Page 194 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Soundscape 177

“full-bodied” nature of sound perception and linking sound sensation to
spatial orientation and movement (e.g. McCartney 2004).
The concept of soundscape also became central to anthropological and
ethnomusicological studies of “acoustemology,” which took the concept
into different analytical directions. Rather than exploring the “acoustic
ecology” of particular social environments, anthropological studies of
soundscape focused mostly on how people imagine, respond to, hear places
as sensually sonic (see Feld 1996: 96). Though most authors employed
the term primarily in reaction to the ocularcentrism of conventional
scientific discourse and to the presumed primacy of vision to Western
epistemology, the conclusions (and agendas) they drew from this heuristic
perspective were actually very different. Authors such as Ong posited
(and essentialized) vision as being the characteristic perceptual mode of
Western modernity and contrasted it to the alleged centrality of smell,
taste, sound in non-Western societies (Ong 1981 [1967]; also see Burrows
1990; Classen 1993; Beck 2006). Other authors, in contrast, criticized
the McLuhanite tendency to think along, and reify, a visual-auditory great
divide and its underlying assumption that “seeing is analytic and reflective,
sound is active and generative” (Schafer 1985: 96). They warned against
countering “commonsensical” assumptions of the centrality of visualism in
Western analytic discourse by erecting an anti-visualism (e.g., Gouk 1991;
Schmidt 2000). Instead, they emphasized the need to analyze all registers
of sensual perception in their interplay. To them, thinking about sound
and soundscape formed part of a larger anthropological exploration of
the senses. Accordingly, they considered soundscape as a domain in which
aural sensation interacts with other perceptual modes, conveys a sense of
orientation (e.g., Idhe 1976; Howes 1991, 2004; Bull and Back 2003), and
serves to inhabit memory (Casey 1987[1976]; Corbin 1998; Smith 1999).
Rather than ontologizing “culturally specific” orders of sensual perception,
they emphasized that modes of sensory dominance change contextually
with bodily emplacement (e.g., Feld 1991; 1996).

Soundscape and/as religious mediation

How, then, can these scholarly approaches to the study of soundscape
be brought to bear on explorations of the relationship between sound
sensation and religious mediation, of sound sensation as a form of religious
mediation? Practices and technologies related to the aural-oral mediation
of religious experience illustrate that “religion” itself should be understood
as a form of mediation (de Vries and Weber 2001; Stolow 2005). Similar
to “communication,” religion refers to the act of establishing contact, of
binding together two different entities or realities; in short, of mediating