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Sonic ethnography explores the role of sound-making and listening practices in the formation of local identities in the southern Italian region of Basilicata. The book uses a combination of text, photography and sound recording to investigate soundful cultural performances such as tree rituals, carnivals, pilgrimages, events promoting cultural heritage and more informal musical performances. Its approach demonstrates how in the acoustic domain tradition is made and disrupted, power struggles take place and acoustic communities are momentarily brought together in shared temporality and space. This book underlines how an attention to sound-making, recording and listening practices can bring innovative contributions to the ethnography of an area that has been studied by Italian and foreign scholars since the 1950s. The approaches of the classic anthropological scholarship on the region have become one of the forces at play in a complex field where discourses on a traditional past, politics of heritage and transnational diasporic communities interact. The book’s argument is carried forward not just by textual means, but also through the inclusion of six ‘sound-chapters’, that is, compositions of sound recordings themed so as to interact with the topic of the corresponding textual chapter, and through a large number of colour photographs. Two methodological chapters, respectively about doing research in sound and on photo-ethnography, explain the authors’ approach to field research and to the making of the book.
, the study of non-Western and folk music has required the adoption of systems of sound recording in order to delimit an object of study in its materiality. This created a proximity with recording technologies that remains central and opened the door for further developments in the field of multimedia. The foundational experience of Béla Bartók at the beginning of the twentieth century shows a synergy between his studies of Hungarian folk music and his activity as composer; more specifically, the latter stimulated his research and became a way to make a creative use
are sometimes limited spatially and temporarily to the performance, that is, they are acoustic communities (Truax 1984 : 65–66) or communities of (sonic) practice that come together around a given event and might separate after its conclusion. In this introduction we unpack how we interpret the connection between sound and the formation of local identities, starting with some clarifications on these two key terms. Subsequently, we trace the main steps in the entanglements of ethnographic research, creative practice and cultural heritage in Basilicata, providing
developing his double role of researcher and performer in the direction of a more engaged and experimental creative practice (see chapter 6 ). The sonic ethnography of the Maggio also resulted in two CDs, each providing a distinct approach and contribution. The first consists of a seventy minute soundscape composition by Feld, divided into six tracks. Recording through Dimensional Stereo Microphones (see Ferrarini 2017 ), Feld used his body as an emplaced ‘point of listening’ (Scaldaferri 2015 : 377) to balance the different sound sources within a very wide
repeat adult offenders in Liverpool, England, Maruna found that men who persisted in a life of crime created and pursued ‘condemnation scripts’: systematized understandings of themselves and the world around them based in anger, futility and resignation. This was in contrast to men who did not deny their past behaviour but who creatively reinterpreted it as not being reflective of the core, ‘real them’, who was, and remained, capable of reform. These men – in Maruna’s parlance, those following ‘redemption scripts’ – were much more likely to desist from offending. This
operations or blown up by landmines spoke not to ‘murder most foul’ but to death ‘by their own hands’. In such circumstances, the security police acted as creative director, landmines or limpet mines were the active agents, while bodies, sometimes alive, were mere matter to be acted upon. More than DHR.indb 212 5/15/2014 12:51:26 PM Apartheid South Africa 213 concealing authorship, these were acts where the very display of bodies was intended to convey a message. As the commander of the Pretoria security police put it: These [bodies] would be destroyed by means of
entered the picture. It was not the work of handpicked professional historians or a master political authority, but rather the creative invention of independent writers, journalists, boosters, and businessmen who, as Mailänder suggests in the case of state functionaries in Nazi Germany, incorporated ideology into their own cultural practices.44 The Orwellian shaping of the ‘California Story’ to ‘make lies sound truthful and give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’ reminds me of several examples from the 2012 conference.45 How Hitler promoted cultural stereotypes of
playing football with the skull of a child, filled with hay. Skulls – bigger ones – also lay at the goal. The earth had washed away, and time had polished them. We looked around. The area was scattered with skulls. Right there, Symonenko composed a verse that he later included in a poem that became famous in Ukraine: ‘We trample underfoot our enemies and friends./O poor Yoricks, all in the same style!/In the graveyard of executed illusions/There is no room for graves.’28 The three sent a memorandum about Bykivnia to the city soviet. The Kiev Club of Creative Youth to
listening to testimonies of traumatized people and identification with their psychological needs were an important moral duty. Thus we came to live in what Annette Wieviorka labelled l’ère du témoin, the era of the witness.43 There fore the men and women who became after 1967 the focus of attention, and who through their testimonies, memoirs, and works of the creative imagination have defined the way we think about the Holocaust as one of the greatest catastrophes in human history, were not real German engineers and industrialists like Fritz Sander and Ludwig Topf, or
, their respective pasts and futures – give an added dimension to their conflicted relationship to the polity border. On-the-ground reactions to re-bordering can, in the Ukrainian as well as the Sarajevo case, be complex and creative. Changed border regimes can stimulate the creation of new pasts; these, in turn, may open up opportunities and thus brighten the future. In Chapter 4, Tošić shows how another ‘moving’ post-socialist border – that dividing Albania and Montenegro – inspired new ways of narrating a family’s border-crossing past. In this case, as mentioned