Bandak, “Making ‘Sound’ Analysis: From Raw Moments to Attuned Perspectives”
Excerpt: “Suddenly, I am unable to hear my own thoughts, far less the words of my interlocutor, as I sit at my usual Internet café, High Point, in Damascus. A deafening sound from the nearby Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, Kanisat Marimiyya, makes it nigh impossible to continue the conversation for several minutes. The sound is coming from the Church orchestra, consisting of vari- ous brass instruments and drums. Trumpets, cornets, trombones, and tubas mix with the sound of snare drums and bass drums. “Da daa daaa, da dada da daaa . . .” the brass instruments go, accompanied by the snare drums: “Tikiti tikiti tik, tikiti tikiti tik . . .” and the bass drums: “Dum dum duum, dum dum duum . . .” People from the Internet café leave their seats to look out onto Yohanna al-Dimashqi Alley, where the orchestra—assisted by uni- formed scouts—is marching by. The orchestra and the young girls and boys walk with rehearsed dignity down the narrow alley as the music resounds in all directions. The Syrian national flag is carried in front, followed by pennants from the Greek Orthodox Church. People smile and rejoice in the celebrations on this Christian feast day. Having been carried away for some minutes, we resume our conversation. I had been telling my friend and col- league about the intricacies of my fieldwork on Christians in Damascus and their perceptions of Christian-Muslim relations. Much to my frustration, I had been telling my interlocutor, I found a lack of consistency in responses, not just from different people, but from the very same ones, which was trou- bling my understanding of matters and, concomitantly, impeding my analy- sis. Someone would one minute recount how relations were, if not cordial, then based on a civilian understanding of being Syrian first and foremost, not Christian, and Syria was a country with room for all regardless of ethnicity or religious affiliation. The next moment he would, as we passed by a mosque in a Christian neighborhood, point to it and simply state that it was out of place in the area. And later again, the very same person would point to mosques and churches neighboring each other as signs of an historical co-existence that was possible and even desirable. How could one account for such seeming inconsistencies, I had asked my interlocutor? At long last, now that we could hear each other again, we both immediately returned to an old discussion we had had on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and, more precisely, their concept of the ‘refrain’ and sonorities in landscapes, and suddenly the material seemed to speak on an altogether different level.
I shall here treat this moment as a significant point of departure for the analysis; it was what Deleuze and Guattari have designated as a ‘raw moment’ ([1980] 2004: 355) in terms of it being the critical point in my analytical labor, where a conceptual take renders another perspective possible from which the analysis can be made. In this chapter, I shall delve into the making of analysis where sound is allocated a much more critical and formative role both in terms of material and analysis. My argument is that ‘sound’ analysis rests on a critical engagement with the material at hand, but also a willingness to lis- ten to stories other than the standard ones, to trace the noise—which Michel Serres so eloquently captures in the epithet—and connect otherwise disparate areas of thought and practice. As argued by Steven Feld, sound in the social sciences and, more particularly, in the discipline of anthropology has often been relegated to mere material to be dealt with in writing, and sound has fur- thermore often been reduced to the words uttered and collected in interviews (Feld and Brenneis 2004: 471; see also Erlmann 2004). Here, my thinking about Christian Syrians was pushed by the massive noise produced by the orchestra marching by, forcing itself on me as the point from where I should start listening. This was, however, something quite different in practice. As Paolo Apolito has pointed out (1998), there is a difference between the work and thoughts possible in the field and the subsequent work with the material away from the field, and—I would add—the work on an analysis previously made, as is the case here. Past necessities can be sundered, dissolved, and reflected upon and the black box of the making of analysis approached. I shall here analyze how this analysis became both possible and preferable, what kind of connections were established, and, by extension, point to the potential for the ‘sound’ analysis to resound across domains ….”