The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound

Description

The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound presents the key subjects and approaches of anthropological research into sound cultures. What are the common characteristics as well as the inconsistencies of living with and around sound in everyday life? This question drives research in this interdisciplinary area of sound studies: it propels each main chapter of this handbook into a thoroughly different world of listening, experiencing, receiving, sensing, dreaming, naming, desiring, and crafting sound. This handbook is composed of six sections: sonic artifacts; sounds and the body; habitat and sound; sonic desires; sounds and machines; and overarching sensologies. The individual chapters explore exemplary research objects and put them in the context of methodological approaches, historical predecessors, research practices, and contemporary research gaps. This volume offers therefore one of the broadest, most detailed, and instructive overviews on current research in this area of sensory anthropology.

Holger Schulze is Professor of Musicology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Principal Investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. He is the author of numerous books including Sound as Popular Culture (2016), The Sonic Persona (Bloomsbury, 2017), and Sonic Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Holger Schulze is the foremost conductor of sonic anthropology. For this handbook, Maestro Schulze has assembled a chorus of many of the leading voices in Sound Studies and a range of emergent voices-junior scholars who are just breaking in on (and up) the scene, or score. There are chapters that will tantalize the listener, like Melissa Van Drie's chapter 'The Food,' and other chapters that will jar you, rock you, soothe you, or leave you wondering what it was you just heard, like Tobias Ewe's 'The Unheard.' The aim of The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound is to decolonialize, idiosyncratize, and sensualize our hearing as 'humanoid aliens' in a more-than-human world. With its sections on 'Living with Sonic Artifacts,' 'Sounding Flesh,' 'Sonic Desires,' and 'Sensologies,' this volume is as polyphonic as it is interdisciplinary, and will definitely leave the reader with the impression that the anthropology of sound is BOOMING. * David Howes, Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada *