Steven Feld
Steven Feld (born 1949) is an American anthropologist, filmmaker, musician, and sound artist, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of New Mexico and Senior Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Feld's academic research principally concerns the anthropology of sound, a term he coined in 1972 to extend the anthropology of music and language into a more critical sensory and aesthetic focus on voice and poetics, all-species sound relations, media and technologies, and environmental and ecological acoustics. From 1975-2000 he pursued anthropology of sound studies in the Bosavi rainforest region in Papua New Guinea, researching relations of environmental ambient sounds, bird calls, weeping, poetics, and song. This work is represented in articles, the monograph Sound and Sentiment, as well as the Bosavi-English-Tok Pisin Dictionary. Based on this research Feld expanded the framework of the anthropology of sound in the early 1990’s to acoustemology, a term coined from at the conjunction of acoustics and epistemology to refer to sound as a way of knowing. The concept circulates widely following the Waterfalls of Song - essay he contributed to Senses of Place, a 1993 SAR Advanced Seminar volume he organized and co-edited with Keith Basso. His essays “Notes on World Beat,” “From Schizophonia to Schizmogenesis,” “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music,” and “pygmy POP: A Genealogy of Schizophonic Mimesis,” have been widely circulated, anthologized, and translated. This “world music” work is also featured in Music Grooves, his 1994 collection of essays and dialogues with Charles Keil (recipient of the 1995 Chicago Folklore Prize). Since 2000 Feld has engaged a third research project, on the history and culture of bells, with European research and recording in France, Finland, Norway, Greece, Italy, and Denmark, and additional research in Japan, Ghana, and Togo. This work on animal, church, carnival, and musical bells is represented in multimedia works like the CD/DVD series The Time of Bells; The New York Times "Best of Season" CD Bells and Winter Festivals of Greek Macedonia; collaboration with Nicola Scaldaferri for the CD-book Santi, Animali e Suoni; and the book-CD-DVD Skyros Carnival with photographer Dick Blau and Greek anthropologists Panos Panopoulos and Agapi Amanatidas. Feld’s fourth major project, since 2004, studies urban diasporic acoustemology and jazz history in Accra, Ghana, focusing on Ghanaba, the man who African introduced talking drums to African American jazz drummers in the 1950s; on Accra Trane Station, a group that plays music inspired by John Coltrane on African instruments; and Por Por, a jazz-inspired music for honking squeeze- bulb car horns performed by union bus and truck drivers. This work is presented in ten CDs, five feature-length films, and the 2012 book, Jazz Cosmpolitanism in Accra, recipient of the 2013 Elliott Skinner Prize from the Association for Africanist Anthropology. Other highlights from the Accra project are the Smithsonian Folkways CD Por Por: Honk Horn Music of Ghana, a US government gift to Ghana for the 50th anniversary of independence in 2007, as well as performance tours in Africa, Europe, and the USA with Accra Trane Station, and their CDs Tribute to A Love Supreme, Meditations for John Coltrane, Another Blue Trane, Topographies of the Dark, Bufo Variations, Ghana Sea Blues, Afrifonica Pyrasonix. The group’s 2017 CD, Harmattan, received an honorable mention for best jazz release by The New York City Jazz Record. Feld’s writings have been translated to French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Greek, Russian, Turkish, Serbian, Chinese, and Japanese. He has lectured or performed at more than 200 universities, galleries, and museums worldwide, and has delivered numerous keynote addresses or distinguished lectures, including the Ernest Bloch Lectures in Music at University of California, Berkeley, the Annette Weiner Memorial Lecture at New York University, the Rayson Huang Lecture at University of Hong Kong, the Sigmund H. Danziger, Jr. Lecture in the Humanities, University of Chicago, the Centennial Lecture, University of Alberta, Canada, the Bruno and Wanda Nettl Distinguished Lecture in Ethnomusicology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the Roger Covell Lecture, University of New South Wales, Australia. He taught Anthropology and Music for ten years each at the University of Texas at Austin and at the University of New Mexico, taught visual and sound communications for five years at the Annenberg School of Communications, University of Pennsylvania, and for shorter periods taught Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and New York University, and Music at Columbia University. He also taught in visiting positions in Music at the Universities of Bergen and Oslo, in Anthropology at the University of Sydney, and in both fields at the University of California, Berkeley. In Fall 2020 he will teach at the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania.For the 2016- 1017 academic year Feld was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, beginning a sequel to Sound and Sentiment titled Vocal Knowledge. Through 2016 and 2017 he was also a visiting artist at Skywalker Sound, collaborating with acclaimed sound editor Dennis Leonard to recompose 25th anniversary editions of Voices of the Rainforest in 7.1 cinema surround sound for concerts and galleries.