The Cry of the Hyena

Every year men from Karangasso Sambla, Burkina Faso, practice a form of communal hunting that is part of an ecological ritual cycle of renewal of the relationship between humans and the bush environment from which they draw their subsistence. Sound plays an important role both in the mythical origin of this ritual and in the workings of communal hunting. Participants make noise in order to flush animals and communicate with each other via shouts and whistles to signal the presence and direction of prey – in other words largely hunt by ear. After a brief, nocturnal sonic evocation of the myth of the hyena, which forms the starting point for this annual cycle, this film transitions to dawn and immerses the listener in the acoustic environment of a collective hunt from the perspective of a participant. Like many collective rituals characterised by shouting, noise and racket, the hunt is a liminal moment of inversion of an established order necessary to redraw the relationship between humans and the environment on which they depend. The piece is primarily structured around a composition of sound recordings, with images and text playing a secondary role, following the lead of an emergent series of works in anthropology that treat images as almost “extradiegetic” (Larcher 2022). By breaking the traditional documentary principle of synchronicity between image and sound, or by taking away the visuals entirely, these sonocentric multimedia pieces adopt “sensory incompleteness” as a strategy to involve the imagination of viewers/listeners (Murch 1994, xix–xx).