Relational Borders: Cartographies of Urban (Un)sounding

Professor Steven Feld (Senior Scholar, School for Advanced Research)

February 29, 2020 (Saturday), 4:00–5:30pm

Room 207, Silver Center for Arts and Science (32 Waverly Place, New York)

Introduction by Bambi Schieffelin (Collegiate Professor and Professor of Anthropology, NYU)

How might acoustemology theorize urban experiential entanglements of nation-state, infrastructure, media, and creative agency? How might acoustemology remap relationality from Anarres, and Urras to Kingston, Fort-de-France, Baghdad, Doha, Algiers, Accra, Lagos, Johannesburg, Capetown, Thessaloniki, London, Manchester, Paris, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe? This talk probes these questions through fifteen years of musical and verbal conversations with Ghanaian artists Nii Noi Nortey and Nii Otoo Annan as we traveled and performed together in Africa, Europe and North America.

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Steven Feld is Senior Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. An anthropologist, filmmaker, musician, and sound artist, he is also Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of New Mexico. Recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1991, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994, and in 2003 received the Koizumi Fumio Prize for Ethnomusicology and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. His research has also been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowments for the Humanities and for the Arts, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and other foundations.

Feld's academic research principally concerns the anthropology of sound, a term he coined in 1972 to extend the anthropology of music and language into a more critical sensory and aesthetic focus on voice and poetics, all-species sound relations, media and technologies, and environmental and ecological acoustics. From 1975-2000 he pursued anthropology of sound studies in the Bosavi rainforest region in Papua New Guinea, researching relations of environmental ambient sounds, bird calls, weeping, poetics, and song. This work is represented in articles, the monograph Sound and Sentiment (1982, 2nd edition 1990, 3rd edition 2012, and 1991 recipient of the J.I. Staley Prize from the School of American Research), as well as the Bosavi-English-Tok Pisin Dictionary (compiled with Bambi Schieffelin and five Bosavi collaborators). It is audible on LPS and CDs like Voices of the Rainforest, Rainforest Soundwalks, and the box set retrospective Bosavi: Rainforest Music from Papua New Guinea, which Time Out New York called "anthropology that is truly wonderful to behold." Based on this research Feld expanded the framework of the anthropology of sound in the early 1990’s to acoustemology, a term coined from at the conjunction of acoustics and epistemology to refer to sound as a way of knowing. The concept circulates widely following the “Waterfalls of Song” essay he contributed to Senses of Place, a 1993 SAR Advanced Seminar volume he organized and co-edited with Keith Basso. For his work in anthropology of sound and acoustemology Feld was awarded the Doctor honoris causa degree by the University of Eastern Finland.

From 1987 Feld took up a second research project on the global anthropology of “world music,” researching equity, representation, ethics, and power disparities between indigenous musicians and in the world of rock stars and the music industry. His essays “Notes on World Beat,” “From Schizophonia to Schizmogenesis,” “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music,” and “pygmy POP: A Genealogy of Schizophonic Mimesis,” have been widely circulated, anthologized, and translated. This “world music” work is also featured in Music Grooves, his 1994 collection of essays and dialogues with Charles Keil (recipient of the 1995 Chicago Folklore Prize).

Since 2000 Feld has engaged a third research project, on the history and culture of bells, with European research and recording in France, Finland, Norway, Greece, Italy, and Denmark, and additional research in Japan, Ghana, and Togo.