The Sound of Danger: Voice, Noise and Risk in Building Material Production in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of the vernacular auditory cultures of safety and risk in construction material production in early twentieth-century Palestine. It examines the qualitatively different understandings and uses of sounds, from workers’ singing to heavy machinery, which characterized dangerous work in Palestine’s rural limekilns and its then sole industrial cement factory. The article suggests that in order to understand the ‘sound of modernity,’ we need to expand the geographic and thematic scope of our studies: looking beyond those for which sound became obsession or profession and the cultural sensibilities of elites, and incorporating the ways in which indigenous and colonial working classes in the colonized world made sense and use of the auditory.