Music, Language, Aurality: Latin American and Caribbean Resoundings

Abstract

Recent work in anthropology has attended to the imbrication of music, sound, listening, and language in research on, and from, Latin America and the Caribbean, as part of a broader movement across regions. In this article, we argue that these relations have their own intellectual genealogies in Latin America and the Caribbean, which have often been neglected in studies written about the region. We focus on recent theorization of aurality—the immediate and mediated practices of listening that construct perceptions of nature, bodies, voices, and technologies. We provide an overview of regional discourses on the interrelations of voice, orality, and writing, and then we discuss the aural turn in four areas: race; migration; socialization and youth cultures; and epistemologies of history, memory, and heritage. We put different bodies of discourse into dialogue as a means of charting a path toward decolonial (inter)disciplinary transformations that are built on other histories, vocalities, and modes of knowledge.