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“Science” and Literary Soundscapes, Neuroscience and Oral History: Research Notes from Iranian Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2016

Camron Michael Amin
Camron Michael Amin*
Affiliation:
Department of Social Sciences–History, University of Michigan–Dearborn, Dearborn, Mich.; e-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

We have no shortage of texts to recover representations of sound. There is also an underutilized, renewable—yet, if not recorded, ephemeral—source that can help us recover the sounds of the vanishing past: oral history. The discovery of soundways and historically contextualized soundscapes is a compelling project on its own. By “soundways,” I mean the “paths, trajectories, transformations, mediations, practices, and techniques—in short, the way—that people employ to interpret and express their attitudes or beliefs about sound.” Global culture can be thought of as flowing through technoscapes, ethnoscapes, mediascapes, financescapes, and ideascapes, Arjun Appadurai has argued. The flow of global culture through these “scapes” would be represented in local soundscapes. Oral history interviews are one way to follow the flow to the level of the individual. And while sensory memories—especially echoic, haptic, and iconic—are being investigated in the context of medical and psychological research, they are not often considered in connection with social history.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 146 - 150
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

NOTES

1 Rath, Richard Cullen, “Hearing American History,” Journal of American History 95 (2008): 431CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Appadurai, Arjun “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory, Culture and Society 7 (1990), 295–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Guttman, Sharon E., Gilroy, Lee, and Blake, Randolph, “Hearing What the Eyes See: Auditory Encoding of Visual Temporal Sequences,” Psychological Science 16 (2005): 228–35CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, accessed 2 October 2015, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40064206; Kraus, Nina and Banai, Karen, “Auditory-Processing Malleability: Focus on Language and Music,” Current Directions in Psychological Sciences 16 (2007): 105–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar, accessed 2 October 2015, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20183172; Conway, Martin A., “Sensory-Perceptual Episodic Memory and Its Context: Autobiographical Memory,” Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 356 (2011): 1375–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar, accessed 2 October 2015, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3067097.

4 Monson, Ingrid, “Hearing, Seeing, and Perceptual Agency,” Critical Inquiry 34 (2008): 535–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, accessed 2 October 2015, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20184424.

5 Excerpted from a translation in Amin, Camron Michael, The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman: Gender, State Policy, and Popular Culture, 1865–1946 (Gainesville, Fl.: University Press of Florida, 2002), 71–72Google Scholar.

6 I am indebted to Pedram Partovi for calling my attention to these periodicals. For more on the state's motivation to create Radio Tehran, see Amin, Camron Michael, “ The Press and Public Diplomacy in Iran, 1820–1940,” Iranian Studies 48 (2015): 269–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 There are a number of types of this stringed instrument. I am not sure which type my grandmother owned and played.

8 My father and I converse in English with Persian sprinkled in. The excerpts here reflect as much as possible how the interview unfolded.

9 Bolkosky, Sidney, “‘And in the Distance You Hear Music, A Band Playing’: Reflections on Order and Chaos in Literature and Testimony,” in After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature and Culture, ed. Spargo, Clifton R. and Ehrenreich, Robert M. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 179–90Google Scholar.

10 McHugh, Siobhán, “The Affective Power of Sound: Oral History on Radio,” The Oral History Review 39 (2012): 187–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 The Harvard Iranian Oral History Project (http://ted.lib.harvard.edu/ted/deliver/advancedsearch?_collection=iohp) is an example of the rich archive of oral history interviews and transcripts that can be generated even when focusing on political elites in the aftermath of a revolution. Inside Iran, the aftermath of the revolution was largely defined by the Iran–Iraq War, and government studies of the war were shaped, in part, by actively recruited interviews and reports of individual soldiers. See Anny Tracie Samuel, “Perceptions and Narratives of Security: The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and the Iran-Iraq War” (Discussion Paper 21012-06, International Security Program Discussion Paper Series, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., 2012), accessed 20 July 2015, http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/samuel_perceptions.pdf.