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Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression . Thirtieth anniversary edition with a new introduction. By Steven Feld . Durham, NC : Duke University Press , 2012. 300 pp. ISBN 978-0-8223-5365-2
Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: A Memoir of Five Musical Years in Ghana . By Steven Feld . Durham, NC : Duke University Press , 2012. 311 pp. ISBN 978-0-8223-5162-7
Reviews
While writing a short review on two books by sound anthropologist Steven Feld, published 30 years apart from one another, one is in danger of finding the limited space somewhat challenging. To start with similarities: both books were written while at the University of California, Berkeley. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, a publication based on Feld's PhD dissertation, is now published for the third time as an 30th anniversary publication. The second book, Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: A Memoir of Five Musical years in Ghana, is a much awaited document on the fieldwork Feld has been accomplishing with Ghanaian jazz musicians.
In Accra the reader also gets a small reminiscent detour to Bosavi rainforest in Papua New Guinea and the fieldwork on which Sound and Sentiment is founded. This anniversary edition of Sound and Sentiment includes a profound new introduction by Feld on how much things have indeed changed not only in sound anthropology but in Bosavi among the Kaluli people, from the time of his dissertation (1979) and the consequent second edition (1989). A valuable point in the introduction reads as follows: 'many of the beliefs, practices, knowledges, rituals and experiences described are either considerably muted or are no longer believed, practiced, known, performed, or experienced' (p. xiii), a result common with acoustic environments affecting them more generally.
The Bosavi people were heavily influenced by evangelisation that was widespread during Feld's fieldwork in the 1970s....