Bells and Social Order: Analysing Sounds in Ethnography

Transcription

1 Bells and Social Order: Analysing Sounds in Ethnography 2017 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from.

2 Bells and Social Order: Analysing Sounds in Ethnography Student Guide Introduction Non-musical and non-linguistic sounds are abundant in every society: whenever and wherever there is society, there is sound. Despite this, besides research on spoken language and communication, sounds have not yet played a significant role in sociological ethnography. Maybe they never will, but perhaps they should. Sounds provide inspiring and intriguing material for ethnographic research on many aspects of social order. The data in this exemplar, provided by Professor Christoph Maeder from the University of Teacher Education in Zurich, are both simple and complex. The two audio recordings of short sound-strips of bells form the downloadable data. Also included in the text below are technical visual representations of the recordings, as well as photographs of the scenes in which they were taken. Together, they create an audio sphere or soundscape. A soundscape is an analogy to landscape: a spatially located acoustic environment like a square in a city, a place by the river, a classroom or even a radio broadcast (Schafer 1993, 7ff). In this dataset, the soundscapes include meadows and pastures in the middle and high lands of the Alps. The dataset and analysis will show how you can discover social phenomena by the observation of soundscapes. You will furthermore see how these tiny bits of data about bells can be linked to grand, overarching sociological concepts, and inspire further aspects and dimensions in ethnographic inquiry. The proficiency of generalising up or bringing things together by using so-called dirty ethnographic data is helpful in order to make sense of the dispersed and particular ethnographic observations one collects in any field site. The dataset will be of most interest to those collecting idiosyncratic data, especially those who have collected both audio and visual data. For context, it is strongly advised that you read the narrative of this dataset first, before downloading the audio data. Ethnography of Sounds Ethnographic research on the acoustic dimensions of societies, beyond language and communication, is relatively young and still somewhat marginal in sociology. Bauer and Gaskell (2000) were early pioneers in the qualitative method literature asking for research of this type, before Pink (2009) popularized the notion of a sensory ethnography. Bull and Back (2003) also demonstrated in their Auditory Culture Reader how such research could look (see also Sterne, 2012). For an overview of the development of sound studies with reference to sociology and ethnography, please also see Maeder (2013). The technical means at our disposal are fantastic and plentiful. Today, sounds can be recorded, stored and enhanced relatively easily and cheaply. The greater challenges lie in the choice of location, practice and research setting that produce sounds and soundscapes, as well as the ways in which you should go about analysing the audio recording. The key to ethnographic sociology on sounds and soundscapes is the use of sounds in particular situations, and the social consequences of the sound that is made. For example, what has been accomplished by that sound? Is there something like sound action (Vannini, Waskul, Gotschalk, & Rambo, 2010) beyond the commonsense notion of the term? We often talk about the ethnographic eye when conducting ethnography; to do sensory ethnography we also need a good ethnographic ear. The example here is from an old sound-producing practice and a simple, archaic technology: the bell. Bells are used in many ways, and are found and heard nearly everywhere. The basic model has developed, and today the bell can be categorized as a functional sound. Functional sounds are defined as non-verbal auditory signs that are linked to a task, e.g. locating something in space, giving a warning, indicating a boundary-value etc. This exemplar considers the Page 2 of 10

