Narrativity in Sound: A Sound-Centered Approach to Indigenous Amazonian Ways of Managing Relations of Alterity

Abstract

Indi genous Amazonian peoples use musical sounds, natural sounds, and musicalized speech in a multitude of ways to manage transformational powers of movement, displacement, and historical engagement with various categories of “others”: mythic ancestor-spirits, spirits of the dead, animal and plant spirits, affines, neighboring indigenous peoples, and non-indigenouspeoples. In this essay, we develop a sound-centered approach to relations of identity and alterity as a critical alternative to perspectivism, which privileges visual ways of knowing bycharacterizing relations with others as a process of “other-becoming” that allows humans to imaginatively see themselves from the other’s point of view and that reduces these processes topredatory relations of consuming, or being consumed by, “others”. The transformational powers of musical sounds and words go far beyond a mere shifting of perspective between humans andnon-humans seen as predatory enemies. Instead, these musical processes are better understood as the creation of a shared musical-and-verbal sonic space of historical engagement that allows for acknowledging the otherness of the other and for effecting social transformations. The shift from myth-centered intellectualist approaches such as structuralism (or its contemporary manifestation as perspectivism) to sound-centered modes of theorizing has profound implications for the way research in ethnomusicology and linguistic anthropology is conceptualized andpracticed. Ethnomusicologists are only beginning to grasp the full complexity of indigenous sonic worlds. We need to find ways of engaging these worlds by consciously taking into considerationour own practices of listening to, recording, and interpretation of musical sounds; thus, understanding these practices as processes of creating sound-centered narratives in collaboration with our indigenous interlocutors. In this essay, we introduce the concept of mike-positionality, or the position of sound recordists as they interact with ethnographic subjects during inscription processes and as they participate in the broader processes of constructing sound-centered narratives. By calling attention to the analytical and creative dimensions of hearing, listening to,and recording human and non-human sounds, the concept of mike-positionality allows us to move toward an understanding of narrativity in sound as the basis for managing relations of alterity in Amazonia.