A sonic ethnography

We propose a sonic ethnography that focuses on listening, departing from an investigation of a soundscape to one that attends to how people listen. This, we suggest, is crucial for an anthropological approach that understands sound as processual and relational. Rather than describing what the ethnographer hears, we outline a project of listening with others. Listening is ordinary, something at which everyone is expert, even as it expands beyond the ear and beyond the human. In this way, listening is central to an anthropogenic sensorium that shifts away from human exceptionalism. Always emergent, listening—like climate change—is fundamentally uncertain. And while recording technology has long been central to an anthropology of sound, we invite new ways of engaging audio technology that take seriously its presence in everyday listening as well as its expressive capacities.