce must be given to the neglected “second sense.” Nearly all the contributors to this volume reject such a simplistic perspective. They are skeptical of a countermonopoly of the ear, not only because it makes scientific sense to conceive of the senses as an integrated and flexible network but also, and more importantly, because arguments over the hierarchy of the senses are always also arguments over cultural and political agendas. Thus, when Paul Zumthor in his Oral Poetry (1990) hopes for a voice that “is soon in a state to pierce the opacity around us that we take for reality” and praises Africans’ verbal prowess, one is tempted to welcome this turn toward the ethnographic ear. Yet if the same author in the same breath sees a “candle that is lit somewhere”—in front of the altar of the spoken word? —we ought to examine this strange juncture of piety and primeval origins more carefully.

Similarly, one wonders about the implications of Marshall McLuhan’s early call for a sensory reawakening—for what he called the “man of total awareness”—especially because it appears to have sprung from the desire to stem the return of the twentieth-century subject to what he calls “the Africa within.” Do the two projects share the same basic philosophical and political underpinnings? Might it be possible that such efforts at redeeming the ear—whether from within Africa or against it—conceal a deeper-seated conservative impulse, a restorative project, metaphorically and literally Catholic? Are we dealing in these and other antiocular discourses, such as those put forward by McLuhan’s fellow antivisual critic and reborn Catholic Paul Virilio, with rather belated attempts at restoring to a new Rome the supreme aural and oral authority to command and to judge? What really is meant by this new center with the presumably more benign, “evangelical” power to spread, urbi et orbi, the good news of more wholesome, more communicative times ahead?

Clearly, postcolonial and poststructuralist critiques of modernity at times appear to be couched in nostalgic terms, wishing for the living voice, the cry, and sonic guerilla tactics. Which is why it is crucial to emphasize that it is not enough to denounce vision and replace it with a new sensibility based on the ear. The rejection of a simplistic dichotomy between the eye as the quintessential modern sensory organ and hearing as some kind of pre- or antimodern mode of perception must be replaced by a more nuanced approach like the one adopted in the contributions to this volume. The essays gathered here go a long way toward allowing the ear “an unromanticized place alongside the eye” (Schmidt 2000: 36). Like Steven Connor in his chapter, the other contributors collectively caution against using hearing as a way of “softening the rigor mortis of a social body that we imagine has gone deaf and dumb, blind and numb.” The task that the authors set themselves, then, is not to ascertain how modern auditory practices might differ from traditional ones. Rather, they ask how listening has come to play a role in the way people in modernizing societies around the globe deal with themselves as subjects in embodied, sensory, and especially auditory ways. Hearing and associated sonic practices, instead of being sequestered in their own domain, separate from the other senses and defined as some kind of historical residue, for the most part are seen to have worked in complicity with the panopticon, perspectivism, commodity aesthetics, and all the other key visual practices of the modern era we now know so much about.

If the auditory is deeply caught up in the modern project—rather than standing apart from it—and if therefore the ear joins the eye in consolidating the fragile modern self, we must nevertheless also ask the reverse question: How are these modern identities constantly being sonically haunted and—perhaps confirming McLuhan’s greatest fear— troubled by a return of the repressed? What do we really know about vocal knowledges that are being forced underground, silenced, or ridiculed as superstitious? Much of recent efforts to retrieve such voices has concentrated on female forms of vocality, primarily in the realm of cinema and opera (Dunn and Jones 1994; Lawrence 1991; Smart 2000), but anthropologists have yet to seriously investigate how other acoustic practices are being drawn into the maelstrom of globalization and modernization and how they often escape, resist, or succumb to the dictates of Western visualism.

Janis Nuckolls’s work on sound symbolism in this volume is a pioneering attempt to show how a specific form of sound communication produces “relational knowledge,” to use Michel Serres’s apt phrase, and how this type of knowledge is being marginalized as a result of modernization. Through their language, Quechua-speaking Runa living in the upper Amazonian region of Ecuador articulate a “sonically driven disposition” toward what Nuckolls calls “sound alignment.” By this she means that Runa model natural processes with sound by imitating the resonant and rhythmic properties of experiential phenomena. By doing so, they foreground the animacy they share with such processes. The chief linguistic vehicles for such sound alignments are ideophones, a broad range of signifiers that do not refer to a signified but are instead related to it by simulation and semblance. These expressions are integral to a style of communication that is embedded in and provides cohesion for social and cultural practices different from those of the industrialized West. They put subjects among things, or, as Nuckolls phrases the matter, they enable Runa to “express a sentiment of common animateness.”

An example that is also familiar from other contexts—such as the Renaissance views of sound and magic examined in Gouk’s chapter— is a class of Runa myths about genesis. In these narratives, themes of analogy, similarity, and interrelatedness between earthly and celestial realms loom large. Similarly, sound not only figured prominently in the thinking of Renaissance theorists and early modern Englishmen but was the chief medium for enacting transitions from one realm to another.

Ideophones work in many different ways, of course, not all of which Nuckolls discusses. The ones she does examine, however, provide fascinating illustrations of the intertwining of orality and visuality in Runa culture and of how Runa society differs from what Nuckolls calls “technologically complex societies.” Ideophones in Runa culture “shoulder a great deal of communicative responsibility,” in that they perform many of the functions that would be allocated to visual modes of expression in the West. Their polysemiotic status allows Runa to mobilize ideophonic speech to communicate a wide range of multisensory experiences. Rather than simply restating the semantic content of a verb, for instance—something Westerners would call redundancy—ideo-phones add a gestural component to relatively soundless phenomena.

