Steven Feld

acoustemology

Acoustemology conjoins "acoustics" and "epistemology" to theorize sound as a way of knowing. In doing so it inquires into what is knowable, and how it becomes known, through sounding and listening. Acoustemology begins with acoustics to ask how the dynamism of sound's physical energy indexes its social immediacy. It asks how the physicality of sound is so instantly and forcefully present to experience and experiencers, to interpreters and interpretations. Answers to such questions do not necessarily engage acoustics on the formal scientific plane that investigates the physical components of sound's materiality (Kinsler et al. 1999). Rather, acoustemology engages acoustics at the plane of the audible—akoustos—to inquire into sounding as simultaneously social and material, an experiential nexus of sonic sensation.

Acoustemology joins acoustics to epistemology to investigate sounding and listening as a knowing-in-action: a knowing-with and knowing-through the audible. Acoustemology thus does not invoke epistemology in the formal sense of an inquiry into metaphysical or transcendental assumptions surrounding claims to "truth" ("epistemology with a capital E," in the phrasing of Richard Rorty, 1981). Rather it engages the relationality of knowledge production, as what John Dewey called contextual and experiential knowing (Dewey and Bentley 1949).

I coined the term "acoustemology" in 1992 to situate the social study of sound within a key question driving contemporary social theory. Namely, is the world constituted by multiple essences, by primal substances with post facto categorical names like "human," "animal," "plant," "material," or "technology?" Or is it constituted relationally, by the acknowledgment of conjunctions, disjunctions, and entanglements among all copresent and historically accumulated forms? It was the latter answer that compelled a theorization of sounding and listening aligned with relational ontology; the conceptual term for the position that substantive existence never operates anterior to relationality.

Relational ontology can be traced across a number of discourses linking philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. Phrasings associated with both Ernst Cassirer (1957) and Alfred Schütz (1967) argue that "actors plus locations" are produced by "relations-inaction." Cassirer's formal antisubstantialism argued that being was never independent of relating. Schütz's lifeworld philosophy focused on the character of sharing time and space with consociates, compared to sharing or not sharing time with contemporaries and predecessors. Relationality as "inter-action" and "trans-action" appears in John Dewey's writings with the hyphen for emphasis on both across-ness and between-ness (Dewey 1960). Without the hyphen, these terms became sociological keywords anew in the 1960s and 1970s, always in the service of arguing against the reduction of agency to a set list of entities or essences (Goffman 1967; Emirbayer 1997).

British social anthropology, in its formative period, focused on the study of "relations of relations" (Kuper 1996). This idea echoed into new frontiers with the conjunction of the terms "social" and "ecology," "ecology" and "mind," and "cybernetic" and "epistemology" in the writings of Gregory Bateson (2000 [1972]). The notion that actors plus relationships shape networks both within and across species or materialities is part of how more contemporary theorists—such as Donna Haraway (2003), Marilyn Strathern (2005), and Bruno Latour (2005)—have schematized relationality's critical logic. These themes are likewise present in contemporary writings on interspecies and nature/culture relations by Philippe Descola (2013) and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2000), as well as in posthumanist theories refiguring human relational presence and action with all technological, animal, and environmental others (Wolfe 2009).

Acoustemology's logical point of connection to a relational ontology framework is here: existential relationality, a connectedness of being, is built on the between-ness of experience. Acoustemology, as relational ontology, thus takes sound and sounding as "situational" (Haraway 1988) among "related subjects" (Bird-David 1999); it explores the "mutual" (Buber 1923) and "ecological" (Bateson 1972) space of sonic knowing as "polyphonic," "dialogical," and "unfinalizable" (Bakhtin 1981, 1984). Knowing through relations insists that one does not simply "acquire" knowledge but, rather, that one knows through an ongoing cumulative and interactive process of participation and reflection. This is so whether knowledge is shaped by direct perception, memory, deduction, transmission, or problem solving. Perhaps this is why relational epistemology is also invoked regularly as a cornerstone of decolonized indigenous methodologies (Chilasa 2012).

Beyond an alignment with relational ontology, the acoustemology coinage was also meant to refine and expand what I had called, for the previous twenty years, the anthropology of sound. This approach had emerged in critical response to perceived limitations of the dominant anthropology of music paradigms of the 1960s and 1970s: Alan Merriam's theorization of "music in culture" (1964) and John Blacking's theorization of "humanly organized sound" (1973). The anthropology of sound idea advocated for an expanded terrain when engaging global musical diversity. That expansion acknowledged the critical importance of language, poetics, and voice; of species beyond the human; of acoustic environments; and of technological mediation and circulation.

While the idea of an anthropology of sound was meant to help decolonize ethnomusicology's disciplinary paradigms, the presence of "anthropology" still made it too human-centric; the prepositional "of" marked too much distance and separation, and the nominal "sound" seemingly made it more about propagation than perception, more about structure than process. It was a case of "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" (Lorde 1984). Other intellectual equipment was needed to address the sounding worlds of indigenous and emergent global geographies of difference across the divides of species and materials. For this reason, the relational ontology background shaped acoustemology as a way to inquire into knowing in and through sounding, with particular care to the reflexive feedback of sounding and listening. The kind of knowing that acoustemology tracks in and through sound and sounding is always experiential, contextual, fallible, changeable, contingent, emergent,...