3 use and sounds of cast and plate iron bells used on herds of stirks and cows in Switzerland. Data Exemplar: Bell Sounds in Switzerland The two examples play back the sound of bells within their particular use that produce a soundscape. Example 1 consists of a 2-minute recording of the sound of small cast-iron bells used only by stirks a domesticated bovine animal. This is the soundscape of the pasture in the meadows of the High Alps. Example 2 is a 1 minute and 3 second recording of the sound of big plate-iron bells exclusively used on cows in the acoustic foreground, as well as some small cast-iron bells sound in the background. Example 2 relates to the soundscape of the pasture in the Middle-Land of Switzerland. Each sound recording is accompanied by a visual representation in the form of a time-wave diagram. These can be used to see if the sound is a low-fi or hi-fi environment, and provide information about the length of the recordings. If you see prominent peaks in the diagram, you are looking at a hi-fi soundscape where each sound is perceivable. If there is just one fat oscillating line visible without any significant peaks, it is a low-fi environment where the single sounds melts into a superimposed acoustic sensation (as an example, see data file no. 6). The data comes from a wider collection of soundscapes recorded by Professor Christoph Maeder. Christoph is collecting recordings of typical soundscapes in and around Switzerland for his research and analyses them sociologically. The goal of this research is twofold: first, it is an experiment that aims to enlarge and enhance ethnographic research methodology by introducing the audio sphere as a socially important aspect of society. Second, it also has a documentary claim. The recordings presented have been produced with the intention of compiling a register or collection of typical Swiss soundscapes. The project is still ongoing. Analysis Here, Christoph tells us how you might combine both audio and visual data. He uses something as rudimentary as a cowbell to illustrate how important sounds are in our everyday lives. From just two short recordings of the sound of bells, Christoph provides an account of how they could be sociologically analysed, discussing wider and more general sociological concepts such as identity, belonging, control and social ordering. Sound is used as both the focus of analysis and as the type of analysis. Christoph begins by setting the scene, providing a description of the soundscapes he has provided and showing how the audio data interacts with the visual data. Intention What I am going to try to show here is a sociological analysis of mixed ethnographic data, both sound and visual information. First, I will sequentially talk you through the data files I have provided and describe prominent features I recognize in them. I will also give some additional information, which is not contained in the data provided, that comes out of the journals I wrote when conducting the fieldwork. The latter information helps to provide context. Context when analysing sound data is imperative. In this case, without additional information of this type, the interpretation would undoubtedly remain very thin and short: one only would hear the sounds of some unknown bells punctuated by the sounds of animals mooing. It is making sense of these bells and animal sounds what they accomplish, how they accomplish it, and what the consequences of this achievement are which forms part of the ethnographer s ear. Example 1 Page 3 of 10

4 Sound Strip 1: Visual representation of the audio file The first sound strip refers to a soundscape on a late afternoon in September 2010 on the Tanzboden (literally, dance floor ), an alpine meadow in Eastern Switzerland. A herd of stirks have gathered near a fence in order to be prepared for the descent from the meadow down into the valley the next day. This is why all the animals had small cast-iron bells around the neck. By walking slowly around on the meadow or just from subtle movements of the neck as they chew grass from the ground, the animals produce a soundscape, which is typical for the preparation of an event called Alpabfahrt (literally going down from the alps, where alp refers to any high meadow in Switzerland). What can also be heard (around 12 to 38 seconds through the recording) is the sound of an airplane crossing the meadow at high altitude. The soundscape changes after approximately 60 seconds when the concert of bells begin to fade out and is replaced by the sound of animal noises in the second half of the recording. This change is also evident visually on the time-wave diagram: the peaks of the oscillations become smaller after around one minute. The change in the soundscape indicates that the animals are moving away from the audio recording device that I am holding. The length of the complete audio recording roughly 2 minutes is shown on the audio data display. Page 4 of 10

5 Photograph 1.1: Photography of the landscape The first photograph shows the situation from the point when we hear the animals in the recording. We can see around 17 animals at a distance of about 40 metres; however, we can hear many more bells on the recording. We can therefore presume that there are more animals on the pasture than we have captured in the photograph. Recognising that what we hear does not match what we see is part of the ethnographic ear. For example, how many bells can we hear? How big is the range of the perceivable sounds of the bells? How far away are the animals we can hear but not see? For the outsider this is not something we can determine easily. Hearing the distance of a source of sound is very tricky and requires training; but an experienced herdsperson will know because listening and hearing forms part of the tacit knowledge required when herding animals in the Alps. Page 5 of 10

6 Photograph 1.2: Photography of the recording situation The second photograph in example 1 shows the landscape where the sounds are heard. The photograph is of a mountainpasture in Eastern Switzerland in the Fall. We can determine this because of the yellow grass and the fog in the background, which is typical for the weather at this time of year. The pasture becomes recognizable by the electric wire fence in the foreground. This fence prevents the animals from leaving the pasture and from risking their lives on the walls of rocks nearby. On this occasion, the fence is also being used to keep the flock of animals together after being rounded up by the herdsmen and their dogs during the day. What is also apparent in the photograph is the damaging effect of animal hooves on the grass cover of the Alpine soil (the brown earth along the fence in the meadow). Such damage is only acceptable on special occasions; collecting the animals in order to bring them down into the valley is one such occasion. All the stirks (around 60 animals in total) will leave the alpine meadow the next morning in order to get back to their collection point. They have been herded for about six weeks up here. Once back down, they are picked up by their owners, who send them upwards to the free-range mountain meadows for grazing. For their mountain-holiday on the Tanzboden, they are handed over to special herdsmen, who are employed by the cattle-coop that owns the meadow. Walking down a flock of this size takes about three to four hours and is extremely tiring for both the animals and the accompanying herdsmen. Example 2 Page 6 of 10

