Everyday Life in Asia

Social Perspectives on the Senses

Devorah Kalekin-Fishman, Kelvin E.Y. Low

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317138426
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Everyday Life in Asia offers a range of detailed case studies which present social perspectives on sensory experiences in Asia. Thematically organized around the notions of the experience of space and place, tradition and the senses, cross-border sensory experiences, and habitus and the senses - its rich empirical content reveals people's commitment to place, and the manner in which its sensory experience provides the key to penetrating the meanings abound in everyday life. Offering the first close analysis of various facets of sensory experience in places that share a geographical location or cultural orientation in Asia, this collection links the conception of place with understandings of 'how the senses work'. With contributions from an international team of experts, Everyday Life in Asia will be of interest to anthropologists, geographers and sociologists with interests in culture, everyday life, and their relation to the senses of place and space.

PART I
Experiencing Space and Place

Chapter 1
Sounds that Unite, Sounds that Divide: Pervasive Rituals in a Middle Eastern Society

Devorah Kalekin-Fishman

Introduction

In one of his most telling pieces of writing, Schafer (1969) discloses his commitment to recording and controlling the overflow of noise as a mission that is both aesthetic and moral. In his ‘Middle East Sound Diary’, a series of notes he wrote about the noises that accosted his ear during his 1960s trip to Turkey and Iran, he complains in the note of April 5 that ‘the contemporary sonic environment … is becoming identical the world over, whereas the visual environment may still retain vestiges of the idiosyncratic and vernacular’. Later, however, he questions the accuracy of his comment on the homogenization of sonic environments. In the note of ‘June 18’, he suggests that it might after all be good to make a sociological survey of sounds in different parts of the world. The premise that there are likely to be interesting differences in the kinds of sensory experiences available in various areas of the globe underlies the plan of this volume and the particulars of auditory experiences are the concern of this chapter. There would, no doubt, be a great deal of interest in a systematic collection of sounds from the Middle East. Schafer’s impressionistic diary provides no more than a hint of how such a survey could be carried out or analyzed systematically.¹ He does, however, state repeatedly that it is necessary to overcome what he heard as noise; his goal was to tabulate sounds that are available as music and to adapt environmental sounds to music. From very early on in his teaching career, he encouraged students and colleagues to apply his approach and indeed highly interesting work appears in publications that describe soundscapes in Europe and in Canada (Schafer 1977, 1978a, 1978b).

Since the 1970s, the work of Schafer and his students has developed into ‘acoustic ecology’, a field whose adherents are committed to fostering the kind of truly attentive listening that makes it possible to integrate elements of soundscapes into musical compositions (see Barbosa 2003, Gaye, Mazé and Holmquist 2003, Jarviluoma and Wagstaff 2002, McCartney 2005). In the words of Wrightson (2000: 12), ‘the value of listening, the quality of the soundscape—are values worth evangelizing’. As a dedicated educator, his greatest fear is that ‘at the end of the busiest, loudest century [the twentieth] in recorded history’, such a project is an overwhelming responsibility.

Support for the somewhat didactic perception of what constitutes a legitimate ‘experience’ of sound can be found in the words of Victor Turner (1982, quoted in Bruner 1986: 13), who asserted that ‘experience always seeks its “best” …. expression in performance—the vital communication of its present essence’. Certainly soundscapes as envisioned by Schafer are the natural materials that have to be preserved and materials out of which performances—of the best sounds as music—can evolve. Schafer, who looked for interesting soundscapes, would probably agree with Turner who, in that same communication, insists that ‘cultures … are [therefore] better compared through their rituals, theaters, tales, ballads, epics, operas than through their habits’.

In this chapter, I take issue with the positions of both the musician and the anthropologist. Schafer’s assumptions that music is a sui generis phenomenon, although it can make use of myriad sounds, especially sounds generated by ‘nature’, and that the unpleasant sound that constitutes ‘noise’ can easily be identified and excluded, only scratch the surface of what a sociological survey of sounds should entail. While as an educational program designed to further aesthetic understanding, the mission of acoustic ecology is undoubtedly of great value, it is inadequate as a basis for understanding the full meaning of sound in social life. The sounds that abound when people are not listening particularly and when nature is only part of the sonal configurations, can be lumped together derogatorily by educators as ‘noise;’ but in habitual combination they are the instruments which shape a great deal of the meaning of lived experience. Moreover, when we center on sensory aspects of ‘experience’, in our case, on the experience of sound, it turns out to be questionable whether predefined rituals are, as Turner insists, necessarily distinct from or ‘superior’ to habits.

Basically, there are two core sociological questions which relate to sound, namely:

• how do social relations shape sounds?

• how do sounds serve social ends?

