Sounding Situated Knowledges - Echo in Archaeoacoustics

This article proposes that feminist epistemologies via Donna Haraway's “Situated Knowledges” can be productively brought to bear upon theories of sonic knowledge production, as “sounding situated knowledges.” Sounding situated knowledges re-reads debates around the “nature of sound” with a Harawayan notion of the “natureculture of sound.” This aims to disrupt a traditional subject-object relation which I argue has perpetuated a pervasive “sonic naturalism” in sound studies. The emerging field of archaeoacoustics (acoustic archaeology), which examines the role of sound in human behaviour in archaeology, is theorized as an opening with potentially profound consequences for sonic knowledge production which are not currently being realized. The echo is conceived as a material-semiotic articulation, which akin to Haraway's infamous cyborg, serves as a feminist figuration which enables this renegotiation. Archaeoacoustics research, read following Haraway both reflectively and diffractively, is understood as a critical juncture for sound studies which exposes the necessity of both embodiedness and situatedness for sonic knowledge production. Given the potential opened up by archaeoacoustics through the figure of echo, a critical renegotiation of the subject-object relation in sound studies is suggested as central in further developing theories of sonic knowledge production

Literatura Literature

Este texto se volta para as vicissitudes do informante nativo como figura na representação literária. A autora trabalha "com uma oposição binária relativamente antiquada entre filosofia e literatura, segundo a qual a primeira concatena argumentos e a segunda concebe o impossível. Para ambas o informante nativo parece inevitável". Ela examina a posição desse informante à luz do que chama de "axiomática do imperialismo" em Jane Eyre, de Brontë, Wide Sargasso Sea, de Rhys, e Frankenstein, de Shelley, para concluir com uma leitura de "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha", de Mahasweta Devi.<br>This text picks at the vicissitudes of the native informant as figure in literary representation. Its author works "with rather an old-fashioned binary opposition between philosophy and literature; that the first concatenates arguments and the second figures the impossible. For both the native informant seems unavoidable". She examines the position of such informant, in the light of what she calls the "axiomatics of imperialism" in Brontë's Jane Eyre, in Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, and in Shelley's Frankenstein, to end up with a reading of Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha"