Sonic Others in Early Sound Studies and the Poetry of Edward Sapir

Characteristically, early research in soundscapes is suffused with a sense of sonophilia; that is, a fascination with auditory perception and sound as the inferiorized Other of sight. Soundscape scholars have thus often conceived of their work as a salvage operation, which is conducted to save what would otherwise be irretrievably lost to a visual regime. This moral impetus to redeem the "sonic Other" is at the center of this article, in which I investigate how notions of sonic alterity interweave with treatments of social and cultural alterity. To explore and interrogate the nexus of social, cultural, and sonic alterity for its political and ethical ramifications, I analyze the acoustics of the poetry of Edward Sapir. Sapir played a key role in the formation of cultural anthropology and the early development of linguistic anthropology. What is far less known is that he is also the author of over six hundred poems, some of which were published in such renowned magazines as Poetry and The Dial. Focusing on the poems "To a Street Violinist" and "Harvest," I probe the dynamics of an anthropo-literary project that sets out to salvage both non-visual sense perceptions and other-than-modern, Western ways of life.

Primitivism and Race in Ethnographic Film: A Decolonial Re-visioning

Ethnographic film, given its history as a vestige of colonial visual culture, has been defined by and constrained by the racist and imperial ideologies of those who were the earliest ethnographic filmmakers. Scientistic, distanced, observational film-making techniques continued the colonial quest for totalizing knowledge through the romantic ideal that film was “objective.” At the same time, the earliest ethnographic films relied on the perceived difference between white, Western, “civilized,” “modern” filmmakers and non-white, “primitive,” tribal, backwards peoples rendered mute on-screen. This ethnographic film history was predicated on observing and salvaging the histories of the “primitive,” soon-to-be-extinct peoples through visual documentation and, in so doing, these ethnographic films neatly mapped race onto culture, unabashedly fixing “primitive” practices onto bodies. Such films also differentially imposed sexist stereotypes on both men and women, pre-determining hierarchies of colonial heteronormative masculinity and femininity within which non-white Others were slotted. In the past thirty years, anthropologists realized the fallacy of essentialized biological racial difference and began reckoning with the role that visual technologies played in re-producing “culture-as-race” mythologies. And yet, ethnographic filmmakers have largely neglected the explicit conversation on race and racialization processes that their projects are inevitably a part of despite the fact that the subjects and objects of ethnographic filmmaking continue to be, for the large part, previously colonized peoples whose contemporary practices are still heavily impacted by the racialized values, institutions, and technologies of the colonial period. As a response, this entry provides a history of ethnographic film which focuses on processes of racialization and the production of “primitive” subjects over time. Part of the task in this entry is to begin to “re-read” or “re-see” some traditional and iconic ethnographic films through an attention to how decolonial visual anthropologists have theorized the ways that the film camera (and visual technologies more broadly) has been used to primitivize, facilitate racializing processes, and produce the expectation of radical cultural alterity. The entry will engage with content that has been produced by anthropologists while also engaging with films outside of the anthropological canon that disrupt, disturb, and unsettle anthropological ways of seeing. These disruptions have obviated the fact that anthropological filmmakers cannot revert our gaze, but instead must find new ways of acknowledging the complex and messy histories from which the discipline has emerged while carefully engaging with the emerging global hierarchies that rely on neocolonial ideologies and produce new racist ways of seeing for (still) largely white and white-adjacent audiences. Each section will include texts and films as examples of how various visual techniques have emerged in order to challenge earlier processes of visual primitivizing. Note: Words such as primitive, tribal, and backwards are used here to describe characterizations imposed on anthropological subjects by (neo)colonial ethnographic filmmakers and do not reflect the views of the author.

The Migrant Position: Dynamics of Political and Cultural Exclusion

The lives and labour of migrants are increasingly shaped by political precarity and rightlessness in an unevenly globalized world. We argue that ‘undesirableness’ rather than mobility is constitutive of the ‘migrant’ position. Besides underscoring the asymmetrical power relations that define the position of the ‘migrant’ vis-à-vis the receiving state and society, an optic of ‘undesirableness’ also foregrounds the governmental techniques deployed to produce the figure of the ‘migrant’. We suggest that the framing of migrants as ‘unwanted’ is pivotal to the European non-entrée regime, which parallels cultural exclusion through an Orientalization of the discourse on migration. The immutable cultural alterity of the (Muslim) ‘migrant’ is thus presumed to pose a perennial threat to Western ‘liberal’ values. Two assumptions undergird this narrative of the ‘undesirable’ migrant as the quintessential ‘Other’ of the European Self: cultural determination of behaviour in migrant communities, and incompatibility of ‘migrant cultures’ with those of ‘host’ societies.

