Sound Subjects and Hearing Cultures: Towards an Acoustic Ethnography

Abstract

Sensory techniques enable the process of classification, which in turn facilitates the perceptive capacity to make sense of the world. The human competence to work with the senses in a complex and often unregistered manner prompts us to explore the world of the senses with reference to their functional modalities in the ways of knowing. Apparently, such an exploration cannot rest on the question of epistemology in its conventional frame. It rather involves the idea of the political in the making of a sensory hierarchy. The history of the sensory hierarchy is stridently audible through the early records of western modernity (Howes, 2003; Howes & Classen, 2014; Seremetakis, 1994; Stoller, 1989, 1997). Placing the hierarchy of the senses as a central concern, this article explores the promises of a sound ethnography that seeks to underline the ways of hearing as a methodological possibility, not as an alternate, but as an add-on to the hitherto ‘dominant’ visual sensibilities and practices. Is hearing an unexplored technique in the study of culture? Can hearing be a method in a more imaginative way in ethnographic research? How do we make sense of the relation between the listening ear and its ‘superior other’ the ‘observing eye’ in ethnographic contexts? While raising such methodological concerns is crucial to the shifting grounds of ethnography, the article engages with the recent debates in the emergent fields of sound studies, anthropology of the senses and digital ethnography.