“What do we hear in the bird voices of our homes? Every species has a sonic signature, and individuals within species have their own unique voices. In this diversity of acoustic expression are embedded many meanings. First, the particularities of species, each with its own cadence and tempo. House wren. Bald eagle. Song sparrow. Raven. By noticing and naming, we take the first step into friendship and understanding, crossing the gulf between species. Sound is a particularly powerful connector because it travels through and around barriers, finding us and calling us out of inattention. We walk across town and notice our avian cousins. Kinship and community are no longer just ideas, but are lived, sensual relationships.”
– David G. Haskell in essay, “The Voices of Birds and the Language of Belonging”
This quote, from a beautiful essay in Emergence Magazine, touches on what environmental anthropologists and other academics have called ‘sensory ecology.’ Steven Feld’s (2013) “A Rainforest Acoustemology” is probably one of the more famous examples of this type of anthropology, where Feld discusses the soundscapes and songlines in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea. In the quote above, David Haskell asks us to become aware of our own local soundscapes and how they not only inform us about the conditions of our environment, but also bond us more intimately to birds and their worlds. Glenn Shepard Jr. (2004) reminds us that sensory experiences are culturally based, and the way people see, feel, listen etc. varies across culture, age, sex, and personal experience. By embedding acts of naming and listening to nature into our cultures, Haskell claims, we nurture a sense of environmental belonging, creating multi-species communities in which animals, like birds, communicate their own stories through sound.
Read Haskell’s full article here.
References:
Feld, Steven. 2013. A Rainforest Acoustemology. Revista Colombiana de Antropologia 49(1), 217-239.
Haskell, D. G. 2019. The Voices of Birds and the Language of Belonging. Emergence Magazinehttps://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-voices-of-birds-and-the-language-of-belonging/
Shepard, G.H.Jr. 2004. A Sensory Ecology of Medicinal Plant Therapy in Two Amazonian Societies. American Anthropologist 106(2), pp. 252-266.
The Edited Jottings of an Amateur Anthropologist 