American Anthropologist最新文献

Abstract

In a traditional New Orleans jazz funeral, the characteristic shift from mourning to joy is propelled by brass band musicians weaving melodies and rhythms together. This article is about how these thickly layered textures of sound elicit shared sentiments of lament and of joy. More than an accumulation of individual layers, the textures and emotions compose an atmosphere, in both the physical and metaphorical sense, of mutual aid. The relative openness of the sound—the fact that it cannot be reduced to its communicative content—means that it can also be heard as a political act of refusal, rebellion, or something else altogether. An underrecognized keyword in sound studies, texture is placed here in a web of relations with other keywords: affect, assembly, atmosphere, care, fugitivity, joy/lament, life/death, mutual aid, rebellion, refusal, religiosity, voice/instrument. Textures of sound do not explicitly call for an end to anti-Black violence, and I am hesitant to even characterize the jazz funeral as an act of resistance. But I suggest that the assemblies of Black sounds and bodies “speak” to the possibility of liberation and generate an atmosphere of mutual aid.

This article explores how sound technologies are deployed by government agencies to produce legitimacy in the struggle over oil pipelines in British Columbia, Canada. Activists seeking to stop the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain pipelines have mobilized noise and silence as tactics of protest and refusal. For example, one thousand demonstrators make a cacophony outside a Vancouver hotel in protest of the Northern Gateway pipeline. Communications technology, though, is deployed here by the state to compress and control. In one of the hotel's small, impregnable conference rooms, public hearings over the pipeline are taking place—only the public is not allowed inside: the proceedings are being livestreamed to a hotel two kilometers away. On unceded Coast Salish territory, the legitimacy of pipeline hearings is also contested because the continued existence of Indigenous legal orders represents a challenge to the pipelines in question. Technological mediation makes it possible to satisfy one requirement of legitimacy: democratically granted representative power. The challenge to the legal system highlighted by the continued existence of the Indigenous, though, is managed through audile techniques deployed as anthropotechnologies. The implications for a politics of sound must be considered in light of sound's mediation, which is never politically neutral.

In music production, a sonic artifact refers to sonic material that is accidental or unwanted, typically the result of the manipulation of sound. This understanding connotes both physical and figurative meanings: artifact as material alteration and as subjectively defined auditory disturbance. Both meanings attune the act of listening to noise—the perception of which relies on normative conceptions of rationality. This article takes up the sonic artifact as an aesthetic figure to listen to Latinx Chicago with attention to vinyl records (or discos) as literal material artifacts and asks: how do discos broadcast—in embodied and symbolic ways—the racialized politics of urban territory, and in turn amplify forms of spatial entitlement? Chicago's racial geography relies on the social reproduction of valuable forms of inequality that render Latinx communities displaceable, or unheard. What place-making strategies emerge given such profound and intersecting dispossessions, and how are they amplified within the aural public sphere? El disco es cultura provides one answer. As curatorial practice, it embodies a phonoaesthetic assemblage of transcultural and transhemispheric sounds and connections that avails sonic artifacts as layered auditory experiences forged within the politics of displacement, pointing us toward the materiality of Latinx place-making aesthetics and auditory fields of social recognition.

Across the globe, museums filled with glass and plexiglass vitrines display collections of Indigenous belongings. The typical display scenario for such belongings places them upon plinths, underneath plexiglass. These cases render the life they contain into objects of display, things to be seen but not touched. For Indigenous people, experiencing this objectifying system of display is often traumatic because that which is on display fits neither category of object nor thing. They hold life, and are beings or ancestors; they are treated as kin. Alongside the life of ancestors who take material form, thousands of Indigenous songs collected by ethnographers on wax cylinder recordings and reel-to-reel tape are similarly confined in museum collections. These songs also hold life, but of different kinds from their material cousins. To reassess the role of the museum as a place that confines life is to put into question its relationship to incarceration. If the museum is a carceral space, how then, might we define repatriation alongside practices of “reentry” and kinship reconnection?

Putting anthropologists of design in conversation with Black studies, this article demonstrates how a group of repentant education entrepreneurs in post-Katrina New Orleans mobilized racialized affective and narrative surplus within an information economy based on design rituals and protocols. I examine how this splinter group of education reformers established design communities through ritualized “pitches” and show how the egalitarian aspirations of designers rely on forms of empathetic erasure rooted in narratives of spectacular violence and universalist assumptions about the motivations, behaviors, and capacities of so-called users and so-called designers. While it is easy to laud the “empathy principles” of design thinking for taking seriously the agency and intellectual capacity of its racialized “users,” this article shares anti-Blackness theorists’ skepticism of liberal humanization projects and is concerned with the burdens that the relationship between designers and users entails. What is the human at the center of design? Humanity here is not a shared essence, nor an egalitarian relation, but in this instance marks a process through which surplus affect and the spectacle of Blackness is instrumentalized and transmuted into racial capital.