In our first lesson with Annie, we broke down what is required from us for the hand in at the end of this module. For this unit, we are developing our own practice and exploring what Sound Art means to us. We have to research a topic of our choice rigorously, internally reflecting based on this research from where our pre- conceptions about the subject were.
We will write a 1,500 word literary review. In which we will respond to one literary resource and refer to roughly 5 books as well as an essay on a title of our choice, which will be informed by the literary review and relate to contemporary issues in Sound Art, contemporary issue effectively meaning my own idea of what Sound Art is.
Constance Classen’s ‘Foundations for an anthropology of the senses’
Human behaviour, physical phenomena, but also avenues for the transmission of cultural values.
Whilst reading this text, I took a lot of quotations just to help me digest the parts I found more dense than others. We spoke about this text in class. I will try to formulate a mixture of what we discussed then with my own thoughts on the topic;…
“Sight may be linked to rea-
son or to witchcraft, taste may be used as a
metaphor for aesthetic discrimination or for sex-
ual experience, an odour may signify sanctity
or sin, political power or social exclusion.
Together, these sensory meanings and values
form the sensory model espoused by a society,
according to which the members of that society
‘make sense’ of the world, or translate sensory
perceptions and concepts into a particular
‘worldview”
The relation of sight to reason or ‘witchcraft’ is a powerful use of a term worth digging into. Classen goes on to explain how things in the past that could not been seen or explained through the visuo-centric model were often accused of as being occult. I was not aware of the “Odour of sanctity”, essentially, common catholic thought that saint’s blood had a floral aroma that was released upon death. This aroma was an indication of the purity of a soul leaving the body. Their blood often referred to as the ‘Oil of Saints’ with healing properties, these graced Saint’s were referred to as Myroblytes. (Myron etymology in Myrr, A Healing Liquid).
Very important with our assessment of other cultures is not to fall into the trap of basing that culture off the lineage and history of our own, completely separate culture. In doing so we lazily imply a sense of superiority. I also felt personally that this type of thinking assumes that progress is a given in societies. Which fails to account for the mistakes of colonialism, genocide and war that has plagued the West and all the times civilisations have crumbled over the millennia of humankind.
“The anthropology of the senses has had to overcome three prevalent assumptions in order to
establish itself as an alternative approach to the
study of culture. The first is the assumption that
the senses are ‘windows on the world’, or in
other words transparent in nature, and therefore
precultural. Considering the amount of attention
paid in recent years to the different ways in
which the human body is socially constructed,
it is surprising that the senses should still be
thought of as purely biological in nature. The
senses, in fact, are as regulated by society as
most other aspects of bodily existence, from
eating to aging. Social codes determine what
constitutes acceptable sensory behaviour at any
time for anyone, and indicate what different
sensory experiences mean. To stare at someone
may signify rudeness, flattery or domination
depending on the circumstances and the culture.
Downcast eyes, in turn, may suggest modesty,
fear, contemplation or inattention.”
In this text Classen talks about how a ‘sensory model is espoused by a society’, this is very important for us as students to note, to choose a more rigorous specification in opposition to, as Annie says “making grand statements about the world”. We reflected on how our senses our based in biology, but their uses are conditioned by cultures.
Ocularcentrism/Visuocentrism – “A perceptual and epistemological bias ranking vision over other senses in Western cultures. An example would be a preference for the written word rather than the spoken word”. This to me seems very apparent in a book by Annie Besant, socialist and theosophist called Thoughtforms (1901). In Thoughtforms, Besant talks about divine energy and uses paintings as diagrams to help us visualise this divine energy. I find this quite fascinating, as perhaps these ideas stemmed from a kind of visuocentrism that would’ve been emboldened due to the development of sciences in that period (the late 19th Century) and having to ‘see something to believe it’. Perhaps what was trying to be visualised was not this completely divine and spiritual energy, but more subtle sensory information; the quality of sound and echo in the space, vibration, smell, taste, all of which could be changed by pressure in the air (outside/inside/seasonal changes). A vast unquantifiable things effect our sensory experience. I wonder how much of these things were aware to Besant at the turn of the 20th century, and whether this mapping is more a representation of honed senses, displaying something more scientific than perhaps it’s considered when removed from its spiritual context.
epistemology, the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge. The term is derived from the Greek epistēmē (“knowledge”) and logos (“reason”), and accordingly the field is sometimes referred to as the theory of knowledge.
