The varieties of sonic experience: “Quiet” versus “not‐noise” in a Ghanaian harvest festival

Abstract

Abstract Sacred calm engulfs Ghana's town of Nungua every year as the Ga people prepare to celebrate Kplejoo, their annual harvest festival. To honor the presence of deities at this time, the Ga ritual specialists introduce a week‐long restriction on drumming and noise‐making. The ritual quiet that descends over Nungua defies the conventional categorization of “quietness” as a sonically neutral category. In this context, “quietness” does not translate to the elimination of high frequencies of sound, but rather stands for the perfect sonic habitat for the visiting deities, whose aural sensibilities cannot be subsumed under the “worldly” sonic categories. The article adopts a cross‐world acoustemological approach to explore the sonically packed content of “quietness” or “not‐noise” in the ritual space of Nungua, placing a special emphasis on ritual songs that are not considered “noisy.” Since the appreciation of “not‐noise” is possible only once the deities are introduced into the picture, the work also calls for an increased focus on cross‐world sensory transmissions as an important methodological step in the anthropological study of the senses.