To demonstrate possible responses to these, it is important, to my mind, to scrap the ready-made categories embodied in a conception of ‘noise’ as a contrast to ‘music’ and as interference with the ‘benign’ sounds that are generated by ‘nature’. Therefore, the focus here will be on sonic configurations among which the distinction between music and noise is never predetermined, but remains an empirical question.² Sonic configurations are of course a key aspect of rituals where they constitute a display, an expression of collective experience. But configurations of sound also characterize the magic of habit, and the practices of habit are no other than the rituals of the everyday. Ultimately, then, a representation of configured sounds can be hypothesized as a faithful delineation of how rituals may be graded from those of common interaction (Goffman 2005/1967) to those adapted to the collective outreach to the transcendental in ‘complex compositional form[s] … revealed through the process of performance’ (Kapferer 1986: 191).

In order to illustrate the thesis, I will sketch descriptions of types of rituals that are part of habitual lived experience in Israel: rituals embodied in the sounds of everyday life and rituals, aspects of which are embodied in sound displays that obliterate the everyday. I will touch on the dialectic of sound and silence in rituals and its integration into the pillars of state ideologies.³ First, I will indicate what approach to ideology applies in this paper and summarize some key ideas on how sounds are created and how they are perceived. Then, I will present findings from a phenomenological examination of the highly regulated sonic environment in a neighborhood in a town in the north of Israel and explore how different kinds of sounds are deployed to regulate public behavior deliberately. Concluding remarks will summarize the potential of sound for promoting solidarity and for perpetuating divisions.

Ideology and Everyday Life

Tracing the development of the concept of ideology, Žižek (1994: 1–33) surveys conceptualizations that make it possible for us to trace connections between the study of sound and the study of ideology. He cites Hegel on religion (‘which, for Marx, was ideology par excellence’), and points out that Hegel analyzed religion as comprised of doctrine, belief, and ritual. In his view, this distinction ‘tempts’ the theorist ‘to dispose the multitude of notions associated with the term “ideology” around these three axes: ideology as a complex of ideas …..; ideology in its externality, that is, the materiality of ideology, Ideological State Apparatuses; and finally, the most elusive domain, the “spontaneous” ideology at work at the heart of the social “reality” itself’ (1994: 9). In fact, this is the basis for the ‘map’ of ideology that unfolds in Žižek’s edited collection.

But these ideas have implications for theorizations of everyday life as well. Analyses of the structures of capitalism explore how they are imprinted in all domains of living (Braudel 1972, De Certeau 1988, Lefebvre 1991). The modes of production and the relations they require have a detailed impact on how people live in and out of the workplace. The realization of capitalist forms at all levels of experience is expedited by the framework of a ‘worldview’, at the heart of which is a grasp of how reality is imbued with ideology.

Focusing on sound as an externality of ideology, which is a ‘spontaneous’ phenomenon in the experience of everyday ‘reality’, I will point out some features through which sound is manipulated to express a worldview that is reiterated with verve by the Israeli regime. I will also look at how sound is implicated in shaping a worldview that sustains that regime. From ranges of sounds—from sounds that seem to be completely neutral to sounds that convey more or less explicit instructions—we can gain an idea of how political, religious, and economic forms shape sounds and shape lives differentially.

The Creation of Sound, its Perception and its Uses

According to Bregman (1990) human beings are born with a potential for sounding and with a capacity for decomposing sonic signals according to their sources into auditory streams. After all, emitting a sound of discomfort is accepted as the primary sign of a spirited entrance into the world. Very early on, as Bregman predicts, infants disclose a potential for absorbing sounds in organized ways. Although the ‘indefensible ear’ (Schwartz 2003), is inescapably exposed to all kinds of sounds, the developing infant acquires schemas for discerning the cues in her environment and for making attributions that are personally useful and culturally viable. Thus, she becomes adept at reconstructing orderly auditory scenes from the welter of surrounding sound. It is the perception of auditory scenes and the definition of their boundaries, that is, the definition of auditory objects, which lay the basis for social integration. Throughout life, people are in constant interaction with their own voicing and the voicing or others, those ‘outside ourselves’, and cannot but overhear the sounds that emanate from and engulf the body. This fundamental experience makes it possible to ‘explore the reflexive and historical relationships between hearing and speaking, listening and sounding’ (Feld 2003: 226). In this paper, however, I will be referring to ‘listening and voicing …’ not only as ‘an ongoing dialogue of self and self, self and other, of their interplay in action and reaction’ (Feld 2003: 226; see also Feld and Brenneis 2004). The interplay of listening and voicing is also a chronicle of how a society works, as well as a tool for constructing a national self and a national other, and a basis for the emergence of resistance.

