Listening to Terror Soundscapes

Listening experiences provide valuable insights in understanding the meaning of events and shaping the way we remember them afterwards. Listening builds relationships with places and subjectivities. What kinds of relationships and connections are built through listening during an event of extreme violence, such as a terrorist attack? This article examines the relationships between sound, space, and affect through an acoustemology of Bataclan survivors’ sensory experiences of both the terrorist attack and its aftermath. I draw on the testimonies of nine survivors of the Bataclan terrorist attack in Paris, which unfolded on the evening of 13 November 2015 during a rock concert, as well as interviews with three parents of survivors and victims. This article explores how the study of listening experiences and aural memories of survivors contributes to understanding mnemonic dynamics and processes of recovery related to sound following violent events.

Shockwaves

Urban conflict literature has attempted new comparisons between contested cities in conflict zones and cities with no armed conflict. This literature tends to use representational frameworks around defensive planning and normative government discourses. In this article, I propose to expand these frameworks and to engage with epistemologies of lived experience to produce new relational accounts linking “conflict cities” with “ordinary cities”. The article accounts for the lived, sensory and atmospheric in exploring the legacies of conflict on the everyday urban environments. It then reflects on the everyday and experiential effects of counterterrorism in ordinary cities. While this is designed to minimize threat, it also alters urban spatiality in a way reminiscent of urban conflict zones. It then explores the unequal impacts of counterterrorism across urban publics, and their experiential connections with practices of counterinsurgency. The article is structured around two ‘shockwaves’ entwining lived experiences across seemingly unrelatable urban settings.

The State of Emergency at Home

This article focuses on the massive house searches and house arrests that occurred during the state of emergency in France between 2015 and 2017. It draws from critical studies on counterterrorism as well as sociology of the intimate to analyze the aftermath of these measures on the Muslim households that experienced these procedures without being sentenced afterward. It examines how house arrests and searches redefine the respondents’ relationships to their domestic space and local environment as these places become spaces of fear, surveillance, discipline, and self-control. The analysis reveals a set of embodied and discursive strategies to prove an innocence that implies a reappropriation of state categories around social integration and the promotion of an acceptable and non-suspect religiosity.

“What about Last Time?”

The article explores how violence as actuality and potentiality shapes the lives of Danish at-risk girls and young women. The article draws on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork in Copenhagen and includes 25 girls and young women aged 13 to 23 who have all experienced using physical violence. Centering on a single young woman’s narrative, violence is analyzed as a meaningful social practice intimately linked to navigating violent social terrains and managing precarious everyday lives characterized by instability and marginalization. Drawing on the concept of potentiality, it is argued that violent interactions are shaped by both the fear of oncoming danger and the desire for powerful social positions. This perspective opens a micro-longitudinal perspective, which explores situational dynamics of violence through time, hereby contributing to micro-sociological studies of violence.

Changing Narratives of Intimate Partner Violence

We explore how women’s narratives of abuse change, including narratives of self as well as narratives of their abusers. We draw on experiences from a photoethnography of people living in rural Alabama who use methamphetamine. The use of photographs taken throughout the project aid in both the representation of the women as well as in data collection (through photo-elicitation interviews). While we draw on the overall experiences from the project, we focus specifically on one key participant— Misty—to illustrate the ways that she made sense of and excused intimate partner violence, and how her narrative eventually changes. Our findings illuminate how the narratives people construct of themselves are intertwined with those they construct with others, and how such narratives change together.

Introduction

While many anthropologists have previously reflected on longitudinal ethnography— for example distinguishing between different categories of longitudinal research, including the ethnographic revisit, either by the same or another researcher, diachronic research projects, involving continuous and sustained engagement over time, or so-called large-scale or multigenerational projects, among others—there has been little reflection on the way particular topics of research might impact on the longitudinal research process. In particular, we argue here that the stakes of longitudinal ethnographic research come to the fore particularly starkly in relation to studies of violence. More specifically, longitudinality potentially both enhances certain risks inherent to carrying out research on violence, while also offering unique opportunities for better understanding the phenomenon more reflexively.

Book Reviews

Law and Disorder: Sovereignty, Protest, Atmosphere By Illan rua Wall. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2021. 209pp. E-Book. ISBN: 978-0-429-33042-1.Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic: Letters from Uganda By Hanne Mogensen. London: Palgrave Macmillian, 2020. 246 pp. ISBN 978-3-030-47522-2. ISBN 978-3-030-47523-9 (e-Book).

Telling Tales?

The ethnographic representation of violence is a controversial issue, involving debates about (avoiding) sensationalism or (acknowledging) emotionality, for example. Less considered is how the subjective nature of ethnography and the fact that ethnographic narratives are always situated can have ramifications for both interpreting and representing violence, particularly in the context of longitudinal ethnographic research. Drawing on my investigations into Nicaraguan gang dynamics begun in 1996, this article explores the subjectivity of the longitudinal ethnographic experience of violence both in and out of “the field” through three specific examples. These highlight in different ways how ethnographic understanding is highly situational and time-bound, meaning that longitudinal research is particularly prone to episodes of discomfiting conceptual disjuncture. At the same time, it is precisely this that arguably imbues it with exceptional power and insight.

“I Showed You What I Thought Was Appropriate”

This article highlights some aspects of doing longitudinal ethnography in criminology. By zooming in and reflecting on some of the key moments and methodological choices made over the course of more than 15 years of fieldwork among members of a Dutch gang, this article illustrates that relations with informants have the potential to strengthen over time, but that building rapport and trust with (active) offenders is not necessarily a linear process. In addition to voicing the emotional and evocative aspects of these methodological deliberations, this “true confession” is meant to spark some more debate on how longitudinal fieldwork in criminology impacts field relations by critically examining not only the performativity of informants, but also of researchers.

Book Forum

Working with Veena Das’s Textures of the Ordinary: Anthropology after Wittgenstein By Lotte Buch SegalRepairing the World: Ordinary Ethics and the Shadows of Moralism By Emilija ZabiliūtėThe Text’s Texture By Marco MottaThe Residues of Kinship By Resto CruzUncertain Relations with People, Practice, and Ethnographic Knowledge By Andrew M. JeffersonThe Moon Shadows: When Arguments Rest By Veena Das