In week 19, during our class with Matthias Kispert, we explored the topic of the anthropology of sound and covered terms such as acosutemology, sensory ethnography, autoethnography, baile funk, and funkification. Start with a discussion on anthropology, its meaning, and problematic behavior in this field, which is studying human culture in remote corners of the world as an attraction for developed, especially white, civilizations and losing the feeling that investigated is a human being and not object. There are differences in the way dynamics in social fields and sound are divided. Both of them can be interpreted in 4 different directions, which are: OBJECTIVE, SUBJECTIVE, ABSTRACT, and CONCRETE. However, differences occur between them, which I presented in the sketch below.
“Sensory ethnography involves ‘a focus on questions of perception, place, knowing, memory, and imagination. […] We aim to come closer to understanding how other people experience, remember and imagine. […] This approach recognises the emplaced ethnographer as her- or himself part of a social, sensory and material environment and acknowledges the political and ideological agendas and power relations integral to the contexts and circumstances of ethnographic processes.” Sarah Pink explains sensory ethnography
“An anthropology of sound […] can take many shapes: it can attach […] to one specific situation of listening and sounding as its experiential, situated, and corporeal core […] and follow it through thick descriptions in the tradition of autoethnography. […] It can also take one established or rare concept of sound culture” Holger Schulze explains anthropology of sound
“Acoustemology conjoins ‘acoustics’ and ‘epistemology’ to theorize sound as a way of knowing. In doing so it inquires into what is knowable, and how it becomes known, through sounding and listening.” Steven Feld explains acoustemology
“Autoethnography emerged in response to concerns about colonialism, the need to recognize social difference and identity politics, an insistence on respecting research participants, and an acknowledgment of different ways of learning about culture.” Adams, Holman Jones and Ellis on autoethnography
BAILE FUNK was born in Brazil as expanded the sonic space of the favela into the formal city.
Funk’s vibrational force as it resonates throughout the juxtaposed built environment of Rio has an affective quality, in other words it influences both the mood of faveladosenjoying the baile—experiencing the joy and pleasure of the bass- driven live experience—and that of the formal city that complains about the noise.