Sounds emanate from the impact of natural events, the workings of objects, the manipulation of materials, and the operation of the human body on the air that envelops the earth. Their acoustic properties are governed by the intensity of the impact on the air, the duration of the implementation, the nature of the materials involved, but also by the intentionality that underlies their generation. Thus, sounds express and reflect relationships. This, however, is not restricted to the interaction of individuals. Moore (2003), for example, has shown that sounds can play an important role in conflict-ridden societies. He has explored the potency of what he calls ‘sectarian sound’ in Northern Ireland, by describing the unbridgeable association of particular sounds with one or the other of the Northern Irish sects. Embodying symbolic strengths far beyond their objective impact, sounds of the language, sounds of music, sounds of particular instruments, especially those of the sectarian drums, and sounds of ostensibly impartial metallic timbre are consistently associated with networks of symbols which serve to perpetuate the divisions between the Protestant and the Catholic communities. It is not by chance that Moore’s description resonates with the influence of acoustic experiences in Israel, a country at the gateway to Asia rent by contrasts and conflicts. As in Ireland throughout most of the twentieth century, the poignancy of the situation in the state of Israel is articulated as well in the ineluctable differences that characterize the sounds of different communities and in the relentless symbolic interpretation of those sounds.

Networks of sound are in a constant, albeit not always conscious dialectic rather than essentialist productions by groups divided according to primordial distinctions. Some sonic configurations are accepted / ignored as a natural cartography of daily life and some are portrayed as measures of personal morality. Functioning at once as expressions and as regulators, sounds are generated by actions, induce actions, and envelop actions. Above all, however, sounds underscore worldviews as particular sounds fill a given milieu and locate interests embedded in the structures of power. These structures reflect and constitute relations in both the economic and the political domains. Thus the delineation of auditory objects is always a preliminary step toward doing and toward conjuring meanings—the stuff of social structure and of ideology.

In what follows I will analyze some examples of significant sonic configurations. First I will look at a neighborhood cartography in which the interplay of sounds shapes the social time of the collective while individuals go about their habitual affairs. Then I will look at how songs, planned performances, serve ideological ends as well as at the uses of the siren and the ‘beep’—two sounds which shatter the habitual and create rituals by framing short periods of relative or absolute quiet. Finally I will note some auditory distinctions between scenes officially recognized as religious rituals. Although these events do not constitute a systematic selection or a complete inventory of auditory scenes, they do exemplify how sounds impact perception so as to establish particular representations of reality—representations designed at once to unite and divide.

Sonic Configurations in Everyday Life

A Neighborhood Cartography of Sound

In describing the sounds of a neighborhood, I am relying on my practice of distinguishing auditory streams and reconstructing the scenes of action. Underlying the sketch, of course, is the inevitable assumption that my schemas of the sounds of habit, the creation of ritual, are not significantly different from those applied by other participants in the everyday life of urban areas of Israel.

Living in a city, one is alerted to sounds that map actions in time (see Thibaud 2003). Sounds are the embodiment of the times of day and are differentiated by season. In Israel, summer is the time of unremitting sunshine and heat. The sounds that frame the day tell the story of how people encounter the weather and cope with extremes. Mornings have a consistent rhythm. After a spurt of people going to work—slamming doors, heels tapping on steps, the whish of automobiles pulling out of parking places—there is a stillness that seems to admonish the occasional passing car. A baby’s cry cuts into the air, and is followed by a hush. With no compunctions, a peddler sings out his wares, repeating: ‘potatoes, tomatoes, watermelons’ and there is a scurry of flopping sandals as women from nearby houses crowd around his pickup truck. Two housewives with bags of tomatoes chat near the entrance to their house, while from the open windows of their neighbors, there are rattles of pots and pans. Sounds reflect the shifting of temperatures as well. The vigorous salty breeze of morning gives way to temperatures that rise till noon and are stable for the hours of early afternoon. The hours are decked with a quiet that is broken at most by the buzz of a few flies. Only late in the day, when the sunlight ebbs, is there a thorough re-awakening and the ‘cocktail party’ of sounds reaches its height. The ice cream cart announces itself with the supremely inappropriate tune of ‘Jingle Bells’ outlining its route through street after street. Children yell at the nearby playground, siblings argue. Old ladies gossip as they sit on the bench at the entrance to a high-rise apartment building. And as the sun begins its path into the sea, the wind, with renewed energy, whistles through some scattered trees. Evenings are saturated with the sounds that emerge independently from open windows: couples laughing, parents and children squabbling, the tinny tones of television sets. In the street, cars with boom boxes approach, slice the sounds of people’s voices, seem to attack, and fade away. Late in the evening, teenagers take over the playground and the scattered benches; there are jokes and songs, snatches of quarrels, and snatches of the vocals of cuddling.

Although they are not very cold, winters produce a different kind of sonic texture. Along with the rain, there is the morning rush hour. For about an hour and a half everybody in the neighborhood seems to be piling out of the buildings to go someplace; the children spill out of the houses in anoraks and cries of impatience with the pelting rain and the wind that defeats umbrellas. The dissonant sounds bespeak clash...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I EXPERIENCING SPACE AND PLACE
• PART II TRADITIONS AND THE SENSES
• PART III SENSORY EXPERIENCES ACROSS BORDERS
• Afterword: Towards Transnational Sensescapes
• Index