This dense social embedding of ideophones comes under immense pressure, however, in the wake of missionization and the intrusion of modern mass media into the fabric of Runa social life, leading to a diminished use of ideophonic speech among young, politically active, and economically ambitious Runa.

Sound, Techniques of the Body, and Technology

Nuckolls’s chapter is not the only one in which issues of technological mediation of sound production and auditory perception loom large. The invention of audio technologies has always been met with a good deal of cultural pessimism, which still resonates in current debates over music, technology, global culture, and commoditization. Working toward a more nuanced assessment of the effects of modern technology on sound and auditory perception, several of the contributors interrogate from an ethnographically informed perspective commonly held assumptions about modernity and ask how Western intellectual anxieties about sound technologies play themselves out in non-Western cultural contexts.

In the past, it is true, the role of acoustic technology in the making of modern sensibilities has attracted sustained scholarly attention, with “schizophonia”—Murray Schafer’s (1977) term for the separation of sound from its source—being considered the most distinguishing (and at the same time most enthralling and angst-ridden) feature of the modern world’s soundscape. But although the vast literature on the telephone, phonograph, radio, and electronic media might lend credence to claims of modernity’s being an auditory rather than a visual era, the real problem seems to lie in the technological determinism, scientism, or cultural pessimism in which discussions of audio technologies have bogged us down for so long.

The essays in this book that directly address questions of technological mediation—those by Michael Bull, Steven Connor, and Emily Thompson—in many ways take us beyond these paradigms by locating hitherto overtheorized practices of media consumption in specific cultural settings. For instance, on the basis of extensive interviews with users of portable radios and cassette or compact disc players (Walkmans), Michael Bull seeks to understand the complex nature of proximity, distance, and mobility in media consumption, scrutinizing the common assertion that Walkman users can be seen as postmodern flaneurs. At first sight, Bull’s argument resembles that of the Frankfurt-school theorist Walter Benjamin. Bull begins his investigation in the familiar and intertwined terrain of myth and modernity: the story of Odysseus and the Sirens (drawn from Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s interpretation of that myth), a reading of Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo, and Sigfried Kracauer’s remarks on radio listening in the 1920s. But he gives these “texts” an unexpected twist. They can be understood, he suggests, as part of the cultural “prehistory” of personal stereos and, more broadly, as part of the Western project of the appropriation and control of space, place, and the “other” by sonic means.

One space that has come increasingly under pressure in the twentieth century is the “home.” Bull recognizes that communication technologies have played an important part in the symbolic construction of “home,” but unlike other commentators, he sees these private spaces— and the subjects who inhabit them—as fraught with ambiguity. Thus, Raymond Williams’s notion of “mobile privatization” posits an experiencing subject unreflectively appropriating, through acts of private consumption, everything that stands before it. What remains elusive in this model of media-generated distance is the way feelings of omnipotence are just the flip side of relations of dependency. Conversely, the sonic mediation of proximity—defined by Bull as “mediated presence that shrinks space into something manageable and habitable”—in the past has been inadequately conceptualized. Echoing Adorno’s notion of “we-ness,” he argues that it is hearing, more than any other sense, that appears to perform a “utopian” function in the desire for the proximity and connectedness that is sorely lacking in capitalist society.

Much of this dynamic appears to be prefigured in myth. As Bull characterizes the Siren episode in the story of Odysseus: “As Odysseus listens, tied safely to the mast of his ship, the sirens’ song transforms the distance between his ship and the rocks from which they sing. Their song colonizes him, and yet he uses this experience to fulfill his own desire for knowledge. . .. Socially speaking, Odysseus is in his very own soundworld.” Similarly, in the more recent, industrial past, radio users have transcended geographical space by communing not with those next to them but with the “distant” voices transmitted though the ether. Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, for his part, aestheticizes the Amazon jungle by blasting Caruso from his phonograph into the forest.

Such historical continuities between gramophone, radio, and Walkman and the way they are embedded in or, in Fitzcarraldo’s case, originate from the ecology of urban life have been remarked upon often. Echoing Benjamin, Bull acknowledges that Walkman users share with the flaneur the desire to aestheticize the alienating urban space by “colonizing” it sonically, but at the same time he is aware that Walkman listeners get “more out of the environment, not by interacting with it, but precisely by not interacting with it.” Bull reaches this conclusion on the basis of extensive interviews with Walkman users—definitely a novelty in the otherwise highly speculative domain of cultural studies.

Other essays offer a different kind of thinking about sound and technology in which it is not technology that makes music more inhuman but rather music that rubs off on technology in unexpected ways, until technology itself becomes a little more like sound or even music. Thus, Steven Connor’s wide-ranging reflections on intersensory perception in the broader dialectics of (Western) culture and (Western) bodies—and the growing sense of unease with the dominance of spect...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Participants in the 2002 Wenner-Gren Symposium
• 1 But What of the Ethnographic Ear? Anthropology, Sound, and the Senses
• 2 Listening to the Wild Blue Yonder: The Challenges of Acoustic Ecology
• 3 Ambiguous Traces, Mishearing, and Auditory Space
• 4 Language and Nature in Sound Alignment
• 5 Raising Spirits and Restoring Souls: Early Modern Medical Explanations for Music's Effects
• 6 Ether Ore: Mining Vibrations in American Modernist Music
• 7 Hearing Modernity: Egypt, Islam, and the Pious Ear
• 8 Edison's Teeth: Touching Hearing
• 9 Thinking about Sound, Proximity, and Distance in Western Experience: The Case of Odysseus's Walkman
• 10 Wiring the World: Acoustical Engineers and the Empire of Sound in the Motion Picture Industry, 1927-1930
• References
• Contributors
• Index