desire for the other
marc augé has said that the discipline of anthropology actually studies “other anthropologies,” that is, the various ways that other groups of people have talked about what it is to Continue Reading →
Author: deej
disenchantment: what’s in a name?
pangangan (naming) easter sunday in a’tolan showed me that sometimes geertz (and before that, benedict) was right about reoccurring cultural structures. much like other rituals around a’tolan, the easter sunday Continue Reading →
preservation and transmission: a participatory approach
Overall, my question was “what if the musical practices that we encounter and that we want to transmit cannot fit neatly into presentational forms or recordings?” Then we need to have a much different set of methods than those borrowed from typical musical education (aimed at presentation), stage performance, and recording (yes, even ethnomusicological field recording). Figuring out what those methods might be was the topic of the conversation I wanted to have with my colleagues at NTTU Continue Reading →
remediation and ethnographic sound work
although anthropologists would not generally confuse ethnography with documentary presentation, such a definition guides most sound work in the discipline. to broaden definitions of ethnographic sound work, i have been exploring what one could call a conceptual soundscape: rather than aiming for verisimilitude, these pieces create fantastic or impossible sounds that nonetheless explore an historically specific way of hearing Continue Reading →
democracy’s soundscapes
what does democracy sound like? in the u.s. electoral politics centers on televised events, leading to the predominance of soundbite or mass spectacle. both tend to the repeated slogan, as do street protests. on taiwan, where electoral politics is more personal, entangled with kinship and local patronage ties, the sounds of “paying respect to” or “pulling in” votes on truck mounted speakers signal that elections are coming soon Continue Reading →
