A Bloomsbury Handbook

Holger Schulze, The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound, Bloomsbury Press New York 2020. 656 pages, EUR 164,50.

»With this handbook and with the whole project of an anthropology of sound I wish to pick up and scatter small grains of thought lying next to habitual seeds. The writers, researchers, and collaborators contributing to this volume try to make sure that previous concepts, images and perspectives that have been used to question histories of humanoid aliens, about their selves as the core of all history, do not predetermine too many answers that are then mainly repetitions.

It is my desire to find a direction past the paths research has taken, a direction that leads backwards only to more clarity about how much humanoid aliens already have changed and how not. One might then get a sense of how differently humanoid aliens like you and me might have to orient themselves inwardly and outwardly, when there should be a further and future sort of history for humanoids, and idiosyncratic and erratic.«

The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound presents the key subjects and approaches of anthropological research into sound cultures. What are the common characteristics as well as the inconsistencies of living with and around sound in everyday life? This question drives research in this interdisciplinary area of sound studies:


it propels each main chapter of this handbook into a thoroughly different world of listening, experiencing, receiving, sensing, dreaming, naming, desiring, and crafting sound. This handbook is composed of six sections: sonic artifacts; sounds and the body; habitat and sound; sonic desires; sounds and machines; and overarching sensologies.


The individual chapters explore exemplary research objects and put them in the context of methodological approaches, historical predecessors, research practices, and contemporary research gaps. This volume offers therefore one of the broadest, most detailed, and instructive overviews on current research in this area of sensory anthropology.

»With this methodological provincializing and experientializing of an anthropology of sound it becomes possible to explore the endless multitude of all the minuscule, erratic and entangled encounters with sounds and the sonic, with the unheard, the barely audible as well as the accidentally overheard and all the phenomena of extreme loudness in everyday life – in a wider spectrum of corporeal and idiosyncratic experiences.«

Table of Content

Introduction

What is an Anthropology of Sound?
Holger Schulze (Copenhagen/DK)

PART ONE: Living with Sonic Artifacts

Pulse: Michael Bull (Brighton/UK)

1. THE HEADPHONE
(Naomi Smith & Anne-Marie Snider, Melbourne/AUS)

2. THE FILE
(Jens Gerrit Papenburg, Bonn/DE)

3. THE INSTRUMENT
(Rolf Großmann, Lüneburg/DE)

4. THE SOFTWARE
(Katrine Wallevik, Copenhagen/DK)

Coda: Sebastian Schwesinger (Berlin/DE)

PART TWO: Sounding Flesh

Pulse: Salomé Voegelin (London/UK)

5. THE VOICE
(Ulrike Sowodniok, Berlin/DE)

6. THE FOOD
(Melissa Van Drie, Copenhagen/DK)

7. THE INTIMATE
(Holger Schulze, Copenhagen/DK)

8. THE DANCE
(Inger Damsholt, Copenhagen/DK)

Coda: Astrid Ellehøj Maaløe (Copenhagen/DK)

PART THREE: The Habitat in Sound

Pulse: Jean-Paul Thibaud (Grenoble/FRA)

9. THE PLAZA
(Sam Auinger & Dietmar Offenhuber, Berlin/DE & Boston/USA)

10. THE HOME
(Jacqueline Waldock, Liverpool/UK)

11. THE STREET
(Juhana Venäläinen, Joensuu/FIN, Sonja Pöllänen, Joensuu/FIN & Rajko Muršič, Ljubljana/SLOV)

12. THE WORKPLACE
(Andi Schoon, Bern/CH)

Coda: Marcel Cobussen (Leiden/NL)

PART FOUR: Sonic Desires

Pulse: Marie Thompson (Lincoln, UK)

13. THE ADMIRATION
(Marcus S. Kleiner, Berlin/DE)

14. THE ENTERTAINMENT
(Macon Holt, Copenhagen/DK)

15. THE CONSONANCE
(Annemette Kirkegaard, Copenhagen/DK)

16. THE QUIETUDE
(Tore Tvarnø Lind, Copenhagen/DK)

Coda: Jordan Lacey (Melbourne/AUS)

PART FIVE: The Listening Machines

Pulse: Jens Gerrit Papenburg (Bonn/DE)

17. THE RECORDING
(Toby Seay, Philadelphia/USA)

18. THE AMPLIFICATION
(Carla J. Maier, Copenhagen/DK)

19. THE STUDIO
(Matthew Barnard, Hull/UK)

20. THE REPRODUCTION
(Anders Bach, Copenhagen/DK)

Coda: Jessica Thompson (Waterloo, CAN)

PART SIX: Sensologies

Pulse: Holger Schulze (Copenhagen/DK)

21. THE MODEL
(Gabriele de Seta, Taiwan/TW)

22. THE EVERYDAY
(Jacob Kreutzfeld, Copenhagen/DK)

23. THE UNHEARD
(Tobias Ewé, Vancouver/CAN)

24. THE EAR
(Marc Couroux, Vancouver/CAN)

Coda: Sam Auinger (Berlin, DE)

Further reading:

[To be added]