Sounding Islam: Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World

Orienting Our Ears to Community: Examining Adult‐Produced Field Recordings of a Living‐Learning Community

“…Indeed, the three adult learners took a “transductive ear” (Helmreich, 2007, p. 632) as they addressed “the sonic ways in which the boundaries between humans and their environs blur” (Eisenlohr, 2018, p. 13). As the trio engineered sound clips, they transduced the recordings into a musical track.…”

“…By taking an ethnographic approach to understanding how adults in the RC “comingle[d] with sonic phenomena” (Eisenlohr, 2018, p. 13), we amplified the resonant sounds of creativity present across communal spaces. Likewise, we enhanced our understanding about how such sounds reverberate as community literacies.…”

“…Building from anthropologists studying the milieu of sound (Eisenlohr, 2018; Helmreich, 2007), we invite readers to consider how to “ethnographically decipher everyday ways of living and doing, with a particular interest in how ambient sound productions are invested in meaning locally, and how ways of listening are forged and oriented differently” (Guillebaud, 2017, p. 1). We focus on the acoustic happenings of the Language and Media Center (LMC)—a technology‐rich space located within the arts‐and‐humanities–based residential college (RC) at Michigan State University—alongside the RC’s Art Studio.…”

Facing Another: The Attenuation of Contact as Space in Dhofar, Oman

“…Thus, these processes are also important analytical windows into the qualities, ontologies, and processes of negotiating such a categorically structured social space as I described above. Instead of asking about the identity of participants, and place through sentiment, affect, or as atmospheres of lived experience, which is certainly in excess of the questions of categorization I raise here (Basso 1996;Feld 1996;Stewart 2007;Eisenlohr 2019). places, events, or objects, gradation asks about thresholds.…”

FM radio and the Malayali diaspora in Qatar: at home overseas

“…First, my ethnography of Malayalam migrant radio in Qatar enters into a conversation with the emerging field of sonic studies, particularly in the context of the Indian Ocean rim. Taken together, recent scholarship in this field (Hirschkind 2006;Ulaby 2012;Basu 2008;Punathambekar and Mohan 2020) invites us to reimagine the Indian Ocean as a site not only of human mobilities but also of translocal 'sonic atmospheres' (Eisenlohr 2018) that mobile groups (re)create, inhabit, and mobilise across the littoral. Ulaby's historicization of maritime musical production and exchange among pearl-divers in the western Indian Ocean brings forward most poignantly the dialectical relationship between work and leisure as mediated by soundwaves (Ulaby 2012).…”