American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting

Description

Sonic Activism. Unsettling Aesthetics with a touch of Anthropology

Abstract:
This paper begins with an ethnographic and aesthetic puzzle: if noise music on the North Atlantic Rim emerged as a form of protest against an aesthetics of silence and the hegemony of rhythmic and tonal music, what is the aesthetic and political appeal of noise music in Indonesia, a place where pentatonic, polyrhythmic music is considered high taste and where noise - in its broadest sense - is rarely considered disruptive?


Our puzzle is this: Does noise music (and sound) express the same thing in these contexts? Does protest and politics?


Over the last four years, we have been participating in the physical performances of Indonesian noise and experimental musicians in Java, followed them to European music festivals and watched their performances online. We have been hanging out with them between gigs, followed them on Instagram and chatted with them on WhatsApp during the pandemic. The musicians see themselves as social activists and yet they deny they are political. The music they play attracts a global audience on the experimental, noise, and trance music scenes, but does so, in part at least, because of its experiments with digital transpositions of Javanese music.



Following all of this across these various registers requires, so we suggest, an acknowledgement of aesthetics and politics as phenomena that are made through continuous transposition. And it requires a break with both universalist and exoticizing histories of aesthetics. But, first of all, it requires anthropology to actually pay attention to aesthetic experience.



What we call aesthetic-anthropological attuned fieldwork is a methodological, analytical, and theoretical approach that straddles aesthetic studies and anthropology. It is an attempt to extend the aesthetic practice of listening to a broader ethnographic, ‘deep’ listening in anthropological fieldwork while also allowing anthropology to unsettle what aesthetics might be.



The paper is a co-presentation by Nils Bubandt, an anthropologist, and Sanne Krogh Groth, a musicologist.

Period	2022 Nov 13
Event type	Conference
Location	Seattle, United States, WashingtonShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International