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This seminar introduces the anthropological study of sound and its importance to culture. We will investigate cultural and historical transformations in listening and sounding and their relations to the social history of the senses in general. We will examine the nature of music as sound and as social action, seeking music's place in wider sociocultural soundscapes, in hopes of developing an appreciation for the social power and importance of music. To this end, we will consider the various relationships of sound to its bodily, social, linguistic, ritual, mythical, and ecological contexts, as well as the roles played by musical forms in social change, identity, the construction of gender difference, commodification, and globalisation. The course will include practical exercises in acoustic ethnography.
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