Identity, Celtomania and the Narrative of Wales in Travel Writing in German from 1850 to 1905

The focus of travelogues shifts from the industrial to the cultural, while the advance of Celtic Studies on the Continent leads to a far deeper engagement with the indigenous culture. Many such engaged writers viewed the development of tourism, of which they were of course a symptom, as a palpable threat to the survival of Welsh culture. This reflects concerns about the situation closer to home as the German states moved towards unification in 1871 and the realisation of a political underpinning to the long-held sense of a common ‘national’ German identity. The image of Wales which emerges by the end of the century is a distillation of cultural elements, - bards, princes, legends, - which can to some extent be seen as an attempt to preserve the cultural alterity deemed to be under threat. This century of Germanophone writing about Wales sees the consolidation of a Welsh narrative which, while sharing numerous themes with Francophone writers, nevertheless addresses over time a number of key German concerns around national identity, the advance of modernity and the place of ancient cultures in the modern world.

Of Birds and Madmen

This chapter discusses the first set of sources to transcribe the corpus of troubadour song: the corpus of francophone songbooks. After tracing the contours of the corpus of Occitan song in French songbooks, it turns to the various mechanisms that obscure the cultural and linguistic alterity of Occitan song in its francophone transmission in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. These include, alongside Gallicization and geographical remapping, anonymization and the compilation of Occitan songs amid francophone songs rather than in a separate section of the manuscript. When troubadour song was demarcated in some way, it was staged not as a foreign cultural artifact but instead as something whose strangeness came from its status as non- or only quasi-human. Indeed, troubadour song was repositioned as avian rather than foreign. The chapter then reveals a fundamental ambivalence in the reception of Occitan song in francophone territories: on the one hand, and most frequently, it was actively assimilated, allowing for easier appropriation, and, on the other, it was exoticized by being remapped onto an axis not of cultural alterity but of species difference.

Multi-isotope evidence for the emergence of cultural alterity in Late Neolithic Europe

The coexistence of cultural identities and their interaction is a fundamental topic of social sciences that is not easily addressed in prehistory. Differences in mortuary treatment can help approach this issue. Here, we present a multi-isotope study to track both diet and mobility through the life histories of 32 broadly coeval Late Neolithic individuals interred in caves and in megalithic graves of a restricted region of northern Iberia. The results show significant differences in infant- and child-rearing practices, in subsistence strategies, and in landscape use between burial locations. From this, we posit that the presence of communities with distinct lifestyles and cultural backgrounds is a primary reason for Late Neolithic variability in burial location in Western Europe and provides evidence of an early “them and us” scenario. We argue that this differentiation could have played a role in the building of lasting structures of socioeconomic inequality and, occasionally, violent conflict.

