“But what of the ethnographic ear?” famously asked James Clifford in his seminal critique of the poetics and politics of ethnography (Clifford 1986, 12). His question resonated deeply during a sensory turn in anthropology in which ethnographers’ attention shifted “from sight and vision to sound and voice, from text to performance, from monologue to dialogue” (Conquergood 1991, 183). This audiography, by Lauren Pond with the American Religious Sounds Project, follows in the footsteps of these dialogues that center aurality as a site of ethnographic encounter. Hers is a strikingly intimate work that archives religious pluralism through field recordings of America’s heartland.

Across three audio collages, Pond approaches her recordings with a preservationist spirit that draws on radio documentary practices. The first segment narrativizes a quest for evangelical redemption among truckers at the Truckers for Christ mobile chapel in Lodi, Ohio. Pond juxtaposes ambient mechanical noise with the relative calm within the chapel (a converted semi-tractor trailer) to convey how religious solace is demanded by transient lives spent on the road. By presenting the chapel as acoustically dry, Pond arguably renders acoustic Emily Thompson’s argument that a “lack of reverberation” has historically marked certain spaces as “modern” (Thompson 2004).

In contrast to the dry sonic signature of the trucker chapel, the second track shifts to an excessively wet rendering of a local gathering of members of the St. Stevan of Dechani Serbian Orthodox Church in Columbus, Ohio. Wetness saturates each segment of this audio collage, from the chatter of voices in a highly reflective room to the transductive sounds of water boiling and fish frying as church members prepare a meal for Lent. Whether linguistic or environmental, these reverberant sounds portray Serbian Orthodox gatherings as highly communal in ways that arguably delimit such socio-religious spaces as more traditional than modern.

The work concludes with an audio collage set in the political present, specifically 2017 protests over Trump Administration travel bans that target Muslim-majority countries. Pond authenticates these public assemblies as markers of Muslim-American life by foregrounding vocal remarks of protesters who self-identify as Muslim. As collective protest chants ricochet off the concrete surfaces of the Columbus airport, a Doppler effect acts as a sonic metaphor for how the political vulnerability of Muslim subjects extends beyond individuals directly impacted by the ban to affect, and ally, a national polity. Yet this setting made me question whether the precarity of Muslim rights speaks for the entirety of Muslim-American lived experience, or whether this focus implicitly recognizes Muslims through the Orientalist gaze rather than on their own terms, a representational tactic that the other audioworlds successfully avoid.

Together, these audio collages compose distinct religious and cultural worlds through the use of acoustic texture and sonic metaphor. Pond clearly attributes agency to her ethnographic subjects and privileges the meaning-making processes of religious culture. However, Pond and her collaborators might benefit from extending their work to include their own presence and active participation, what Tim Ingold calls “zones of entanglement” (Ingold 2008). Integrating dialogic relations within the collages themselves could potentially redistribute the authorial control currently structuring this work, such that “vulnerability and self-disclosure [become] enabled through conversation” (Conquergood 1991, 183). Nonetheless there is much to be gained through this work. By amplifying religious pluralism through audio collage, Pond offers a set of echoes through which, as Steven Feld suggests, listeners become entangled “with reverberant pasts in the present, presents in the past” (Feld 1994: 5). Her work raises compelling questions about how we might listen for religion, and how seeking such through its sonic manifestations offers new perspectives on the makings of religious life in our contemporary America.

Works Cited

Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. 1996. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Conquergood, Dwight. 1991. "Rethinking ethnography: Towards a critical cultural politics." Communications Monographs 58, no. 2: 179-194.

Feld, Steven. 1994. "From ethnomusicology to echo-muse-ecology: Reading R. Murray Schafer in the Papua New Guinea Rainforest." The Soundscape Newsletter 8, no. 4-6.

Ingold, Tim. 2008. "Bindings against boundaries: entanglements of life in an open world." Environment and Planning A 40, no. 8: 1796-1810.

Thompson, Emily Ann. 2004. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. Boston: MIT press, 2004.

Reviewer Bio:

Shayna Silverstein is an assistant professor in Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Her research examines the politics and aesthetics of sound and movement in the contemporary Middle East, focusing on the Syrian dance music, dabke. Her recent and upcoming publications about sound include a chapter in Remapping Sound Studies (Duke UP) and an essay in Music & Politics. Her current book project, entitled Syria Moves: Performance, Politics, and Belonging in Syrian Dance Music, analyzes body, performance, and culture in prewar and wartime Syria.