Sound Subjects and Hearing Cultures: Towards an Acoustic Ethnography

Hearing Cultures, Sound Subjects

Are there categories of culture that can be heard? Is race audible? Does gender have a voice? How does religion connect to the soundscape? Is there a sound of caste? How does a sensory approach help us to unravel such sonic manifestations of culture? ¹ When we pose a problem of hearing as a way to experience or understand particular cultures, then the process involves our encounter with distinct cultural traits including material objects and non-material subjects.

James Clifford (1986) raises a startling problem in his opening note to ‘Writing Culture’—‘What about the ethnographic ear?’(Erlmann, 2004, p. 2). Drawing from the critiques of the ‘dominant visualism’ in the anthropological inquiries of culture advanced by Walter Ong (1958, 1965) and others in their accounts of orality, Clifford suggests the need for a ‘cultural poetics that is an interplay of voices, of positioned utterances’ (Clifford, 1986, p. 12). Erlmann’s (2004) collection of essays on anthropology, sound and the senses, fuels the spark of the ear flickered in ‘writing culture’ and explores the promising field of ’hearing cultures’. Erlmann affirms that the project of hearing cultures does not simply mean to alert us on one of the less explored senses or to open up the hitherto uncharted terrain of ethnography, rather it underlines the quest for an ethnographic ear with a more sensible and sophisticated approach to dialogue, voices, speech gestures and sensitized hearing as methodological adaptations (Erlmann, 2004, p. 3). It offers the possibilities of conceptualizing new ways of knowing and understanding of a culture within its sonic dimensions of experience and exchanges of everyday life. The ways in which people in society make sense of the world and relate to each other through the hearing sense offers immense insights into a range of issues pertaining to the present-day political equations of power, governance, control and conflict, inflected by globalization, technologization and digitization.

Random sounds of everyday life cannot be dismissed as having no cultural significance. Such sounds, unknowingly, shape and punctuate our social life. They instill a kind of auditory unconscious that organizes our communications. However, the conventional inquiries of cultural analysis—predominantly conducted by the accumulation of a body of interrelated texts and other material objects of ocular significance—were confined by apathy and a steadied disregard towards a multi-sensory approach to knowledge and research. The emergent domain of sound studies has marked this void towards a methodological shift.

Sound Studies: An Overview

There has been an explosion in the writings on sound by scholars in the human sciences at least for the past three decades. These works can be distinguished by an interdisciplinary disposition, traversing the borders of knowledge ordained in the old disciplinary regime. Sterne qualifies sound studies as a domain of study with a strong interdisciplinary ferment in the humanities and social sciences that marks ‘sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival’ (Sterne, 2012, p. 3). By exploring sonic practices as well as the discourses and institutions that represent and express them, it rearticulates ‘what sound does in the human world, and what humans do in the sonic world’ (Sterne, 2012, p. 3).

Sound studies scholarship ranges from the most obvious sonic phenomena like voice, speech, listening, sound technologies, art, architecture and music and theatre performance to the broader fields like nationalism, religion, city, public politics and governance. ² Being a global phenomenon, sound enables us to redescribe artifacts, events, geographies and people that are part of the common sense captured majorly or merely by the ocular sense. As a body of concepts and methods, sound studies can be understood as an intellectual reaction to not only the contemporary changes in culture and technology but also an outcome of the shifts in the disciplinary approaches and epistemological traditions. While natural scientists and geographers have focused on the technological and spatial aspects of sound production and reception (Coates, 2005; Rodaway, 1994), historians and anthropologists have sought to study sound in the backdrop of the emerging critique of western modernity and epistemology with respect to the hierarchy of the senses (Howes, 2003; Howes & Classen, 2014; Seremetakis, 1994). Political phenomena such as public speeches, processions and political campaigns were studied through their auditory attribute from the Indian context in recent explorations (Brueck et al., 2020). The sonic dimension of black feminist intellectual life is one of the most recent attempts to explore sound and the politics of race and gender (Brooks, 2021). These accounts substantiated that the distribution of the sensory functions in different cultural geographies vary and produce distinct experience.

