Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology
- 21 October 2010
- journal article
- Published by Annual Reviews in Annual Review of Anthropology
- Vol. 39 (1), 329-345
- https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-022510-132230
Abstract
A generation of scholars in multiple disciplines has investigated sound in ways that are productive for anthropologists. We introduce the concept of soundscape as a modality for integrating this work into an anthropological approach. We trace its history as a response to the technological mediations and listening practices emergent in modernity and note its absence in the anthropological literature. We then trace the history of technology that gave rise to anthropological recording practices, film sound techniques, and experimental sound art, noting productive interweavings of these threads. After considering ethnographies that explore relationships between sound, personhood, aesthetics, history, and ideology, we question sound's supposed ephemerality as a reason for the discipline's inattention. We conclude with a call for an anthropology that more seriously engages with its own history as a sounded discipline and moves forward in ways that incorporate the social and cultural sounded world more fully.Keywords
This publication has 66 references indexed in Scilit:
- An anthropologist underwater: Immersive soundscapes, submarine cyborgs, and transductive ethnographyAmerican Ethnologist, 2007
- Vision, Media, Noise and the Percolation of TimeJournal of Material Culture, 2006
- Sounds of Freedom: Music, Taxis, and Racial Imagination in Urban South AfricaPublic Culture, 2006
- Wax Cylinder RevolutionsThe Musical Quarterly, 2005
- accidents, hooks and theoryPopular Music, 2005
- The Sound of EvolutionModernism/modernity, 2003
- Reading between the Lines: Reflections on the Massive "Anthology of Folk Music of the Chinese Peoples"Ethnomusicology, 2003
- Dropping the Bomb: Steelband Performance and Meaning in 1960s TrinidadEthnomusicology, 2002
- Interpreting Electronic Sound Technology in the Contemporary Javanese SoundscapeEthnomusicology, 1996
- Puerto Rican Music and Cultural Identity: Creative Appropriation of Cuban Sources from Danza to SalsaEthnomusicology, 1994