Aurality: Listening & Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia by Ana María Ochoa Gautier (review)

This is a rare work in Colombian historiography. Ana María Ochoa Gautier's Listening & Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia substantially redefines our understanding of what constitutes the political. She attends to classic works by authors well-known to Colombianists and builds on prior intellectual and literary histories. But Ochoa Gautier does far more by following Lisa Getelman's idea that inscription is "the act of recording a listening into a particular technology of dissemination and transmission (in this case writing)" (7). Listening sorts sounds into human and nonhuman, intellectual and emotional, linguistically correct and incorrect, and more. In this way, sounds and listening became politically important. Colombian writers denaturalized these "natural" practices in writing as a way to assess and categorize the nation's characteristics, human and nonhuman.

The blurb on Aurality claims it is "audacious" and, certainly, it surprises. Yet this is a quieter study than that adjective suggests. If one follows Ochoa Gautier's logic carefully – and it is nuanced – then one will observe written words in a new way. Her particular sensitivity is to the privileging of the visual and the gaze in classic Western European knowledge production. She usefully reviews the binary thinking with which sight has traditionally trumped hearing in this perspective: the eye is linked to intellect, distance, perspective, control, and death, while to the ear is attributed affect, immersion, interiority, exuberance, and life (14). The binarism is not proportionally understood: vision has superseded sound in scholarly analysis, too. Ochoa Gautier has us consider how these attributes are associated to modernity and colonialism, and the precarious midpoint at which nineteenth-century Colombians found themselves between these two poles.

For historians, her approach may be unusual and certain sources unfamiliar, including songbooks and music notation. Readers with no background in ethnomusicology, literary analysis, or listening studies may find this work difficult to understand. A sample sentence: "In such an assemblage we have less a transparent field of acoustic communication as implied by the audiovisual litany than ample possibilities for equivocation" (23). Those who find her analysis burdened by jargon will likely have steered away from Duke Press for just this reason. Nevertheless, curious readers will benefit from her provocation to think seriously and systematically about the history of listening. Her insistent theorizing includes concepts ranging from Fabián Ludueña's zoopolitics (that of the natural world excluded from the built, or bíos [9]) to the political theology of the Ángel Rama's "lettered city" that privileges the recording of a certain orality (the spoken word) over an untamed vocality (sound).

Ochoa Gautier reflects on how Colombians transferred knowledge about themselves, their environment and their nation. How did Colombians who worried about constituting their own modernity understand other Colombians who wanted to sound like animals? Chapter One, "On Howls and Pitches," uses as the main example the sounds of boga (canoe) pilots, often described by contemporary outsiders as "howling." Other records noted that Amerindians and Afrodescendants studied and, possibly, imitated animal sounds like birdcalls (61). If sounding like an animal was the goal of some people, then they did not delineate between human and nonhuman. They saw their personhood in relationship to nature, not in distinction to it. The author applies new anthropological questions to Colombian writing about sound to upset the traditional view that nature and culture are separate. If, as this perspective suggests, humans and animals have a "shared capacity…to have a voice, sing, and speak," and if "songs and languages can potentially be transmitted between species … then having a particular type of voice does not imply representing a single entity" (63). Language used to differentiate humans from animals; now it is reframed as not exceptionally human.

Radically reframing voice and listening is crucial to Ochoa Gautier's analysis of Colombia's vantage point on the long global history of personhood and nature. The most familiar historical reference is the Las...