Introduction to the special issue ethnographic ear

Abstract

Ethnography has never been undertaken in a world of complete silence.1 Despite this, ethnographers have barely acknowledged that the world they study is also layered with sounds. It was only in the eighties, when publications forming the foundations of the anthropology of sound emerged, that the incorporation of the sonic in ethnographic work began. However, despite wide admiration for the works of Paul Stoller (1989), Tim Ingold (2016) or Steven Feld (1982), sound for many ethnographers remains something of an exotic field, involving a research methodology that by some is perceived as almost esoteric. Yet, sound is not a separate world, or a distinct sphere of fieldwork. The way in which we experience sound in the environment is integrated with our other senses, and indeed with our entire bodily constitution. Moreover, even if we are dealing with a recorded sound, the materiality of the medium and the location of the listener’s body in space are crucial. The spaces throughout which sound reverberates are built by physical (recently also virtual) infrastructures, material surfaces and elements of the landscape. Or, to put it in the terms of an example from an essential study, the ethnographic description of rainforest sounds integrates trees, animals and, finally, people living in the forest, and concerns their perceptions of sounds as intertwined with their other senses (Feld 1982). Yet, writing an ethnographic description centred on sound is challenging. How to address something that is “deafeningly obvious” to paraphrase the words of Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward (2007, 341)? The task is puzzling because, as Mbembe argues, “there is nothing more complex than verbalizing that which involves the non-verbal, or describing sound, which in essence is neither linguistic nor involves the purely spontaneous practice of language” (Mbembe 2005, 74). Moreover, the