GEOGRAFIA E DISCURSOS ACERCA DE IDENTIDADES E DIFERENÇAS NO ESPAÇO ESCOLAR EM REDENÇÃO, PARÁ

A partir de entrevistas com docentes, o presente artigo procura analisar discursos de professoras e professores de Geografia acerca das identidades e diferenças étnicas e regionais no espaço escolar. O texto é parte da pesquisa em andamento em nível de doutorado. Nele, trata-se de compreender como as identidades e as diferenças são discursivamente construídas no espaço escolar e que mecanismos estão implicados em suas construções, determinando a valorização de algumas em detrimento de outras. Considera-se o espaço escolar como o lugar de relações, sentido do pertencimento e de constituição de identidades dos sujeitos escolares e de experiências com a alteridade cultural. Adota-se a entrevista semiestruturada como procedimento qualitativo para a elaboração do material primário. Percebe-se até o momento que os enunciados das/os docentes são atravessados pela identificação das diferenças étnicas e regionais que emergem no cotidiano da escola, mas que encontram pouco espaço de reflexão e debate. Sendo assim, considera-se relevante que o ensino de Geografia para futuras/os professoras e professores priorize abordagens que percebam e valorizem a pluralidade que institui o espaço escolar.GEOGRAPHY AND DISCOURSES ABOUT IDENTITIES AND DIFFERENCES IN, PARÁAbstract From interviews with teachers, this article seeks to analyze discourses of teachers and teachers of Geography about the identities and ethnic and regional differences in the school space. The text is part of in progress research the doctoral level. It attempts to comprehend how identity and differences are discursively built at school space and which mechanisms are implied in its constructions, as to determine the valorization of some in detriment of others. School space is considered as the place of relations, meaning of belonging and identity building of school subjects and cultural alterity experiences. Semi-structured interviews were adopted as qualitative proceedings to elaborate main data. It is noticed that teachers enunciates are intercepted by ethnic and regional differences that emerge on school daily life, which, however, find little space of reflection and debate. Thus, it is considered relevant that Geography teaching for future teachers prioritize approaches that notice and enriches school space plurality.Keywords: Alterity. Culture. Teacher discourse. Social justice. Ethnic. Regional.GEOGRAFÍA Y DISCURSOS ACERCA DE IDENTIDADES Y DIFERENCIAS EN EL ESPACIO ESCOLAR EN REDENCIÓN, PARÁResumen A partir de entrevistas con docentes, el presente artículo busca analizar discursos de profesoras y profesores de Geografía acerca de las identidades y diferencias étnicas y regionales en el espacio escolar. El texto es parte de la investigación en curso a nivel de doctorado. En él se trata de comprender cómo las identidades y las diferencias regionales son discursivamente construidas en el espacio escolar y qué mecanismos están implicados en sus construcciones, lo cual determina la valorización de algunas identidades y diferencias, en detrimento de otras. Se considera el espacio escolar como el lugar de relaciones, sentido de la pertenencia y de constitución de identidades de los sujetos escolares y de experiencias con la alteridad cultural. Utilizamos la entrevista semiestructurada como procedimiento cualitativo para la elaboración del material primario. Hasta el momento, se percibe que los enunciados de las / los docentes son atravesados por la identificación de las diferencias étnicas y regionales que emergen en el cotidiano de la escuela, pero que encuentran poco espacio de reflexión y debate. De esta forma, consideramos relevante que la enseñanza de Geografía para futuras/ os profesoras y profesores priorice enfoques que perciban y valoren la pluralidad que instituye el espacio escolar.Palabras clave: Alteridad. Cultural. Discurso docente. Etnia. Justicia social. Regional.

A Favela That Yields Fruit: Community-Based Tour Guides as Brokers in the Political Economy of Cultural Difference

Reversing decades of fear and neglect as no-go zones for outsiders, Rio de Janeiro’s most iconic favela communities have become tourist attractions offering a glimpse of the purported “other side” of Brazilian society as well as panoramic vistas over the Marvelous City. Since 2010, tourism has become a vehicle and justification for security, infrastructure, and capacity-building projects in Rio’s favelas. Promoted as an exemplary favela in this social uplift scheme, Santa Marta has received thousands of tourists per year. In an unprecedented step, Santa Marta guides organized themselves into a committee to collectively manage the tourism enterprise and to promote themselves as a brand of community-based tourism in contradistinction to outside commercial tour operators. Their authority and authenticity as local experts hinge on the emergent perception of the favela itself as a resource and that their labor makes that value economically productive. This article analyzes the work of these guides as cultural brokers to think through the semiotically overdetermined yet shifting status of the favela as space of cultural alterity from the perspective of those who are both targets and agents of its transformation. Exploring how community-based guides have emerged as political and economic brokers, this article suggests that their performances as local experts, as well as their modes of organizing, shape tensions and contradictions of the favela as a commodified place. It demonstrates how collectivist and competitive interests among guides embody differing perspectives on state intervention in their community. The discussions and conflicts among tour guides themselves embody the tensions over the future of communities long marginalized by state and capital yet suddenly targeted for economic investment and cultural valorization.

‘Nos ancêtres n’étaient pas tous des Gaulois’: Post-Migration and Bande Dessinée

The association between bande dessinée (comics) and second generations might seem surprising, yet it is not new: the authors of Astérix le Gaulois, the most famous and celebrated comics in France, were also the children of immigrants (Polish and Hungarian for Goscinny, Italian for Uderzo). As a hybrid genre that links words and images, comics have been a privileged terrain since their inception for authors of second generations. This art form is now used by postcolonial second-generation authors in France as an ideal artistic medium to express their situation. Raising questions about the representation of minorities, 'new French' from immigrant backgrounds contribute to debates on national identity, and they do so with the unique elements of comics. Their graphic tales thus become an ideal site for observing the representation of cultural alterity and the use of forms of engagement that, in departing from entrenched practices, now acquire a new meaning. This chapter will trace the complexity of relations between comics and second-generation Maghrebis in France by following work by Farid Boudjellal, Halim Mahmoudi and the Gargouri sisters.