7 Sound Strip 2: Visual representation of the audio file The audio file for the second example also plays the sounds of the pasture. Here, though, we can hear the much lower and slower sounding big iron-plate bell worn by a cow in the foreground (represented in the time-wave diagram). In the background, we can hear the small cast-iron bells of the regular stirk members of the flock. What we cannot hear in this example, and what is different to the first recording, is movement in the sources of sound. The sound is much more static. This is because the animals remain more or less in the same place and are not being walked down the mountain. This is confirmed in photograph 2.1, showing them grazing. This audio file is taken from a Hamlet in Eastern Switzerland recorded in August, Photograph 2.1: Photography of the sounding situation Page 7 of 10

8 This all sets the scene and the context. What, though, is the role of sound in the context of herding these animals? What is important sociologically? What does hearing provide the ethnographer that seeing cannot? How do we go about analysing such sounds? I now discuss how this dataset can be analysed by focusing on the functions of the bell sounds. Analysis What we hear in the first example is an institutionalized event, the preparation of the Alpabfahrt. This preparation is loaded with lots of very special, local knowledge, which is relevant in order to understand what is happening and what we can hear. For instance, the preparation requires the equipping of every single animal with a light cast-iron bell. The particular bell we hear in this recording is one that is only used on stirks. In the Swiss Alpine farming tradition, every species of animal that is herded (stirks, cows, goats, sheep) is given a different and distinctive bell. Such an assignment and ordering appears to be a widespread custom in animal keeping since Panopoulos (2003) also reports the same tradition in Greece. Consequently, a knowing hearer recognizes what animals (whether it is goat, stirk or cow) s/he is dealing with from the sound of the bell in the distance. The uninitiated hearer may assume the sounds they were listening to in our example were cows due to the perceivable mooing. This is because the sounds that cows and stirks make cannot be distinguished by our ears. However, there are no cows in this herd. If there were cows, we would hear the sounds of the much larger cowbells that are made out of plate (rather than cast) iron. Indeed there are far fewer cows in the Swiss High Alps than stirks, and many good reasons why this is the case. Cows need to be milked every day, either by being collected individually and taken to the milking machine or by being milked by hand on site. This is extremely time-consuming and is not always possible, given the large, challenging terrain of the alpine meadow. What is striking in the recording, then, is the use of a very old acoustic technology in order to control the stirks and their use of space. Without their bells, stirks would have to be guided, one or two at a time, down the mountain and guarded by a herdsman, which would be equally as time-consuming as milking the cows. In this case, this would require 30 herdsmen to bring 60 stirks down the mountain. With the use of the bell though, all of a sudden, vast and wide areas even in the mountains can be efficiently stocked with animals for grassing and feeding and controlled by a few herdsmen with the help of their dogs. Just by listening to the bell, they know in which direction the animals have gathered, and if they are grazing or on the move. The bell then is used to control, order and communicate, enabling herdsmen and their dogs to locate the animals in order to bring them down the mountain. Indeed, the invention of something as simple as the bell would have been a hugely significant development in the region, allowing animals to be controlled from large distances, with the knock-on effects of increasing meat production through extended and intensified use of difficult mountain terrains. Such a simple, archaic invention would have been as ground-breaking for the local economy as the introduction of the wheel. Therefore control would be a prominent sociologically theme I would interrogate further from this data. For example, on a more functional level, the combination of bells heard in example 2, Michlenberg, also serves as a kind of control of the humans over the animals. However, in this soundscape hierarchy is introduced in more than just direct human-bovine domination. First, it also makes audible the human-animal relation, where humans dominate the animals by hanging bells on them. However, this domination is transferred and infused further into the herd of bovine animals, where one animal a cow is selected as a leader and is equipped with a special plate-iron bell. The herd is then controlled through the herdsman s interaction with the dominant, leading cow, which we hear in the foreground of the recording. The plate-iron bell of this cow produces a much lower and slower sound, while the rest of the herd is equipped with the high and fast-sounding stirk-bell. Taken together, this soundscape composed of two kinds of bells is a quite complex matrix, representing dominance and control. The herd is not being brought down the mountain as in example 1, but they remain herded through interaction with the dominant cow and their bells. Ethnographic questions then arise around hierarchy and practice: for example, is there a Page 8 of 10