How has the diversity of sensory practices apart from the optic sense then remained in oblivion even when ethnographers of the past two centuries ventured into the remote geographies and cultures? The debate on the hierarchy of the senses is worth mentioning here before exploring the methodological quest towards an acoustic ethnography.

Visualism and the Hierarchy of the Senses

Is there a hierarchy among the senses? If so, how do the ways of knowing get clustered in the usage and privileging of particular senses over others? These questions point to a discourse, in which the status and cultural value that the difference senses command, and where the visual sense occupies the highest stature, that is of western modernity. The status of sight in western culture with its physiological and practical importance offered it a high cultural value and elevated it above all the other sensory experiences (Howes & Classen, 2014). The link between vision and knowledge became profound and almost intrinsic with the advent of print culture. Books, paintings and other visual art found a common place after the renaissance; photography, film, advertisement in the modern era; followed by the visual information boom with computers and internet and digital and mobile visuality of the recent decades. The enunciation of modernity in the invention of the ‘human subject’ as the centre of affairs, eventually transformed the viewer into the unique centre of knowledge. Though Western modernity recognized sound’s association with intellect as the second order sense after vision due to its importance in speech and communication, the rest of the sensory capacities of smell, touch and taste were considered insignificant for cognitive and intellectual development. Touch, taste and smell were relegated to the lower senses, which carried practical importance for the sensations of pleasure and pain, but they remained in the realm of the private and therefore considered as subjective and non-cognitive. It is this power of vision in western culture and its constitutive hierarchy of the senses that further spread out to other parts of the world through colonial expansion, imperial capitalism and the related dissemination of technological communication.

However, the contemporary fields of sensory studies often censure this perceptional hierarchy and claim that sensory experience cannot be catalogued on the basis of any single factor. Rather there are overlapping or collective sensorial experiences and perceptions that become instrumental to the way in which one makes sense of culture, and the world. It is further realized that ‘sensation is fundamental to our experience of reality’, and that the ‘senses mediate the relationship between self and society, mind and body, idea and object’ (Bull et al., 2006, pp. 5–6). Howes uses the term—polysensoriality—to ‘highlight the multiple ways in which the senses are constructed and lived in a given cultural context’ (Howes, 2011, p. 441). Recent ‘sound scholarships’ set the tone to unsettle the narratives of the so-called hegemony of the visual and the privileging of the eye. They yearn for a ‘democracy of the senses’ and place the lower senses on board for the analysis of culture (Bull & Back, 2003; Connor 2003; Howes, 2003; Sterne, 2012).

Sound and other ‘proximal senses’ have the power to resurrect feelings and emotions as well as the knowledge of history, memory, experience, political subjectivity, social and cultural embodiments and fantasies of the human subject. The interplay of voices and sounds in particular cultural settings prompts the ethnographer to explore auditory techniques and work with listening practices of both the self and the other. This methodological shift led to a series of discussions and debates in the field of anthropology and cultural studies, which further delineates the ranges of possibilities within sensory studies and sound studies (Kumar & Parayil, 2020).

Towards an ‘Acoustic Ethnography’

Over the past several years, anthropological research has charted a methodologically authentic ground in the understanding of culture by offering a blueprint of ethnographic fieldwork. The ethnographic process was premised on the ideas of assumed proximity and relative unfamiliarity between the subject and object of research. Since culture featured as the central theme in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century anthropology, the methodological imagination took different turns at particular junctures of experiments in ethnographic research (Abu-Lughod, 2000; O’Reilly, 2005).