The cultural bias of sight…
“Focusing on the visual (or the audio-visual)
elements of culture to the neglect of other sen-
sory phenomena can furthermore introduce a
rupture in the interconnected sensory system of
a society. This occurs most notably with arte-
facts, which are frequently abstracted from a
dynamic context of multisensory uses and
meanings and transformed into static objects for
the gaze inside the glass cases of museums or
within books of photography. Navajo sandpaint-
ings, to give an example, are much more than
simply visual representations for the Navajo.
Sandpaintings, which are created in the context
of healing ceremonies, are made to be pressed
onto the bodies of the participants, and not
simply seen. From a conventional Western per-
spective, picking up sand from the sandpainting
and applying it to the body ‘destroys’ the paint-
ing. From the Navajo perspective, this act ‘com-
pletes’ the painting by transfemng the healing
power contained in the visual representation to
the patient’s body through the medium of touch.
According to traditional Navajo religion it is,
in fact, sacrilegious to preserve a sandpainting
untouched: such an act of visual hubris is said
to be punished by blindness.” – Constance Classen
“‘The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts
. . . which the anthropologist strains to read over
the shoulders of those to whom they properly
belong’ (Geertz, 1973, p. 452).”
“Seeger further found the Suya
to emphasize the social importance of speaking
and hearing, while linking sight with anti-social
behaviour such as witchcraft. He argued that
the importance of aurality was evident in the
lip and ear discs worn by Suya men, an instance
of body decoration serving to remind individ-
uals of the proper sensory hierarchy (see further
Turner, 1995; Howes, 1991, pp. 175-78)”
“The grandma sits on a wooden stool . . . Her face dark,
her hair tied in a bun, her hands freckled and rough.
The child slips into her lap. It is time for fairy tales.
Slipping into her lap is slipping into a surround of
different smells and textures, sediments of her work in
the fields, the kitchen, with the animals. (Seremetakis,
1994, p. 30)
Seremetakis states that her aim in undertak-
ing an anthropology of the senses is to recover
the ‘often hidden sensory-perceptual dispo-
sitions’ of traditional societies and thereby
recover the memory of culture embedded in
personal recollections and material artefacts”
“During this period, traditional sensory
concepts such as the odour of sanctity largely
passed away, while new concepts such as photo-
graphic truth were introduced. Nonetheless,
anthropologists should not assume that, because
smell, for instance, was more important in earl-
ier periods of Western culture than it is now,
non-Western cultures in which the sense of
smell is important today represent an earlier
stage in the scale of sensory and social evol-
ution. To make this assumption is to harken
back to the old days of anthropological thought
when the cultural transition from smell to sight
was deemed to accompany the transition from
savagery to civilization. The history of the sen-
ses in the West must not be considered a yard-
stick against which to measure the sensory
development of other cultures. Each society has
its own trajectory of sensory progression and
change.”
This was quite a dense piece of text that I found quite challenging to absorb. The takeaway was this discussion about higher and lower senses. It made me think about other factors that might influence a person and how they prioritise senses. For example, someone hard of hearing may lead with visual cues or sight for information, or speak in sign. Some neurodivergent people may lead with sound and find eye contact over-stimulating or may not develop verbal communication until later in their lives. It also made me think about how we listen. Everyone listens differently, as I come from a musical background, I am aware that I mostly hear tones in music, and prioritise these over lyrics and words in music. Often never learning the lyrics to my favourite songs. Other people know all the lyrics to a song after a few listens. In music, we often talk about established western harmony, so we perceive music through this social model. In a book I am reading ‘Music To The Self’, the author postulates that classically trained Indian musicians find that the tuning of a grand piano sounds wrong. Also personally speaking, sometimes I find if I am listening to someone or something, I need to look away from them in order to listen more carefully, or close my eyes. Or sometimes vision can distract me from listening. These senses compete for my attention/for dominance. Whether or not that applies to more anthropological studies am not sure. The big takeaway for me from this discussion was that, a sensory model that relies too heavily on sight or sound is actually a form of exclusion for disabled people within a society who don’t see or hear in the mainstream capacity, so I think not only is a realisation of a visuo-centric or “audio-centric” bias bad when attempting to learn and document indigenous or foreign cultures, but also bad for any society when aiming to create a unifying language. Everybody’s experience of their collective senses are different. Perhaps there is no way to not exclude with art, but related to visiting practitioner Hannah Wallis (who I am still formulating my notes on) maybe it’s about doing our best to create works that are properly ‘captioned’ for those who might be excluded in mind. Captioning in the sense as Wallis put it – A caption that is intrinsic to the understanding of the work, in a way that is a process from the beginning, instead of an afterthought.
