Sounds of Trauma

Bibliographic Data

ID8250989
AuthorsMalini Sur (0000-0002-5744-9648, Western Sydney University, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume3
Issue1
Pages144-151
Publication date2020-12-09
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCommoning Ethnography (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2537-9879 • E-ISSN: 2537-9879
PublisherVictoria University of Wellington Library (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.26686/ce.v3i1.6655
OpenAlexW3113323842
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited10

This article explores the sounds of trauma in anthropology. I ask: when, where, and under what circumstances do unmoored sounds and voices gain salience in anthropology? In particular, can methodological insights prepare anthropologists for the intense military scrutiny that societies endure in violent borderlands? Recalling the long tradition of orality in anthropology, I suggest that the slippery registers of sound and voice in trauma is generative not only of location and culture, but also of a perennial sense of dislocation. Writing anthropology demands the iterative re-dwelling and reliving of sound and voice that continually haunt, emerge, flow, and resurface across different stages of ethnographic labour. Disembodied sounds and voices generate indescribable languages. Based on my long term ethnographic fieldwork in the Northeast India-Bangladesh borderlands, I show how sensory modalities not only nourish divergent possibilities of meaning and emplacement but also register impasses of interpretation and displacement

Aesthetics · Art · Ethnography · Heteroglossia · Linguistics · Orality · Salience (neuroscience · Scrutiny · Sociology · Anthropology · Cambodian History and Society · History · Philosophy · Psychology · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

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