the anthropology of sound
Sound, in Western thinking, has always been somewhat of an irritant. Ubiquitous and yet evanescent, sound does not easily yield to a thinking accustomed to things, locations, and stable configurations. Likewise, hearing for centuries has been dominated by the other senses: olfactory, haptic and most prominently in modern times, visual perception. Even though recent scholarship has slowly begun to recuperate the senses from longstanding neglect, and despite the upsurge of critical discourses centered on the body, still few are those scholars who challenge the prevailing emphasis in the social sciences and humanities on representational practices associated with the visual. Even fewer are those who turn their attention to hearing. The course will explore a range of discourses and practices pertaining to sound as culture. Many of the readings will be about various aspects of sound (and occasionally, music) in Europe, but by examining sound from a cross-cultural perspective the course will also attempt to open up a dialogue with alternative sonic practices and thus ultimately challenge many taken-for-granted notions underlying contemporary theories of culture.
Introduction: Sensescapes
David Howes: Introduction: Empires of the Senses, David Howes, ed., Empire of the Senses. The Sensual Culture Reader. New York: Berg, 2005: 1-20
“Intrinsically Ambiguous:" The Ear in the Western Philosophical Tradition
Aristotle: De anima, II/ VII-VIII.
Anthony Synnott: Puzzling over the Senses: From
Plato to Marx, David Howes, ed., The Varieties of
Sensory Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press: 61-76
Sound Cross-Culturally: Hearing and the Anthropology of the Senses
Constance
Classen:
Creation
by
Sound/Creation
by
Light:
A
Sensory
Analysis
of
Two
South
American
Cosmologies,
David
Howes,
ed.,
The
Varieties
of
Sensory
Experience.
Toronto:
University
of
Toronto
Press,
1991:
239-56
Ian
Ritchie:
Fusion
of
the
Faculties:
A
Study
of
the
Language
of
the
Senses
in
Hausaland,
David
Howes,
ed.,
The
Varieties
of
Sensory
Experience.
Toronto:
University
of
Toronto
Press,
1991:
192-202
Henry
Stobart:
Bodies
of
sound
and
lanscapes
of
music:
a
view
from
the
Bolivian
Andes,
Penelope
Gouk,
ed.,
Musical
Healing
in
Cultural
Contexts.
Brookfield,
Vt.:
Ashgate:
26-45
Paul
Stoller:
Sound
in
Songhay
Cultural
Experience,
American
Ethnologist
11/3,
1984:559-70
Within Earshot: Rainforest Acoustemology
Steven
Feld: ‘Waterfalls of Songs: An Acoustemology of
Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea,’ in
Feld, Steven and Keith H.Basso, eds.: Senses of
Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press:
91-136
Anthony Seeger: Why Suya Sing. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987
Gutenberg and a New Episteme?
Marshall McLuhan: The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990 [1962]
Walter Ong: Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge, 1982
Bruce Smith: The Acoustic World of Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, ch.4
The Politics of Sound in Early Modern Europe
Richard Leppert: ‘Desire, Power, and the Sonoric
Landscape (Early Modernism and the Politics of
Musical Privacy), in The Sight of Sound. Music,
Representation, and the History of the Body.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995,
15-42
Bruce Smith: The Acoustic World of Early Modern
England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999,
ch.3
Modernity - A Visual Age?
Penelope
Gouk: Music, Science and Natural Magic in
Seventeenth-Century England. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999
Martin Jay, Downcast eyes : the denigration of
vision in twentieth-century French thought.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993:
21-113
Urban and Rural Soundscapes in 19th century France
James
Johnson: Listening in Paris: A Cultural History.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995
Alain Corbin: Village Bells. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998
Postmodernism and the (An)Aesthetics of Sound
Douglas Kahn: Noise, Water, Meat. A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999
Schizophonia and Sound Technologies
Friedrich Kittler: Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, ch.2 ‘Gramophone’
Tom Porcello: "Tails Out": Social Phenomenology and the Ethnographic Representation
of Technology in Music-Making. Ethnomusicology 42(3), 1991:485-510
Michael Taussig: The Talking Machine; His Masters Voice, in Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993: 193-235.
Paul Theberge: Any Sound You Can Imagine. Making Music/Consuming Technology.
Wesleyan University Press, 1997
Sounding out the New: Acoustic Ecology
Steven Connor: Feel the Noise: Excess, Affect and the Acoustic, Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung, eds., Emotion in Postmodernism. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Carl Winter, 1997: 147-62
Murray Schafer: The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Destiny Books, 1993
Jacques Attali: Noise. The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992