I found our discussions difficult, as personally speaking I have rarely been dropped into another culture, so found it a hard concept to get around, without drawing on learned stereotypes about other cultures.. or things I have no way of proving without experience. That being said I live within a melting pot of various cultures, importantly all under the branch of western society. It’s easy for the conversation to steer towards generalisations of cultures maybe, and that part of the discussion made me slightly uncomfortable. It was interesting to hear perspectives on English culture (specifically South of England) from people who came from different countries. English sensibility has always been perceived as unkind or reserved it’s interesting to ponder why that is, the north and Scotland being archetype-d or stereotyped as a lot warmer. As previously stated, I dislike these generalisations and as someone who has only ever been immersed in this culture, I lack anything to compare it to.
Thoughts on Books to research:..
There are a few issues I am interested in off the bat here: Deep Listening, Pauline Oliveros and New Age. How are these two things connected? I felt reading Deep Listening, that there was an element of new age to it due to its formation in a time where the west was more and more influenced by far reaching cultures as an answer to unrest and unhappiness in the increasingly capitalist west. I’m also interested in New Age because of Healing Music, which has strangely filtered to the present day with things like ‘binaural beats for study’. New Age musician Iasos wrote music that he believed took people to a higher emotional plane and had a complete new age-y scientific explanation for how to achieve this within music. Most notably, he composed ‘Angels of Comfort’, which some counsellors in America give to terminally ill patients to ease there anxieties and discomfort with confronting death. Some people who have had near death experiences claiming that this music is what they heard in heaven. This cult-like response to music was very powerful and when I discovered I had tinnitus, I found this music helpful in alleviating symptoms by sleeping with it on at the tiniest volumes. This kind of spirituality attached to sound is interesting, and reminds me of a book I bought but have yet to read released by sacred bones called Thoughtforms, about theology and the manifestations of divine energy. Perhaps quite interesting when speaking about anthology of the senses, about how we try to make sense of intangible spiritual concepts, and which senses we choose to relate them too. My hearing conditions were entangled with an anxiety disorder and for years I dealt with a sensitivity to sound. With Hannah Wallis’ talking at the University, I have been inspired to engage more with this line of enquiry. I personally feel that my hearing problems effected my relationship to sound quite profoundly. So as we enter the final stage of my BA, it makes sense that I try to start relating the course to my experiences, which hopefully on a personal level might clarify with myself what that ordeal taught me. Healing Music is an interesting concept, New Age and ‘wellness’ culture, these tangible dreams are sold to us, as society we do not consider often that pain is a part of life until it becomes a part of our lives. Chronic Illness and Disability are left out of this equation.
Syneasthesia is an interesting avenue which links to Thoughforms and Theosophy and also even back to the Art movement Symbolism early 19th Century. Mostly painters became interested in how certain colours may connote emotions within viewers. This in turn could’ve lead to colours being use to signify or represent unseeable divine energy in thought forms, which could be a visualisation of a person from a visuocentric period not fully considering the power of touch, smell, taste and sound (not music).
Now it’s about narrowing down some kind of relation between Theosophy, New Age, Occult, Cults, Deep Listening and Aural Diversities. Some will most definitely have to be left on the cutting room floor.