Sonic Transculturation, Epistemologies of Purification and the Aural Public Sphere in Latin America

Abstract

This paper explores how practices of sonic recontextualization enacted by both folklorists and the music industry during the first half of the twentieth century have been crucial to the constitution of an aural modernity in Latin America. This is mediated simultaneously by the contradictory practices of epistemologies of purification—which seek to provincialize sounds in order to ascribe them a place in the modern ecumene and epistemologies of transculturation—which either enact or disrupt such practices of purification. Through this I wish to argue that the aural has been a sphere of crucial constitution of Latin America's highly unequal modernity, one that is significant not only in the contemporary sonic turn but that also played a role in defining the very idea of a Latin American lettered modernity. I also explore the relation of this to the construction of epistemologies of traditional and popular musics in Latin America and their role in the constitution of musical ‘knowledges otherwise’. I particularly explore the politics of knowledge of some of the early twentieth cenutry folklorists and their implications for thinking about the structure of knowledge in musical disciplinary fields in a globalized, postcolonial context at a moment in which the sonic is mediating crucial fields of experience and knowledge.

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