Lecture by UNM Emeritus Distinguished Professor, Steve Feld: “HEARING HEAT: AN ANTHROPOCENE ACOUSTEMOLOGY”
Thursday February 22, 2018
2:00-3:30pm
Location: Waters Room, Zimmerman.
Bruno Latour argues that even if poisoned, the anthropocene is a deep gift to human research, inciting new approaches to environmental responsibility. Taking up Latour’s challenge through acoustemology, the study of sound as a way of knowing, this talk engages histories of hearing heat that affectively entangle cicadas and humans in Papua New Guinea, Japan, and Greece.
Steven Feld is an anthropologist, musician/sound artist, and filmmaker. His acoustemology research projects include rainforest sound ecology in Papua New Guinea, the history of bells in Europe, and jazz cosmopolitanism in West Africa. He taught in multiple fields for 35 years, the last 10 of them at UNM. Presently he is Senior Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, working on Voices of the Rainforest, a documentary feature film building on a 7.1 surround virtual rainforest that he composed this year at Skywalker Sound.
The Gay West: From Drug Store Cowboys to Rodeo Queens
The masculine ideal represented by the American cowboy is variously interpreted by spectators, dancers, musicians, and contestants at gay rodeos and country western dances across the U.S. Examining embodied gender practices within these communities, this talk articulates the sonic, social, and geographical spaces of the gay American West.
The Cruelty of Jazz: Toward a Hemispheric Politics of Sound
Rooted in concepts of affect and Empire, this paper argues that jazz operated in various 20th century Latin American settings as a vital touchstone bearing the risks and benefits of urban modernization, hemispheric geopolitics, and transnational cultural production, “cruelly” echoing the United States’ cultural, political, and economic dominance in the hemisphere and beyond.
Music from the Americas presents Versus 8
Percussion music in the Americas is one of the most exotic, visually attractive, and antique forms of expression since pre-hispanic times. Preserving, promoting and creating music for the percussion family of instruments is at the core of Versus 8’s mission through international collaboration with composers, performers, students, and cultural centers that contribute with their resources to the cycle of music, namely: creation, performance, and listening..