The Ethnography of Enchanted Listening: How Sonic Beings Become Social Facts

Enchanted listening is what happens when listeners perceive in external sounds qualities that can’t normally be heard. They might, for instance, describe “shapes,” “colors,” “resolutions,” or “attractions.” Animistic descriptions are also frequent, with sounds being ascribed their own emotional “characters,” “personalities,” spiritual “drives,” and other kinds of intrinsic agencies. Enchanted listening is what people do when they listen to something as “music,” but accounts of enchanted auditory experiences are also frequent in cultural contexts where “music” is not a meaningful concept. What kind of evidence can we gather about auditory beings that have social existence without being “normally” heard? As an empirical example, this paper analyzes references to Ottoman makam during a class of Greek music in southern France. To all participants, makam was a distinctly “foreign” concept. Moreover, most of them played instruments in equal temperament, while the Ottoman theory is predicated upon the use of untempered intervals. Yet something that the participants called makam became obviously “real” for them in the interaction. What was it, and how did this happen? previous article back to index