Ontologies of acoustic endurance: rethinking wartime sound and listening

Abstract

This article argues that when recent writers in sound studies claim primacy for nonrepresentational experiences of the sounds of military weaponry in definitions of the “ontology” of wartime sound and audition, the result is that a universalised, Western, male listener and the sounds of weaponry are positioned as the proper subject and object for writings in sound studies on war. Turning to the sonic lifeworlds of women and children (as soldiers, civilians, mothers, widows, and so on) in Sri Lanka’s civil war (1983–2009), I argue that wartime sound and audition are best described as processes that structure wartime endurance at several overlapping temporal registers, through culturally-determined ontologies of personhood, violence, sonic efficacy and sonic protection.

Keywords:

• Sound
• war
• Sri Lanka
• gender
• culture

Disclosure statement

I do not have any financial interest arising from the direct applications of this research.

Funding

This work was supported by the Fulbright-Hays DDRA; the Mellon Foundation; the Wenner-Gren Foundation; the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies; and the University of Pennsylvania's University Research Fund.

Notes

1. In this article, I italicise words pertaining to sound, silence and listening in wartime, so that we may develop a vocabulary for understanding their relations within social contexts during war. All italicisations are mine unless specified.

2. This literature on war in sound studies should be seen as auxiliary to, rather than simply a part of, scholarship on music and war (or vice versa; e.g. Gilman 2016; Pieslak 2009; Pettan 1998; Grant 2014; Sumera 2013). Except for a few examples (Fast and Pegley 2012; Kartomi 2010; McDonald 2006), little fieldwork has been conducted on sound or music and war outside the West in which the protagonists are not American soldiers or local combatants, and very little attention has been paid to non-Western ontologies of sound, music and violence.

3. Kane (2015) argues that Goodman’s approach strengthens a dualism between cognition and affect that he seeks to overcome.

4. See also Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1998; Das 2007; Scheper-Hughes 1993; Scarry 1985; Tambiah 1986.

5. For overviews of the political and social dynamics of Sri Lanka’s war, see Tambiah 1992; Daniel 1996; Marga Institute 2001; Bartholomeusz 2002; DeVotta 2004. For important regional perspectives on the war, see Lawrence 1997; McGilvray 2008; Gaasbeek 2010; Spencer et al. 2015; Thiranagama 2011; Durges 2013. For the post-war period, see Louis and Deenadayalan 2011; Goodhand, Spencer, and Korf 2011; Choi 2012; Amarasuriya and Spencer 2015.

6. Describing an interlocutor in eastern Sri Lanka, Patricia Lawrence (1997, 10) exclaims, “At the end of language, her body became the agent, a site where truth is made public”.

7. In an essay called “I Wail, Therefore I Am”, Tripta Chandola (2014, 213–214) writes that women in the Delhi slum of Govindapuri are “denied techniques of being heard, and thus their entry and assertion into its soundscapes often remain, at best, muted”. It is the wailing woman, Chandola asserts, that “has the potential to disrupt the intersecting sonic, spatial, and gendered masculine hierarchies, however temporarily”: “the un-heard do wail; the un-dead do not just cremate themselves into ashes; and the un-existent continue to move across the spatial-temporal-sonic matrices. In their wailing, they haunt” (her italics).

8. Veena Das (2007, 8) writes that words can be imbued “with a spectral quality”, as though they are “animated by some other voice”. There are also those who choose to stay mute to protect their voice.

9. De Soyza describes looking at her mother “in the dull light of the bulb, I saw worry in her face as she recited the rosary in silence” (de Soyza 2011, 65).

10. “The real voice is muted by the violent event, leaving empty and absent words in which the violence endured [seems] to be ‘on the edge of the conversation’” (Walker 2013, 94).

11. Bourdieu and Wacquant (2004, 273) note that the “male order is so deeply grounded as to need no justification ... leading to construct [relations] from the standpoint of the dominant, i.e., as natural”.

12. Walker (2013, 3) argues that, “moments of hope and imagination as well as the everyday endurance which drives people forward must constitute a core element of anthropological representations of violence and suffering. This includes highlighting the non-violent spaces or parts of daily life, which are less dramatically framed by violence, and are often lost in contexts of conflict, faded out as weak shadows to the more forceful violence”.

13. See Daughtry (2015, 57) for a discussion of noisy generators in Iraq.

14. Occasionally the stress boiled over into direct confrontations seemingly unrelated to the war, as when “an elderly man and his granddaughter were shot by their neighbor for daring to complain that his television was too loud” (ibid.).

15. It should be noted that the soundscape of terror Argenti-Pillen describes is now almost two decades in the past.

16. In a 2014 article, Daughtry coins the phrase “Thanatosonics” to refer to sounds he wishes to “cordon off” as “extreme wartime acoustic phenomena” (Daughtry 2014, 27) in which sound acts “as blunt force”, displaying “the strange democracy of sonic violence” (ibid., 38–39). However, he also defines the term as the “physiological and psychosocial effects that are created when sound and death are fused together” (ibid., 39–40), creating a collapsing of cultural difference through ontology (similar to “belliphonic”). If defined as the latter definition, I suggest, “Thanatosonics” needs to incorporate non-Judeo-Christian understandings of the fusing of sound and death, such as Buddhist pirit chant and discourses on rebirth.

17. Aadhil, it should be mentioned, has written many songs on other issues. He now resides in Australia.

18. Daughtry cites this quote approvingly in his book; it comes from a panel he organized at NYU on violence in 2009 (Daughtry 2015, 25).