Listening, Language, and Colonialism on Main Street, Gibraltar
2012; Routledge; Volume: 9; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14791420.2012.663094
ISSN1479-4233
Autores Tópico(s)Caribbean and African Literature and Culture
ResumoAbstract This essay explores the ways in which listening exists as a means for the maintenance and operationalization of power in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar. On Main Street, a struggle between Spanish ways of practicing space and British ways of representing space is played out in a discourse between the soundscapes of spoken Llanito and British nationalistic parades. Utilizing ethnographic research gathered in 2009, and drawing on practice theory and semiotic approaches, I argue that an examination of how people listen on Main Street makes legible the complex power dynamics between Gibraltarians, Spanish-ness, and the British state. Keywords: SoundscapeLanguageListeningUrban SpaceColonialismPractice Notes 1. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 2. 2. Placing the locus of sound in the listener comes from a long history of media perception scholarship that, arguably, starts with Jonathan Crary. Using the camera obscura as representative of the whole of visual experience, Crary states: “The corporeal subjectivity of the observer, which was a priori excluded from the camera obscura, suddenly becomes the site on which an observer is possible. The human body . . . generates ‘the spectrum of another color,’ and thus becomes the active producer of optical experience.” See Jonathan Crary, “Techniques of the Observer,” October 45 (Summer 1988): 3–35. 3. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962). 4. Jonathan Sterne, “Hello!” in The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 1–30. 5. All names of participants have been changed, and exact ethnographic locale left ambiguous as required by human subjects protocol. 6. Melissa L. Caldwell, “Moscow Encounters: Ethnography in a Global Urban Village,” in Urban Life: Readings in the Anthropology of the City, ed. George Gmelch, Robert V. Kemper, and Walter P. Zinner, 5th ed. (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2010), 55–71. 7. Traditionally, in anthropology and other ethnographic-based disciplines, a greater amount of value has been assumed of formal interviews, whereas informal interviews have been seen as lesser or supporting data. Further, differences in length have been inscribed in the difference between formal and informal, which is not necessarily the case in terms of urban informal interviews. In an urban space, such as Main Street, Gibraltar, informal interviews more closely approximate the performed subjectivity of urban dwellers, travelers, and inhabitants, and can occur over longer periods of time—say a bus ride—than would typically be considered “standard.” Methodologically, then, informal interviews provide a better source of information in urban settings. 8. Sterne, “Hello!” 19. 9. Siegfried Kracauer, “Dialogue and Sound,” in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 102–31; and R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Turning of the World (1997; repr., Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1993). 10. Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (New York: Continuum, 2004). 11. Schafer, The Soundscape. 12. Roman Jakobson, “Sign and System of Language: A Reassessment of Saussure's Doctrine,” Poetics Today 2, no. 1a (1980): 33–8. 13. Tim Ingold, “Against Soundscape,” in Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice, ed. Agnus Carlyle (Paris: Double Entendre, 2007), 10–3. 14. Emily Ann Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Boston: MIT Press). 15. Conversation with a bus rider, August 8, 2009. 16. Michael Bull, Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience (New York: Routledge, 2007). 17. Eric W. Rothenbuhler, Ritual Communication: From Everyday Conversation to Mediated Ceremony (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998). 18. Conversation with an informant, August 29, 2009. 19. Jakobson, “Sign and System of Language.” 20. Juri Lotman, Universe of Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). 21. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). 22. Lotman, Universe of Mind, 30. 23. Charles Augustus Stoddard, Spanish Cities, with Glimpses of Gibraltar and Tangier (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1892), 189. 24. Peter Mühlanhäusler, Linguistic Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Region (New York: Routledge, 1996). 25. Interview with a heritage official, August 11, 2009. 26. Edward G. Archer, in a history of Gibraltar, discusses the ways English was the instructional language of infrastructurally run education in order to craft a particular type of civility. Edward G. Archer, Gibraltar, Identity, and Empire (New York: Routledge, 2006). 27. Interview with a heritage official, August 14, 2009. 28. Conversation with a tourist, August 22, 2009. 29. Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak, Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism (London: Routledge, 2001), 43. 30. Conversation with Spanish “tourists,” August 24, 2009. 31. Schafer, The Soundscape, 77. 32. Michel Foucault, “Questions of Method,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality; with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, ed. Graham Burchell, Collin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 88. 33. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). 34. George, August 8, 2009. 35. Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria 1960: The Disenchantment of the World—The Sense of Honour—The Kabyle House, or the World Reversed, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 134. 36. Conversation with a tourist from the United States, August 24, 2009. 37. Conversation with a German tourist, August 24, 2009. 38. Conversation with a British tourist, August 29, 2009. 39. Conversation with a Gibraltarian, September 1, 2009, original spoken emphasis. 40. Conversation with a Gibraltarian, September 5, 2009. 41. Bourdieu, Algeria 1960, 25. 42. Although the event is not an official government function, we must be aware that it takes much collaboration for such an undertaking to be approved, encouraged, and facilitated. 43. This is by no means intended to pass a type of moral judgment on institutions or people. “Ideology” is often taken with negative connotations; however, I use the term in its most neutral possible sense, recognizing the fact that there is never an absence of ideology within any form of cultural production. Sacvan Berkovitch has suggested that where ideology was established as “us vs. them,” we shift to an inclusive perspective such as “what we do.” “In the broad sense which I use the term . . . ideology is the system of interlinked ideas, symbols, and beliefs by which a culture—any culture—seeks to justify and perpetuate itself; the web of rhetorical, ritual, and assumption through which society coerces, persuades, and coheres.” See Sacvan Berkovitch, “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 4 (1986): 635. 44. In this section, I am making a distinction between British and English—whereas on some occasions Gibraltarians will claim themselves as British, their notion of this is expanded and hybridized to include the unique Gibraltarian position between Spanish and English. English, on the other hand, denotes a restricted definition that is closely associated with whiteness and “proper” English sounds. 45. Richard Bauman, “Disclaimers of Performance,” in Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse, ed. Jane Hill and Judith Irvine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 182–96. Additional informationNotes on contributorsBryce Peake Bryce Peake is a PhD student in Communication and Society at the School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon. This research was made possible through funding and support from the Gibraltar Museum, Institute for Gibraltarian Studies, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. I would like to thank Greg Wise and the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions, as well as Carol Stabile and Phil Scher for their insight, guidance, and criticism
Referência(s)