9 single leading animal or a number of leading animals in the herd, and why? How are leading animals trained, selected, etc.? Who does the selecting? Who conducts the training? How is the training done? What are the functions of the bell besides making sound? For example, are there any symbolic aspects of the soundscapes to consider? Of further interest to sociologists, the bells are also a sign and symbol of property. In fact, there are different sounding bells for the different regions of Switzerland. However, at this point it does get a little more complicated: not only do the sounds of the bells differ slightly between regions, but the way the bells look is distinct too. In the different regions of Switzerland, there are various types and colours of stitching on the neckbands that lace the bells. So even when bells sound similar or cannot be distinguished, the type of stitch can reveal whose herd it is. Overall The bell is more than an audio instrument; it is a social instrument. What is important sociologically in this dataset is the use of the bell for interspecies domination, for control over the landscape, and for production and property identification. Indeed, from something as simple as a bell and the soundscapes of herding animals, we can begin to interrogate wider sociologically noteworthy themes such as aspects of food production and issues related to property and identity display (for example, the different neckbands). We can also examine local, tacit knowledge about herding bovine animals how are different sounds distinguished, for example, how are they recognized, how do herdspeople learn to distinguish different sounds? This kind of acoustic environment is typical for rural Switzerland and it points to many other local webs of meaning, which deserve ethnographic research too: for example, the bells do more than just sort herds of animals; they also sort agricultural identities and the people who do the farming. When local people gather for the special events like the Alpabfahrt (the going down from the meadows) or the Alpauffahrt (the going up to the meadows) or at celebrations like weddings or christenings, they bring along bells and make soundscapes with them. Sometimes these bells are on animals, but sometimes they are used to decorate the rooms in which they gather. On occasions, these bells are even found in the living rooms or entrances to people s homes. The bell, then, has further meaning here, over and above the control of animals; it becomes a part of the herdspeople s culture, custom and identity. In the Alps, the bell does more than domesticate animals, it also domesticates humans and is a cultural artefact that is used to symbolise group identity and mark property. Bells do not need to be carried around the neck to have control. The simple sound of the bell is enough! Think of school bells, ship bells and church bells. The model and sound of the bell might be slightly different, but they all display similar functions. They are often used to warn or alert people of something: for example (i) that it is time to leave school, (ii) that a service is about to commence or (iii) that you have entered a premise when you should not have. The sounds produced by these bells control for space, time or function. So what have we learned? The bell as an acoustic technology has been and continues to be used to domesticate animals and their social environments. Understanding what bell is ringing and what this means requires a lot of local, tacit knowledge. Piecing together this tacit knowledge requires ethnographic work that collects both audio and visual data, and a commitment to developing an ethnographic ear. Reflective Questions 1. The bell is introduced here as a predecessor and a general model for what nowadays is called functional sounds that are evident in our modern societies. Describe two important functions of these sounds for those who own them. 2. In the examples presented, audio recordings are combined with photography and time-wave diagrams. Why is the visual data important to complement the audio data? What would change at the level of the analysis (field access, field role, documentation and field notes, software etc.) if we used video recordings instead? Page 9 of 10

10 3. A single, old acoustic technology is examined in order to find general social patterns like domination, control etc. Are there similar approaches available for other senses? If so, think of other ethnographic studies that deal with the senses. Where do they take place and what could further studies on sensual aspects of society reveal? Further Reading Bauer, M. W., & Gaskell, G. D. (2000) Qualitative Researching with Text, Image and Sound: A Practical Handbook for Social Research. London: SAGE. Bull, M., and Back, L. (2003) The Auditory Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg. Maeder, C. (2013) Analysing sounds. In U. Flick (ed.) The Sage handbook of qualitative data analysis (pp ). London: SAGE. Panopoulos, P. (2003) Bells as symbols: Sound and hearing in a Greek island village. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 9, Pink, S. (2009) Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: SAGE. Schafer, R. M. (1993) The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. Sterne, J. (2012) The Sound Studies Reader. Oxford: Routledge. Vannini, P., Waskul, D., Gotschalk, S., & Rambo, C. (2010) Sound acts: Elocution, somatic work, and the performance of the sonic alignment. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 39, Page 10 of 10