Julie Métais is a lecturer at Toulouse Jean Jaurès University. Her research focuses on the voices of conflict in the Americas (Mexico, Brazil), drawing on an anthropology of politics and sound.
Ethnographic work generally involves making sound recordings (recorded interviews, field recordings, or archival documents), whether or not the research includes a sonic dimension. But the sonic corpus of ethnographical research does not stop there; it also includes recorded "notepads," recordings related to daily life, telephone messages, etc. A large part of these sound data is discarded at the time of analysis and writing. What if it were otherwise? Relying on my research on cultural expressions of political conflicts in Oaxaca (Mexico), I propose a reflective approach to an initially discarded corpus of sounds, in order to reevaluate my listening and recording position as an anthropologist.