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Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3161589

1527-1900

Alejandra Bronfman,

Early Modern Spanish Literature

The discovery of a sonorous written archive prompted Ana María Ochoa Gautier to write this book, which proposes to rethink nineteenth-century histories of personhood, nation building, and the constitution of the relationship between nature and culture. The voice — as “ambiguously located between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’” (p. 3), in Ochoa's terms, or both of the body and easily imagined as separate from it, as other scholars have pointed out — is key. Ochoa argues that for literary figures, politicians, and scientists, among others, the politics of the voice and of listening were central to what it meant to be human. The texts that they produced were replete with inscriptions of sound and endeavored to designate boundaries between the civilized and the modern or the powerful and the marginal. Her methodological decisions have produced a superb model for how to write and think about sound in the era before electronic recording. Ochoa finds inscribed voices everywhere as well as detailed and extensive meditations on the epistemological and ontological dimensions of voice. These texts were not frivolous or trivial. Rather, they were central to the constitution of the very categories of humanity on which power rested in nineteenth-century Latin America. The book is a densely theoretical and erudite evaluation of the ways that orality and aurality were embedded in what Ochoa identifies as the central problem of the nineteenth century: containing the diversity of humanity and of nature, which were imagined as threatening controlled spaces with their unruly racket even as they held out a promise of exploitable labor or resources.Though the book is rich in philosophical and methodological observations, it is much more than that. Full of vividly rendered stories and people, the book reverberates with the din of many utterances. One chapter takes up the bogas, who paddled canoes up the Magdalena River in groups of six or eight and whom Alexander von Humboldt described as upsetting in their “barbarous, lustful, ululating and angry shouting” (quoted on p. 32). Humboldt and others cited in the chapter are befuddled by the howls of the bogas and interrogate them at length to try to “undertake the project of epistemologically mapping sonic difference as scientific observation” (p. 33). The chapter doesn't rest there, however; it moves beyond notations about sound in travel writing and scientific treatises to focus on the bogas themselves and how they might have conceived of their own vocalizations. Maintaining a delicate balance between shifting her perspective away from the observers to the observed even while she recognizes the futility of reconstructing soundscapes, she offers a rendition of bogas' soundings as communiqués in a context in which the human and nonhuman are interconnected and in constant conversation.In subsequent chapters, she takes up texts that include editions of missionary grammars, songs and poetry, and manuals about elocution and orthography. Remarkably, these texts were produced by a range of writers of a variety of ideological leanings and intellectual pursuits. Everyone, it seems, had a stake in the production of aurality as a central tenet of governmentality. Characters as diverse as Ezequiel Uricoechea, who studied medicine, chemistry, mineralogy, astronomy, meteorology, philology, and Arabic and who compiled and edited Indian grammars in the midst of partisan violence in Colombia, and Jorge Isaacs, the half-Jewish novelist and essayist who turned to armed insurrection against Conservative rule in Colombia, dedicated portions of their lives to thinking about and theorizing the space between the ear and the voice and to seeking the contours of humanity within the sound of indigenous languages.Speaking from the intersection of sound studies, Latin American studies, and the history of natural history and musicology, this book shifts the terrain upon which all of those fields have comfortably settled. Scholars of sound studies will need to take note of Ochoa's challenges to European or North American framings. By the same token, this book signals the significance of attending to sound and listening in Latin American history. It opens new conversations and is sure to nuance older ones with its profusely imaginative approach.