While writing a short review on two books by sound anthropologist Steven Feld, published 30 years apart from one another, one is in danger of finding the limited space somewhat challenging. To start with similarities: both books were written while at the University of California, Berkeley. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, a publication based on Feld's PhD dissertation, is now published for the third time as an 30th anniversary publication. The second book, Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: A Memoir of Five Musical years in Ghana, is a much awaited document on the fieldwork Feld has been accomplishing with Ghanaian jazz musicians.
In Accra the reader also gets a small reminiscent detour to Bosavi rainforest in Papua New Guinea and the fieldwork on which Sound and Sentiment is founded. This anniversary edition of Sound and Sentiment includes a profound new introduction by Feld on how much things have indeed changed not only in sound anthropology but in Bosavi among the Kaluli people, from the time of his dissertation (1979) and the consequent second edition (1989). A valuable point in the introduction reads as follows: ‘many of the beliefs, practices, knowledges, rituals and experiences described are either considerably muted or are no longer believed, practiced, known, performed, or experienced’ (p. xiii), a result common with acoustic environments affecting them more generally.
The Bosavi people were heavily influenced by evangelisation that was widespread during Feld's fieldwork in the 1970s. Evangelisation was even more powerfully present when he returned in 1984. Missionaries wielded considerable powers: they controlled air traffic in and out of the region, they had control over jobs, education, communications, development and social benefits. Needless to say the expatriate missionaries also contributed to the community with healthcare, before they left in 1990. According to Feld, ‘despite the long period of missionary residency, the Bosavi people neither received much educational benefit nor were empowered with the practical skills to manoeuvre as citizens in the new nation’ (p. xix), resulting in feelings of alienation.
Music has been one channel in processing the new situation of the nation. One way of resonating with the past is the gita gisalo, the ‘guitar ceremonial song’, music of the first generation of Bosavi people to grow up in an independent Papua New Guinea. This genre of music is continuing with the everyday vocal song in Bosavi, further developing many of the poetic conventions and topics discussed in Sound and Sentiment. The Bosavi Digital Archive and the adjacent Bosavi People's Fund, supported via the royalty fees from Feld's CD publication ‘Voices of the Rainforest’, work in preserving and compiling decades of media materials Feld and his colleagues have collected (see http://bosavipeoplesfund.net).
The anniversary introduction includes a section on the acoustic turn, a scholarly interest in the world of the sonic. Feld appropriately sees his work in a parental or grandparental relationship to today's soundscape and sound culture studies. For him the starting point was to address questions in Alan Merriam's anthropology of music, to ‘underscore critical importance of engaging the socio-acoustics of expressive forms that were in between language and music’ (p. xxiv). From a critique of the model grew anthropology of sound, which Feld has named acoustemology, i.e. acoustic epistemology.
The postscript to the second edition includes thoughts about dialogic editing, a method that is very present in the work he has done in Accra. In short, this refers to juxtaposing the voices from the field to the one of the author, simultaneously unmasking editing practices to open questions about controlling whose voice is heard. In Sound and Sentiment dialogic editing is more present in the process of actual editing and recording field audio material but in Accra it seems the whole book is done in a dialogue and written out as a conversation. As the musician Nii Noi Nortey explains his way of listening to John Coltrane's playing as African languages, Feld takes a liberty in using rhetorical means himself. A passage from Accra (p. 131) includes a take on critical theory, recounting listening to Foucault lecturing on some of his key points and Bakhtin reminding him of some of his own while Feld is listening them both ‘in stereo’.
With dialogue and intimacy come other moralities, other concerns, ‘the gritty issue of getting close’ (p. 9). For Feld the intimacy-making is a bridge to understanding of the sonic life-world. His voice is a voice of a storyteller in the Accra book, reflections from the musical friendships he has in Ghana.
Feld's research manifests not only in written form. An integral part of the way he delivers his argument is by audio and video. The Accra book is published with a companion CD and DVD of which the latter includes the three one-hour documentary films (Hallelujah!, Accra Trane Station and A por por funeral for Ashirifie).Footnote 1 Feld is carrying out his research in an academically hybrid environment. This might concern the more textually oriented academic but it is more than evident that the audio and visual documents of the subjects in hand are indispensable in understanding the core of Feld's work which is the acoustemological understanding of the world.
In Accra Feld writes about sonic stratigraphy, an interesting notion of the challenging multiplicities of fieldwork in a globally layered city and its equally layered acoustic environment. With the company of musicians Nii Noi Nortey, Nii Otoo Annan, Ghanaba/Guy Warren and the La Drivers Union Por Por group, Feld puts weight on the off-the-radar lives of musicians and practises cosmopolitanism from below, across centuries of music and across genres. For example, with Ghanaba the reader gets introduced to the fascinating history of African American jazz in the 1950s. Using the concept of diasporic intimacy by Svetlana Boym in his analysis, Feld states that ‘cosmopolitanism is … fundamentally a necessary ethical response to all forms of injustice’ (p. 138).
The inclusivity of this kind of approach manifests in intimate encounters and practices that produce meaningful sound such as smelting sound out of the brass tubes of car horns to make pumping flat tyres more pleasant and collecting plastic cones that once had thread on them to build afrifones, both instruments built by Nii Noy Nortey. It can even include arguing for Beethoven's African ancestry.
To conclude with some differences. Even more than Sound and Sentiment, Accra is a very warm and intimate study. The reader will be invited to listen to the people involved. Hearing their voices is important, a point Feld makes very clear by writing in their own style of talking. Both books are indispensable companions for any academic or layperson interested in the multiple sounds and voices of everyday life. Along with soundscape research drawing from theories on communication, Feld's Sound and Sentiment was the seminal book on which the contemporary sound anthropology was founded in the 1970s. In sum, both books are highly recommendable for anyone interested in the scholarly history of not only sound anthropology but anthropology and ethnomusicology.
