Sonic Knowledge Production in Archaeoacoustics – Theorising an ‘Aural Gnoseology’

Archaeoacoustics (or acoustic archaeology), since its inception as an academic field in the early 2000s, has sought to integrate long-neglected questions of sound and listening into archaeological method. Caves, architectural formations, buildings, rock-faces, and sound-producing objects, the subject of study of sound archaeologists, are considered forms of sonic media through which knowledges can be produced in this project. In the absence of a greater interrogation of larger ontoepistemological questions in the field of archaeoacoustics, my PhD research draws on feminist epistemologies (Haraway, Harding) and decolonial traditions of thought (Quijano, Santos, Wynter, Lugones) to assess the ramifications of sound and the sensory on Western ocularcentric epistemological traditions.

However, rather than relinquishing to the easy alterity of the sonic, as encapsulated by Sterne’s diagnosis of the widespread “audiovisual litany”, the challenge is to remain “situated” in a Harawayan sense when conceptualising sonic pasts. Against an imaginary which implies a depoliticized, ahistorical and unmediated sonic past of “sonic naturalism”, I attempt to carefully posit a theory of sonic knowledge I call “aural gnoseology”. In doing so, I follow Walter Mignolo’s conceptualisations of “gnosis”, inspired by Valentin Mudimbe’s call to think outside Eurocentric modes of knowledge production and transmission as “gnosis” and Gloria Anzaldua’s “thinking of/from the ‘border’” which moves towards a propositional new mestiza consciousness. Aural gnoseology seeks to undertake a grounded, situated mode of speculation which asks what a theory of sonic knowledge – one which acknowledges the historico-epistemological implications of colonality/modernity, patriarchy and capitalism – might embody, effect and enact.