But What of the Ethnographic Ear? Anthropology, Sound, and the Senses

“Hearing culture” suggests that it is possible to conceptualize new ways of knowing a culture and of gaining a deepened understanding of how the members of a society know each other. The impact of critiques of “visualism” advanced by Walter Ong and other scholars of orality on the then emergent interpretive anthropology, he suggests, has made us aware of the need for a “cultural poetics that is an interplay of voices, of positioned utterances”. Thus, when Paul Zumthor in his Oral Poetry hopes for voice that “is soon in a state to pierce the opacity around us that people take for reality” and praises Africans’ verbal prowess, one is tempted to welcome this turn toward the ethnographic ear. Hearing and associated sonic practices, instead of being sequestered in their own domain, separate from other senses and defined as some kind of historical residue, for the most part are seen to have worked in complicity with the panopticon, perspectivism, and commodity aesthetics.