Call for papers for the Special Issue ''Ethnographic archives: other inscriptions and epistemologies of sound and listening''

In the perspective that the production of ethnographic knowledge is mediated by the subjectivities and sociocultural and political contexts that underlie and emerge from the interactions in the field, as well as by paradigmatic or theoric assumptions, the dossier “Ethnographic archives: other inscriptions and epistemologies of sound and listening” seeks primarily to problematize the positivist notion that the “archives” are repositories of material registers and stable meanings of reality (García 2018, 2019, 2021) — a contestation formulated by call of the “archivistic turn” (Derrida 1997, Steedman 2002). Furthermore, it also aims to amplify the ontological, epistemological and aesthetic debates on the practices of inscription and representation, as well as the unfinished and unstable processes of becoming of the registers and archives.

 

Specifically, we invite to expand the the comprehension of sound archives and registers beyond of the qualities and technologies of their material support — recording, music sheets and transcriptions —, in line with the notion that the various contexts and forms of inscription of listening — speeches, performativities, acoustic conditions and auditive dispositions (Ochoa 2014) — engage with particular agendas, uses and assumptions, conforming a plurality of voices that exceed the institutional representation and fixation of meaning.

 

With regards to the latter, the Special Issue is also concerned with the generation of decentralized intercultural dialogues and/or other dislocations that complexify and/or question the unidirectionality of the production of specialized knowledge — ethnographic, historic, ethnomusicological, organological, among others —, revealing  the emergence of other actors, interventions, creative scenarios as well as spaces of transmission and listening (Appadurai 2003). Such is the case of the decolonial processes of “restitution”, through which have been attempted to heal the colonial fracture caused by occident-centered hearing and episteme that marks scientific research and ethnographic registers (Tuhiwai 2016).

 

In this sense, the Nucleo Milenio Culturas Musicales y Sonoras (CMUS) invites researchers to present, in this special issue, works that discuss and reflect over the situationality and positionality of sound documents and archives in general and, more specifically, the regimes of aurality and spectrality that underlie the production of anthropological knowledge.

 

We propose a few thematic nuclei, such as:

 

1. Epistemologies of hearing: exploration of the forms of knowledge that emerge from the auditive practices and their impact on the methodologies of the social sciences such as ethnography, the generation of sources and the analysis of historical archives;
2. Recording technologies and their sociocultural contexts: analysis of how the recording technologies and the perspective of those recording incide on the production and perception of sound archives;
3. Performativy and sound: study of the performative practices and their relation to the creating and conservation of sound registers, as well as the transmission of memory and history;
4. Sound archives and decolonial thought: reflections on the process of generation or restitution of archives and their role in the reparation of the colonial fracture
5. Acoustic conditions and subjectivity in ethnography: investigations on how the acoustic conditions and the researcher’s subjectivity influence both the capture and analysis of ethnographic data and the production of knowledge.
6. Politics of sound: examining how policy and institutional regulations impact the creation, conservation and the access to sound archives;
7. Sound archives and cultural representation: case studies on how sound archives represent local and traditional communities;
8. Uses and reuses of sound archives: explorations of the practices of using and reusing sound archives in multiple contexts and their implications on socio-cultural research.