The Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra Project: Interview with Steven Feld

Abstract

In the 1970s, he developed an anthropology of sound that engages expressive forms that are in between language and music and the relationships between human and non-human sounds in the acoustic environment of the Papua New Guinea rainforest. His successive research, in Melanesia and Europe, on the history and culture of bells, and in Ghana, on bells and jazz cosmopolitanism, is marked by various conceptions of listening, and issues of using sound as a primary medium for ethnographic research.Recording sound is central to his use of playback and feedback and his "dialogic auditing" and editing methods inspired by Jean Rouch, with whom he studied in Paris in 1974 (Feld 1987). The production of CDs also allows him to make his ethnography listenable, moving away from the "textual fetishism" that marks his discipline (Boudreault-Fournier and Feld 2019). The two vinyls (1982, 1985) produced at the time of the publication of his first book Sound and Sentiment (2012 [1982]) offered sensory access to his own experience, and to the complex relationships between ambient sounds, bird calls, cries, poetics and song in the Kaluli environment of Bosavi. They were followed by numerous recording projects through which Feld sought to link the anthropology of sound to an "anthropology in sound" (Brenneis & Feld 2004).In 2004, Feld started a new project in Ghana, where he studied acoustemology-one's sonic way of knowing and being in the world (1996)-from the standpoint of avantgarde jazz musicians. This multimedia project brought together new conceptions of recording and histories of listening, as his lives as musician and researcher became

Net Neutrality and the Battle for the Open Internet

“…26 The submission is steeped in the economic policy jargon of competitiveness, efficiency, and investment typical of corporate libertarian Beltway think tanks, yet it also stokes populist fears of "government control" and "government ownership." 27 The support for such anti-net neutrality posts on IdeaScale, as well as the large quantity of other posts along those lines, did demonstrate the ability of AFP to shape some people's understanding of the issue, especially through the talking points circulated through conservative media and deployed in user comments. Glenn Beck, then at the height of his popularity, brought the "government takeover" discourse of net neutrality to his Fox News television program courtesy of AFP, pointing his viewers to the group's NoInternetTakeover.com website through which to submit comments to the FCC.…”

“…Net neutrality is infrastructure that enables the internet to be infrastructure in that it works to maintain the network's existence as a common shared public resource, not a specialized, privatized mechanism for commercial content delivery. 27 This works only if policy is able to inscribe these conditions into technical and industrial structures-so regulation is necessary for democratic communications.…”

“…Duties to serve all equally and on reasonable terms were given to these communications services independent of any liability or market power, thus recognizing nondiscrimination as the central obligation for common carriers and establishing openness for a basic general-purpose communications network as a necessity for democratic participation. 27 As part of the wave of "deregulation" that especially took hold in the 1980s in the United States, the core nondiscrimination provisions of common carriage have been removed from communications policy as public interest principles have been steadily replaced with measures to supposedly promote marketplace competition. Although common carriers are often dominant in the marketplace, whether via government-granted franchise or "natural monopoly" status, market power was never historically a prerequisite to common carriage regulation of communications networks.…”

“…Schmidt coauthored a blog post and a Wall Street Journal op-ed with the CEOs of Verizon and its wireless subsidiary pointing to their "common ground" on net neutrality and a shared call for "minimal government involvement" with the internet, which was echoed in a joint filing to the 2009 Open Internet proceeding. 27 By the time the FCC began the closed-door talks over the Open Internet rules, Google and Verizon were well positioned to take the lead in finding a compromise. That the two of them worked out a side deal to the side of the original side deal, though, was surprising to the involved parties and unsettling to Genachowski, who saw Google and Verizon as undermining his process and his hopes for a wide "consensus," or privatized regulation, with which to move forward.…”

“…The work of policy advocates is to translate these things to people and mobilize them to act on those terms. 27 Doing so must be done with a trust in people and their capacity to deal substantively and meaningfully with difficult and obscure policy issues, see how it impacts their lives, and translate that into how those things operate in the policy sphere. Free Press communications director Tim Karr says that for everyday people, once the initial hurdle of the complications of the policy issue is overcome, engagement with the complexity can actually be a hook that motivates further commitment, because having expended the effort to understand it creates incentives to act on it and stick to it.…”