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Ana María Ochoa Gautier , Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham, NC, and London : Duke University Press , 2014), pp. xiii + 266, $16.99, pb.
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In recent years scholars have shown that the circulation of knowledge and the validation of certain kinds of knowledge above others (e.g. 'Western' science over indigenous cosmology) played a crucial part in colonial systems of government, particularly in disciplines such as botany, cartography, linguistics and anthropology. However, the role of listening in the gathering and organisation of knowledge has been largely absent from these debates. In this innovative cultural history, Ana María Ochoa Gautier sets out to understand the ways in which literary scholars and scientists categorised sound in nineteenth-century Colombia, and how their efforts both contributed to and destabilised the construction of Colombian national identity.
Aurality examines listening practices in four areas: interactions between European travellers and slave-descendant boatmen (bogas) on the Magdalena river; studies of popular song; ethnographies of regional dialects and indigenous languages; and the work of orthographers who instructed Colombians on the art of 'speaking correctly'. Listening in certain contexts reinforced racial prejudices, as in Alexander von Humboldt's assertion that the 'barbarous, lustful, ululating and angry shouting' of the bogas supported his observations about their psychology, despite the fact that he lacked a common language with which to talk to them about their 'howls and pitches' (p. 32). For folklorist José María Vergara y Vergara (1831-72), Colombia's diverse musical traditions corresponded to a racialised geography in...