Human Nature Timelessly Depends On Listening To Stories of Listenings

Sacred Texts & Interpretation, Yoga Studies, Theology

Acoustemology, Ethnomusicology, and Decolonial Anthropology

by M.L. McKee |

Bachelor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley ||

MA Religion and Practice, GTU Berkeley||

This podcast series is based on human life, while following de-colonial approaches to research -- via ethnographic methodology that is emphasized by anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Steven Feld.

When investigating the collective body of myth revolving around our personal stories, stories are hereby willed to reveal to us the intricacies we are ready to hear each time we tune in or investigate our lives.

Methodology of Podcast: The choice of an ethnographic project follows matters of the heart as much as the mind. The moral landscape of this podcast draws from sound studies to pursue anthropological inquiry into sensory experience into human transformation through story-telling and mutual suggestibility.

As an audio ethnographer, acoustemology allows me to hear more about personal spiritualities, subjectivities and positionalities -- by “inquir[ing] into knowing in and through sounding, with particular care to the reflexive feedback of sounding and listening.

Steven Feld refers to acoustemology as a methodology that enables him to investigate the experience of sound whilst “engaging with the relationality of knowledge production” (2016[2015], 12). Acoustemology focuses on how the world is constituted by relationality, with “sounding as simultaneously social and material, an experiential nexus of sonic sensation” (Feld 2016[2015], 12). The kind of knowing that acoustemology tracks with and through sound and sounding is always experiential, contextual, fallible, changeable, contingent, emergent, opportune, subjective, constructed, selective” (Feld 2016[2015], 14). In fewer words, the mending of “acoustics” to “epistemology” describes the multiple approaches in which Steven Feld studies soundscapes to investigate how place relations (re)emerge knowledge. Thus, this nexus is my entry point into an open space where material and social converge in a public sphere where knowledge production transpires—where the social manifests the material and vice versa.

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The origins of a ‘soundscape’ in anthropology stems from R. Murray Schafer’s work in sound studies. In Turning of the World (1977), Schafer signifies how the term is directly related to the definition of the word “landscape,” referring to how geographical spaces are integrated with natural elements and human-made features. Schafer uses ‘soundscape’ to acknowledge how an overlay of human presence results in an “overpopulation of sounds” (1977, 3) within urban greenspaces. Schafer’s salvage anthropology will be contested in this thesis, but his fieldwork became a foundation to ground in sound and embody a soundscape.

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The primary research approach I implement in acoustemology allows me to gather knowledge and information across the space-time continuum. While toggling around the acoustemological approach, ‘listening to histories of listening,’ I explored stories and agreements that date back to when People’s Park was founded in Berkeley, California. During my thesis fieldwork with acoustemology at People's Park, I encountered how this acoustemological approach enables the ethnographer to listen to the many facets of a bundle of stories within a place-based history. It becomes evident how the first use of the word “listening” addresses the ethnographic perspective after engaging with interlocutors, while the second use of the word identifies the stories that interlocutors pass down throughout the spacetime continuum.

The secondary acoustemological approach that I implement is ‘knowing-in-action,’ which Feld defines “as a knowing-with and knowing-through the audible” (Feld 2016[2015], 12). Research continues with figuring in “stories of sounding as heterogeneous contingent relating; stories of sounding as cohabiting; stories where sound figures the ground of difference—radical or otherwise—and what it means to attend and attune; to live with listening to that” (2016[2015], 15). Thus, more clarity may be realized, upon an inquisition about how others attend and attune to the atmosphere during ground-level ethnography. Upon acoustemological fieldwork, the first approach brings a foundation for the second approach; as one has listened into and about a space -- one then enters the space with a knowledge-base that may be questioned, while it is not yet embodied -- until one enacts by immersing into the space.

