Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia, by Ana María Ochoa Gautier

Abstract

Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia, by Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier. Series: Sign, Storage, Transmission. Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2014. xiii, 266 pp. $89.95 US (cloth), $24.95 US (paper). Ethnomusicologists and historians reveal a rich repository of sounds and silences in their examination of how voicing, hearing, and listening as interpretive acts are used politically to promote belonging and recognition, and in so doing, in conflicting ways, create unequal modem power dynamics. Building on extensive experience working in the creation of cultural policy in Colombia and knowledge of music and transculturation in Latin America and the Caribbean, Ochoa examines the interpretation and meaning of the aural in nineteenth-century Colombia. Her work is a much-awaited contribution to the cultural history of Colombia, and to the body of literature on how sound links humanity to environment. The junction of Europe and the Americas provides the backdrop for Ochoa's examination of the ways nineteenth century scientists, intellectuals, and politicians lent an ear, transcribed into writing, and policed the sounds of a geographically fragmented and racially divided colonial society, built by a Catholic Conservative elite, which crystalized linguistically at the century's end. Ochoa describes the different ways in which sound united Europeans, peoples of European descent, and the Conservative elite with indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and mestizos, or mixed-raced peoples, in unexpected ways, and the intellectual authority, beliefs, and values the former drew from in order to set themselves apart from and above the others. Ochoa's analysis of the works of prominent scientists, intellectuals, and politicians published during the nineteenth century, in Europe, the US, and Colombia, sheds light on the constitution of political subjects and their relation to the natural environment. In chapter one, the travel accounts of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), amongst others, on the Magdalena river offer a glimpse into the sounds made by the bogas, mixed-raced oarsmen, which were likened to the lowly sounds of animals, defying description as either speech or song. Chapter two turns to fiction, histories of literature and songbooks, and renowned men of letters such as Jose Maria Vergara y Vergara (1831-1872), Candelario Obeso (1849-1884), and Jorge Isaacs (1837-1895) in order to discuss the gap between popular song and what is heard (or misheard), what is felt, and what is recorded in writing (or misspelled). These two chapters address the problem of the inscription of the Afro-descendant voice and the normalization of speech utterances. The works of Ezequiel Uricoechea (1834-1880), Isaacs, and Miguel Antonio Caro (1843-1909) relate the inscription of indigenous languages, between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, by use of the Spanish alphabet by Catholic missionaries to its place in the national project. …