Hearing Heat: An anthropology of sound for the Anthropocene

Delivered by the most outstanding academics in the UK and beyond, the British Academy’s flagship Lecture programme showcases the very best scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. This event is part of the Radcliffe-Brown Lectures in Social Anthropology named after the Association’s first President, A R Radcliffe-Brown FBA , first delivered in 1972.

Among humanity's planetary companions. cicadas, well over 3000 known species, are notably thermometric. Heat turns them on. And that follows is a remarkable sonic presence, whose amplified power exceeds their size by a factor of thousands. The result is no less powerful than that of bells, car horns, birds, and other sonic technologies that create consciousness of time and space. How might we listen to this history in an age of scientific and public obsession over the profundity of climate change, no less an age of brutally irrational and conspiracy-tinged climate change denial? With cicadas indexing histories of heat, how might we uncover an anthropocene "message in a bottle" from inquiring into global histories of listening to them? How might an anthropological intervention articulate new ways of conceptualizing and engaging climate change, drawing on this archive full of traditional ecological knowledge, no less worlds of mythology, poetics, oral and written arts, visual and material culture? This lecture explores these and related questions through research on cicada-human relational histories in rainforest Papua New Guinea, as well as ancient and contemporary Japan and Europe.

Speaker: Professor Steven Feld FBA

Steven Feld is an anthropologist, filmmaker, musician/sound artist, distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of New Mexico, and director of VoxLox Media. His academic work concerns the anthropology of sound and acoustemology.

Chair: Professor Fiona Magowan, Queen's University Belfast

Fiona Magowan is Professor of Anthropology and has published extensively on the analysis of conflict and the arts, sound, music and emotion in Aboriginal Australia, as well as on sex and gender in anthropology and ethnomusicology.  She is the author or editor of eight books including Sounding Conflict: From Resistance to Reconciliation (2023 co-edited), Christianity, Conflict and Renewal in Australia and the Pacific (2016 co-edited), Performing Gender, Place and Emotion: Global Perspectives (2013 co-edited), The Anthropology of Sex (2010 co-authored) and Melodies of Mourning: Music and Emotion in Northern Australia (2007), as well as more than fifty chapters and journal articles.  She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Free, booking required

This lecture will be available to attend in-person and will include a reception for attendees, details to follow.

If you have any questions about this event, please email [email protected].

Image credit: Professor Steven Feld