Overall, the “inseparable from the environmental consciousness they have produced...as knowledge production—as listening to histories of listening” (Feld 2016[2015], 19). Feld finds that soundings such as “songs are an archive of ecological and aesthetic coevolution” (2016[2015], 19). This led him to explore how these soundings might simultaneously materialize past, present, and future aesthetic qualities and place relations. With this in mind, in my fieldwork I considered how “every sound is equally immediate to human experience and to the perceptual faculties of others, of perceivers who may even be absent, nonhuman, or dead” (2016[2015],19). Exploring histories became a solid and lucid form of situated listening, which allows a researcher to gather awareness of sensory experience by studying subjectivities and postionalities in a coevolving space.

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David MacDougall’s (1998) early critique of narrative and voice addresses how “[t]he language of the classical ethnographies has been found inadequate for reaching broader understandings of certain aspects of culture, particularly in societies with substantially different notions of the self, which previous invocations of the ‘native point of view’ tended to take as unproblematic” (1998, 155). It becomes important to note that any project is “no longer outside the situation it describes, nor has it merely been expanded through self-reflexivity or acknowledgement of its fuller meanings. It is inside someone else’s story” (1998, 163). Such a project “can be read as a compound work, representing a crossing of cultural perspectives. Sometimes the process goes no further” (1998, 163).

There is a profound mindset explored in The Race of Sound, Nina Sun Eidshem, which can be taken one step forward when sounding and listening becomes a way to uncover wisdom and connection regarding natural elements, spiritual aspects, social spheres and place relations:

“Adopting the mindset that listening is always already political has the potential to put intense pressure on the positionality of the listener. That is, listeners are not let off the hook, as they otherwise would be, existing under the radar when it comes to understanding timbral meaning. Keeping in mind that listening is always already political, listeners would examine any interpretation or judgment, acknowledge that it is the process of listening and interpreting that willed that particular meaning into being, and interrogate why it was projected onto a particular vocal timbre” (Eidsheim 2019, 59).

Eidsheim (2019) discusses how the ‘listening ear’ always keeps an ear out, deconstructing projections of collective and individual voice, by recognizing “that listening contributes to shaping that voice, so we must listen to how we listen” (2019, 57). Eidsheim also states how it is necessary to note how listening is carried out and deemed through the presence of sound; “since sound is not always already static and knowable, the ‘identified and its meaning’ are listener-derived” (ibid., 58). In being mindful of the process of interpreting, “listeners would know that any meaning that arises is based on their own meaning derivation” (ibid., 59). As an audio ethnographer, the ‘listening ear’ becomes necessary to pay attention to how meaning is projected onto each other among interlocutors, while further deconstructing how one investigates sounding and listening.

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The core of this modality is oriented around “histories,” as stories expressed from a first person point of view, when interlocutors relate with a placename at a particular moment in history. The double use of the word “listening” allowed me to establish my focus within part one of my thesis, as a means to engage my readers with voice. While paying attention to histories of listening, I studied the process of developing principles in a public sphere by focusing on the speech and silence. My research then leads to listening about social agreements and personal experiences from members of multiple vocal communities within a family, village, region or area. The key focus within decolonization heightens a focused lens into the experience of community sovereignty in place relations, or lack their of -- upon the recognition of individual sovereignty.

Upon a series of interviews (both formal and informal), I continue to realize how and why soundings are referenced to “listenings” -- which Feld sometimes refers to both uses of the word at the same time, as an explanation that an interlocutor and ethnographer come into dialogue with during an interview or interaction -- offering greater depth into the same histories in specific instances; pin-pointing a temporality then becomes a main facet of the research, in which may share fully embodied knowledge we acquired as histories, via our own means and interpretations.

Lastly, while studying sensory phenomenology, I seek a relational presence and any social immediacies that pertain to values and qualities, in search of a moral dimension that addresses and determines spatial and respectful boundaries. Acoustemology ultimately allows me to study a private and/or public place that is meant to amplify the sense of sovereignty in an open space, that acknowledges the value of inner space or self-awareness, otherwise known as grace. At all, I find that the worlding of a place merges with one's inner world -- upon the natural correspondence often known as moments of divinities -- composed of aesthetics in which there are transformative interplaces between speech and silence, birth and death -- that which is life or interpenetration.