The machine of sonorous indigeneity: craftsmanship and sound ecology in an Andean instrument workshop

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article traces the relationship between sound and indigenous social politics in the South Peruvian Andes, through the medium of the chinlili guitar in and around the city of Ayacucho. Focusing on the role of its foremost maker in realigning indigeneity’s sonorous parameters, I show how craft expertise, technical and environmental affordances and ideological principles interact, placing the instrument at the heart of a changing indigenous soundscape. Drawing upon material culture studies, I treat instruments as sites of what Stiegler has called ‘tertiary retention’: mnemonic technical objects that condense relationships between sounds, materials and social categories that exist at the moment of their creation. I also adapt Adam Smith’s metaphor of the ‘machine’—an assemblage of human and non-human elements whose relationships permutate as they interact through time—as a useful trope for tracing the ethnographic study of such mnemonic objects.