Ethnography was comprehended primarily based on the idea of witness-cum-recording of cultural events—‘watching what happens’ (Atkinson & Hammersley, 2007; O’Reilly, 2005). Observation represents a clear guide to operate with a particular sense, which is the ocular sense. ‘Listening to what is said’ follows as the second order action in fieldwork albeit the methodological possibility of listening as an auditory technique was unmarked. Following the conceptual and methodological tools sharpened by sensory studies, acoustic ethnography involves the ‘microsonic listening’ (along with or against microscopic viewing) of the tones and textures of culture. It attends to the sounds of human speech, auditory gestures, musical and technological aspects that constitute a sonic ecology. Auditory techniques of ethnography imply the act of hearing not simply in search of meaning in linguistic and textual dimensions. Rather the acts of deep listening, involving causal, semantic and reduced modes (Chion, 2012) that contain the scope of acoustic ethnography. ³ In some cultural contexts, sound is considered more significant than in others, and such situations demand sonic registers and techniques. For instance, Steven Feld (1982, 2003) has demonstrated that sound operates as the dominant means of cultural orientation and everyday practice among the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, who reside in dense rainforests (Smith, 2004, p. 40). A deep listening field technique by deploying an ethnographic ear becomes imperative in such settings to construct richly embodied cultural accounts. In the act of tracking culture through the ethnographic ear, the dominant modes and metaphors of ethnographic representation slip away from the ‘observing eye’ and swing towards ‘expressive speech and auditory gestures’ (Clifford, 1986, p. 12; Erlmann, 2004, p. 2). Here both the writer’s voice that situates the analysis and the voice of the other, which talk for the given culture in its sonic repertoires, are clearly heard. Ethnographic research from cross-cultural contexts have produced evidence from comparative analysis that non-visual senses may offer a more crucial and important role in organizing social life in particular cultural settings and a multitude of sensory categories (Classen, 1993, 2010; Feld, 1982, 2003; Stoller, 1989, 1997).

In my own research on popular soundscapes, I have explored the practices of listening in the time of emerging digital audio technologies. My focus was on the practices of listening and reusing audio content among the youth in Kerala, including the rerecording and sharing of songs and soundtracks on digital platforms, whereby a distinct mode of listening gets enhanced (Kumar, 2020). Against the conventional approach to sonic content, where the focus was on the textual or the lyrical aspects, I was interested in following the listeners and their changing orientation in using sonic content and technologies. The techniques of studying this domain include a close analysis of the types of sounds, genres, devices and technologies, supplemented with interviews and conversation with the producers and listeners on their choices, processes and circulation; and the subsequent making of an auditory culture. Though conventional techniques of ethnography offer scope, the subject of focus gets shifted to the auditory world and the emergent listening practices.

Anthropology of sound and sensory ethnography are not simply an alternate path in an increasingly fragmented map of approaches to cultural analysis, rather they chart out a critical methodological space, which does not privilege any particular method of data collection and analysis over others. On the other hand, they open multiple windows of knowing through hearing (also through smelling, touching and tasting) and reflecting, thereby triggering new ways of unravelling critical knowledge about culture (Bull & Back, 2003; Pink, 2009). Until the recent past, approaches and methods in the social sciences were not free from the entanglement created by the politics of the sensory modality and hierarchy. Ethnography of the senses and acoustic ethnography attempt to address this problem both at the levels of theory and research by mapping an alternative economy of the senses.

Conclusion

Sound ethnographers ask how listening has come to play a vital role in the way people in globalizing societies deal with their everyday life as subjects of embodied, sensory and sonic ways enabled by electronic, information and digital technologies. Technologically enhanced hearing traversed the boundaries of musical, aesthetic and entertainment discourses of the old media to the very ordinary spheres of social life (Kumar, 2020). The information age (Castells, 1996), characteristic of the early years of the new millennium witnessed tremendous alterations by the second decade due to the rapid advancements in digital technology and the life-worlds getting attuned to those shifts. In the age of smart phones, internet users are no longer limited to the old class of computer literates. When the pandemic period expanded the ‘screen life’ of many, the actual screen experience did not simply correspond to the act of looking. At times the auditory dimension overrides the visual as the much-desired multitasking is facilitated with the features of podcast platforms, clubhouse debates and other auditory content. The ‘careful listener’ in the time of earlier radio broadcast has now transformed into a ‘distorted listener’ in the time of MP3 and mobile music. Here the praxeology of listening gets transposed to a terrain of profound aesthetic experience, and it often celebrates the limit of the human ear (Kumar, 2020; Sterne, 2006). Such technological shifts invite the scope for rigorous auditory ethnographies into the complex spheres of digital culture. Our ongoing encounters with sonic cultures and technologies constitute a new awakening in the understanding of contemporary socialities, characteristic of the pandemic present, are illuminated with a distinct set of listening habits and sensibilities. The auditory features of everyday life and culture, which were relatively ignored in scholarly affairs of the past, are now turned vital in the understanding of the ‘new social’.