A Conversation on Discarded Recordings

Heikki Wilenius

What can be considered as a discarded recording in an ethnographic inquiry? Do the instabilities and technical errors show that technology is really part of the encounter of ethnographic situations? Furthermore, is there a limit beyond which a sound that is too degraded can no longer be restored but simply described in writing, the preferred medium of the human sciences in general and anthropology in particular? These three ideas were at the center of an online conversation with Ernst Karel, starting with the film Expedition Content (2020) made with Veronika Kusumaryati from the sound archives of the Harvard-Peabody expedition (1961) in Dutch New Guinea. The many errors and failures that punctuate Rockefeller's recordings – we also listened to some recordings that did not appear in Expedition Content – form a fertile ground for thinking about the tactics and listening that can make examining ethnographic rubbish a heuristic, both for the history of the anthropological discipline and for the history of the place where it was recorded.

1. Introduction

2. Neither Good Nor Bad Sounds

3. Silence as Rubbish

4. Audio as a Secondary Matter in Dead Birds

5. Ideological Matters Surfacing From Rubbish

6. From Rubbish to Archaeological Treasure

7. Useful at the Moment: Recordings Around the Ethnographic Inquiry

References

Applewhaite, Che R. (2020), “Open City Documentary Festival 2020: Focus: Listening Against a Colonial Present, an Interview with Expedition Content’s Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati.”

Birtwistle, Andy (2010). Cinesonica: Sounding Film and Video. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Carlyle, Angus, Rupert Cox, Kozo Hiramatsu and Atsuhshi Nishimura (2017). Zawawa, the Sound of the Sugarcane in the Wind. Numérique, 50 min. University of the Arts/University of Manchester.

Chion, Michel ([1990] 1994). Audio-Vision. Sound on Screen (ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman). New York: Columbia University Press.

Duranti, Alessandro (1997). “Ethnographic Methods,” In Alessandro Duranti, Linguistic Anthropology (pp. 84–121). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Feld, Steven (2019). Voices of the Rainforest. 4K, 7.1 surround sound. 69 min. Bosavi Peoples Fund.

Feld, Steven and Donald Brenneis (2004). “Doing anthropology in sound.” American Ethnologist 31/4: 461–474.

Gardner, Robert. 1964. Dead Birds. 16mm, 84 min. Film Study Center of the Peabody Museum.

Gerald Collins, Samuel, Matthew Durington and Harjant Gil (2017). “Multimodal Anthropologies. Multimodality: An Invention.” American Anthropologist 119/1: 1–5.

Karel, Ernst (2003). “Kerala Sound Electricals: Amplified Sound and Cultural Meaning in South India” (Doctoral dissertation). Chicago: University of Chicago.

Larcher, Jonathan (2022). “Des images extradiégétiques? Le tournant acoustique en anthropologie visuelle.” In La Revue Documentaires 32: 73–84.

Larkin, Brian (2014). “Techniques of Inattention: The Mediality of Loudspeakers in Nigeria.” Anthropological Quarterly 87/4: 989–1016.

MacDougall, David (1998). “Visual Anthropology and the Ways of Knowing.” Transcultural Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Schaeffer, Pierre ([1966] 2002). Traité des Objets Musicaux: Essai Interdisciplines (second edition). Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Silver, Micah (2014). Figures in Air: Essays Toward a Philosophy of Audio. New York: Inventory Press.

Steintrager, James A. and Rey Chow (eds.) (2019). Sound objects. Durham: Duke University Press.

Takaragawa, Stephanie, Trudi L. Smith, Kate Hennessy, Patricia Alvarez Astacio, Jenny Chio (2019). “Bad Habitus: Anthropology in the Age of the Multimodal.” American Anthropologist 121/2: 517–524.

Toop, David (2001). Ocean of Sound. Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds. London: Serpent's Tail.

8. The Heuristics of Repetitive Listening

9. The Multimodal Turn in Visual Anthropology

10. Listening Through Distorted Sound

11. How to Hear the Context in the Ground Noise

12. Presenting Experiences of Listening to Rubbish

References

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