Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia

by Ana Marïa Ochoa Gautier

Overview

In this audacious book, Ana María Ochoa Gautier explores how listening has been central to the production of notions of language, music, voice, and sound that determine the politics of life. Drawing primarily from nineteenth-century Colombian sources, Ochoa Gautier locates sounds produced by different living entities at the juncture of the human and nonhuman. Her "acoustically tuned" analysis of a wide array of texts reveals multiple debates on the nature of the aural. These discussions were central to a politics of the voice harnessed in the service of the production of different notions of personhood and belonging. In Ochoa Gautier's groundbreaking work, Latin America and the Caribbean emerge as a historical site where the politics of life and the politics of expression inextricably entangle the musical and the linguistic, knowledge and the sensorial.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822357360
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	12/01/2014
Series:	Sign, Storage, Transmission
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.96(w) x 9.09(h) x 0.74(d)

About the Author

Ana María Ochoa Gautier is Associate Professor of Music and Director of the Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. She is the author of several books in Spanish.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

Introduction. The Ear and the Voice in the Lettered City's Geophysical History 1

1. On Howls and Pitches 31

2. On Popular Song 77

3. On the Ethnographic Ear 123

4. On Vocal Immunity 165

Epilogue. The Oral in the Aural 207

Notes 215

References 231

Index 252

What People are Saying About This

MP3: The Meaning of a Format - Jonathan Sterne

"Aurality shows how hearing, writing, speech, and song were central to the constitution of modern personhood in the nineteenth century. Using Colombia as her grounding point, Ana María Ochoa Gautier explores the ways that colonial intellectuals, creoles, and indigenous people spoke, sung, and wrote across difference as they struggled to establish new kinds of political subjectivity and nationality. Based in deep, creative readings of primary source materials, and steeped in anthropological and cultural theory, Aurality is an erudite, challenging, and rewarding book. It offers a vital alternative to a literature that has too often taken Western Europe and anglophone North America as points of historical departure. Aurality will transform our understandings of the human and the animal; nation and citizenship; music and language; speech and writing; and modernity itself."

MP3: The Meaning of a Format - Jonathan Sterne

"Aurality shows how hearing, writing, speech, and song were central to the constitution of modern personhood in the nineteenth century. Using Colombia as her grounding point, Ana María Ochoa Gautier explores the ways that colonial intellectuals, creoles, and indigenous people spoke, sung, and wrote across difference as they struggled to establish new kinds of political subjectivity and nationality. Based in deep, creative readings of primary source materials, and steeped in anthropological and cultural theory, Aurality is an erudite, challenging, and rewarding book. It offers a vital alternative to a literature that has too often taken Western Europe and anglophone North America as points of historical departure. Aurality will transform our understandings of the human and the animal; nation and citizenship; music and language; speech and writing; and modernity itself."

Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects - Jairo Moreno

With generous voice and incisive ears, Aurality offers us the gift of listening to and through multiple histories, eavesdropping into a Colombian 19th-century archive in whose seemingly muted vociferations Ana María Ochoa Gautier hears nothing less than the clamor of the political-sensorial genealogy of the Latin American, Caribbean, and global present. Hearing, listening, speaking, writing, and voicing all emerge here as ontological wagers on life, on personhood, and on human - non-human relations. But this is no celebration of the sonorous, it is a most critically sober and theoretically eloquent call that we listen in order to think Latin American (and global) modernity and coloniality again for the first time.

Editorial Reviews

"Aurality is a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of sound studies. Ana Marıa Ochoa Gautier adeptly guides the reader across complex scales of analysis using well-selected historical case studies.... Aurality achieves its goal of establishing a critical vantage point for making sense of the contemporary transformations that are shaping the 21st."

William Hopen Ethnologist

"Ochoa Gautier provides a vitally important account of the intricate and heterogeneous modes of knowing, being, becoming, and belonging that continue to resonate in the postcolonial lettered city." 

Leonardo Cardoson Anthropologist

"The volume is a must for enthusiasts of sound studies and/or Colombian history. Ochoa Gautier has done a fine job chronicling the way in which the aural played a key role in the definition of a relation between humankind and the body politics of the nation-state. It deserves wide recognition and ample endorsement."

EIAL - Héctor Fernández L'Hoeste

"Aurality is a rich and complex book that raises important questions about colonialism and modernity, personhood and nation. Ochoa Gautier has made an important contribution to Colombian historiography, certainly meeting her aim to explore 'the relationship between listening and the voice as a part of the history of the relation between the colonial and the modern'.  . . . It will be difficult to read history in the same way again."

The Latin Americanist - Meri L. Clark

"This book raises important questions about the role of sound and efforts to categorise it in defining the relationship between the human and the non-human, and between different social groups within Colombian society.... Aurality will undoubtedly serve the specialist researcher well and it is to be hoped that the rich lines of inquiry it opens up will receive further attention in future."

Journal of Latin American Studies - Anna Cant

"Ochoa Gautier provides a vitally important account of the intricate and heterogeneous modes of knowing, being, becoming, and belonging that continue to resonate in the postcolonial lettered city." 

American Anthropologist - Leonardo Cardoso

Gautier’s work is tremendously useful. A challenging and rewarding read, I recommend her work to persons who are seriously interested in new approaches to retelling the history of any nation.

AmeriQuests - Julian Ledford

"Speaking from the intersection of sound studies, Latin American studies, and the history of natural history and musicology, this book shifts the terrain upon which all of those fields have comfortably settled. Scholars of sound studies will need to take note of Ochoa’s challenges to European or North American framings."

Hispanic American Historical Review - Alejandra Bronfman

"Aurality is a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of sound studies. Ana Marıa Ochoa Gautier adeptly guides the reader across complex scales of analysis using well-selected historical case studies.... Aurality achieves its goal of establishing a critical vantage point for making sense of the contemporary transformations that are shaping the 21st."

American Ethnologist - William Hope

"The volume is a must for enthusiasts of sound studies and/or Colombian history. Ochoa Gautier has done a fine job chronicling the way in which the aural played a key role in the definition of a relation between humankind and the body politics of the nation-state. It deserves wide recognition and ample endorsement."

EIAL - Héctor Fernández L'Hoeste

With generous voice and incisive ears, Aurality offers us the gift of listening to and through multiple histories, eavesdropping into a Colombian 19th-century archive in whose seemingly muted vociferations Ana María Ochoa Gautier hears nothing less than the clamor of the political-sensorial genealogy of the Latin American, Caribbean, and global present. Hearing, listening, speaking, writing, and voicing all emerge here as ontological wagers on life, on personhood, and on human - non-human relations. But this is no celebration of the sonorous, it is a most critically sober and theoretically eloquent call that we listen in order to think Latin American (and global) modernity and coloniality again for the first time.

Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects - Jairo Moreno

"Aurality shows how hearing, writing, speech, and song were central to the constitution of modern personhood in the nineteenth century. Using Colombia as her grounding point, Ana María Ochoa Gautier explores the ways that colonial intellectuals, creoles, and indigenous people spoke, sung, and wrote across difference as they struggled to establish new kinds of political subjectivity and nationality. Based in deep, creative readings of primary source materials, and steeped in anthropological and cultural theory, Aurality is an erudite, challenging, and rewarding book. It offers a vital alternative to a literature that has too often taken Western Europe and anglophone North America as points of historical departure. Aurality will transform our understandings of the human and the animal; nation and citizenship; music and language; speech and writing; and modernity itself."

MP3: The Meaning of a Format - Jonathan Sterne