Hearing Cultures Essays Sound

Hearing Cultures is a timely examination of the elusive, often evocative, and sometimes cacophonous auditory sense - from the intersection of sound and modernity, through to the relationship between audio-technological advances and issues of personal and urban space.

As cultures and communities grapple with the massive changes wrought by modernization and globalization, Hearing Cultures presents an important new approach to understanding our world.

The ear, as much as the eye, nose, mouth andhand, defines experience.

This book shows how sound offers a refreshing new lens through which to examine culture and complex social issues. 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” (1986: 12).

Veit Erlmann In the introduction to Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography,one of the most influential and controversial collections of anthropological writing to have appeared in almost two decades, James Clifford asks an unexpected question: “But what of the ethnographic ear? Given the context in which it appears, the inquiry about the ear appears to be at odds with the idea—by now enjoying a certain, albeit contested, hegemony within anthropology and the humanities more broadly—that culture is ultimately the result of acts of inscription and that anthropology, because it seeks to decipher the meanings resulting from these inscriptions, is best understood as an act of reading and interpretation. In such a poetics, he claims, “the dominant metaphors for ethnography shift away from the observing eye and toward expressive speech (and gesture).

Hearing Cultures Essays Sound

The writer's 'voice' pervades and situates the analysis, and objective, distancing rhetoric is renounced.”One knows what has become of this renunciation of the observing eye and distancing rhetoric, and this is not the place for prolonging a debate over the merits of an intended paradigm shift in anthropology that certainly produced more “utterances” but rather few accounts of . Wiley Online Library requires cookies for authentication and use of other site features; therefore, cookies must be enabled to browse the site.Detailed information on how Wiley uses cookies can be found in our Privacy Policy.By using our site, you agree to our collection of information through the use of cookies. Google(); req('single_work'); $('.js-splash-single-step-signup-download-button').one('click', function(e){ req_and_ready('single_work', function() ); new c. Hearing Cultures is a timely examination of the elusive, often evocative, and sometimes cacophonous auditory sense.It answers such intriguing questions as: Did people in Shakespeare's time hear differently from us? Why do people in Egypt increasingly listen to taped religious sermons?The ear, as much as the eye, nose, mouth and hand, offers a way into experience.All five senses are instruments that record, interpret and engage with the world.If the study of sound in modernity has tended to focus on technological changes and bracket aesthetic questions, it is perhaps because the relationships among the science, technology and aesthetics of sound have not yet been adequately parsed.The entire quotation from the influential media theorist is ‘the phonograph does not hear as do ears that have been trained immediately to filter voices, words, and sounds out of noise; it registers acoustic events as such’.