Tunnels of Voices. Mining Soundscapes and Memories in South West Sardinia

For the anthropologist, the work of mining seems to be characterised by a specific set of spatial, material, corporeal and sensorial relations. On-going debates in anthropology emphasize the prominence of a direct approach to this range of features of experience, in correlation with a need to understand how they are connected with social meanings. This article uses such an approach to investigate how the sensory experiences of mining are shared by miners as a community of practice. At the same time, the historical decline of mining activity is inexorably restricting mining landscapes and cultures to the heritage of the past. In European mining districts, such as South West Sardinia (Italy), a rich heritage of the memory of an abandoned mining world coexists with a number of advanced, government subsidised mining plants that are just ceasing to be active. In this context, a particular form-of-life seems to appear that links miners, witnesses of a recent mining past, with local communities that are still entangled in mining activity. The existence of a rich aural sensitivity underground, recorded by the research project’s filmmaking, is closely related to the way in which former miners “give voice to” and “feel” what they are saying. Sensory landscapes of mining life are linked to the subjective voices which express their history and memory. Starting from an ethnographic research, I shall discuss the relationship between performative aspects of oral memory, and the aural and visual dimensions of modern-day mining work.