Research Catalogue

By combining text and three video essays, this contribution presents a multimodal ethnography of loudspeakers in the Roma neighborhood of a Romanian village. It is based on video recordings, which were left out of the analysis and editing of my documentary films because of sound distortion. Revisiting my fieldnotes and the “ethnographic rubbish,” here I establish a critical study of my initial position – for 15 years I wasn’t paying attention to loudspeakers as an object of study in their own right – and I argue how these sounds have become auditory markers of the neighborhood since, at least, the beginning of the 2000s. The article thereby contributes to the fields of both anthropology and sound studies. It shows how the use of loudspeakers is made up of rivalry, interference, fame, fraternity, and familism. Moreover, the analysis shows how the lines between public and private spaces, and between oblique listening and noise cancellation are continually reconfigured in a community obsessed with mutual acquaintance.

What can be considered as a discarded recording in an ethnographic inquiry? Do the instabilities and technical errors show that technology is really part of the encounter of ethnographic situations? Furthermore, is there a limit beyond which a sound that is too degraded can no longer be restored but simply described in writing, the preferred medium of the human sciences in general and anthropology in particular? These three ideas were at the center of an online conversation with Ernst Karel, starting with the film Expedition Content (2020) made with Veronika Kusumaryati from the sound archives of the Harvard-Peabody expedition (1961) in Dutch New Guinea. The many errors and failures that punctuate Rockefeller's recordings – we also listened to some recordings that did not appear in Expedition Content – form a fertile ground for thinking about the tactics and listening that can make examining ethnographic rubbish a heuristic, both for the history of the anthropological discipline and for the history of the place where it was recorded.

The introduction to this special issue of The Journal of Sonic Studies addresses the concept of sonic waste in anthropological research. Stemming from a laboratory session titled "Rubbish, Noise, Experimentations: New Afterlives of Field Recordings" at the 2020 European Association of Social Anthropologists conference, this collection reconsiders ethnographic recordings traditionally categorized as noise or errors. The text sets the stage for the ensuing contributions that critically engage with discarded audio materials, challenging the long-standing emphasis on clarity and precision in field recordings. This introduction explores the notion of “ethnographic rubbish” – recordings that fall outside the ethnographer's initial analytical framework – and positions this rubbish as worthy of scholarly attention. It argues for the inclusion of these “noisy” artifacts in the broader ethnographic narrative, suggesting that they can offer unique insights into the affective and infrastructural aspects of the researched environments. By foregrounding the materiality of sound and advocating for a multimodal ethnographic approach, this introduction invites a reassessment of what constitutes valuable data.