Steven Feld

• Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences

Simpósio sobre sociomusicologia comparativa: Estrutura sonora como estrutura social

Steven Feld and Virginia Ryan’s sound and visual art collaboration is a meditation on the forced movements, departures and returns of people and things as part of the slave trade and its legacy, evoked through a linked composition of the sonic materials found along the space of Ghanaian shoreline at Accra, at Pram Pram, Jamestown, Labadi, Anomabo,...

Beyond text?: Critical practices and sensory anthropology addresses a series of questions concerning the relationship between anthropological understandings of the world, sensory perception and aesthetic practices. The book suggests that if different sensory experiences embody and facilitate different kinds of knowledge, then we need to develop new...

No lançamento do CD Rainforest Soundwalks: Ambiences of Bosavi, Papua New Guinea, em 2001, Steven Feld fala sobre sua concepção de passeio sonoro; a escuta da floresta em seus limites e o “soar que-sobe-além”; sua escolha de equipamento e técnicas de gravação; sua relação com a música eletroacústica; e a antropologia do som.

This text has the purpose of giving a voice to a sort of alternating reality, to a kind of resonant sensibility I have found by way of anthropological research of the ecology of language, of music and acoustics. My hope is that when granting spaces to marginalized voices from where they can speak out, scream and sing, therefore anthropology could i...

One way to imagine the potency of "nature" as a cultural construction is to imagine the appropriateness of the word "aesthetic" in each place where Roy Rappaport 1 uses the word "adaptive" in his essay on ecology and cognition. To do that I will review two intertwined dimensions of a mutualism of adaptation and aesthetics among the Kaluli people of...

Sound has come to have a particular resonance in many disciplines over the past decade. Social theorists, historians, literary researchers, folklorists, and scholars in science and technology studies and visual, performative, and cultural studies provide a range of substantively rich accounts and epistemologically provocative models for how researc...

A Sweet Lullaby for “World Music”. — How has “world music” moved from remote academic interest to global commercial marketplace? The article first concerns this history of “world music” as a discourse, narrated equally by tropes of “celebration” and “anxiety.” It then considers “world music” as a zone of interactions and contacts, as well as aesthe...

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In summer 2001, a Brazilian sound researcher, Carlos Palombini, emailed me some questions, to provide background material for his review of Rainforest Soundwalks in the electronic journal Leonardo (available via the Rainforest Soundwalks page on EarthEar's website at www.earthear.com). I briefly answered Carlos' questions for that occasion. In what...

How has « world music » moved from remote academic interest to global commercial marketplace? The article first concerns this history of « world music » as a discourse, narrated equally by tropes of « celebration » and « anxiety. » It then considers «world music » as a zone of interactions and contacts, as well as aesthetic and business practices....

A collaboration between two of the most interesting voices in ethnomusicology, this volume explores two powerful themes: the "groove" of firsthand experience and participation in music and the "groove" of musical mediation and commodification through recordings. A number of the authors' most important essays, all revised and updated, are introduced...

L'A. relit et critique «Le Don» de M. Mauss du point de vue de la mimesis schizophonique de la musique Pygmee. Sa lecture porte sur la moralite turbulente des relations actuellement de plus en plus contestees entre formes d'invention musicale et formes d'echange culturel. Il critique Mauss, en se fondant sur les travaux de Colin Turnbull et en prec...

This volume explores the dual themes of musical participation and musical mediation. A number of the author's most important essays, thoroughly revised and updated, are introduced and framed by dialogues that supply additional context, introduce retrospective concerns, and reveal previously unseen connections. This format expresses the author's des...

The study of lament forms, including ritual wailing, sung-texted weeping, keen, mourning songs, dirge, and elegy, is complexly located in discourses of the humanities and social sciences. Because lament varieties are reported throughout the world, questions as to the universality or cultural specifi city of their structures and meanings are importa...

Thesis--Indiana University. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 528-542).

This paper discusses major themes in Jean Rouch's cinema for the purpose of illuminating their interdependence with a conception of ethnographic practice. Four themes appear central to the corpus of Rouch's work. The most crucial of these is the attempt to create a filmic synthesis of the theories of Robert Flaherty and Dziga Vertov. From that synt...

Relations between language and music have traditionally been addressed at two distinct levels of discourse. One is phenomenal and often taxonomic, addressing the boundaries of speech and song, prosody and intonation, text and tune, paralanguage and vocables, sprechgesang and sprechstimme , and motivation toward signifier or signified. The other lev...

BeckerA. L. & YengoyanAram A. (eds.), The imagination of reality: Essays in Southeast Asian coherence systems. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1979. Pp. xvi + 336. - Volume 9 Issue 2 - Steven Feld