Climates of Dissent

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-01-23

Abstract This chapter describes a long-term pedagogical encounter—the author’s own study of a popular, three-stringed Isan Thai instrument called the phin—that examines the intersecting concepts of sonic environmentality and sonic dissent. Through common terms such as “soundscapes” and “protest music,” respectively, these terms have frequently been treated in scholarship as universal analytics. This chapter investigates instead how they might be treated with greater historical specificity. But terms presume a horizontal compatibility between radically different kinds of public spheres. Dissidents in different political contexts conceptualize music and sound in radically different ways. By thinking through sonic environmentality and sonic dissent together, the author argues for the provincialization of both, especially within sound studies and ethnomusicology.

Pilzer, Joshua. 2023. Quietude: A Musical Anthropology of “Korea’s Hiroshima”

MUSICultures · 2025-01-01

Y/Our Music

Ethnomusicology · 2020

• Computer Science
• Computer Science

6 ] The Spoiled and the Salvaged: Modulations of Auditory Value in Bangalore and Bangkok

Duke University Press eBooks · 2020

• Computer Science
• Audiology
• Communication

Sound‐Politics in São Paulo by Leonardo CardosoOxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 247pp.

American Anthropologist · 2020

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science

Atrocity Broadcasts

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2019-03-28

This is the second of several interlude chapters that are interspersed throughout the book to give an impression of conditions the author encountered. It reflects on media material that showed violence committed by the Thai military against Red Shirt demonstrators. Thai society.

Whistles

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2019-03-28

This short chapter describes the use of whistles at Red Shirt protests, both by police and by Red Shirt volunteer guards. Whistles performed authority, even when their particular sonic emanations were not indexical. Examples include whistles used by parking lot attendants, expressway traffic police, and mass transit station agents, as well as by crew members of vessels on canals and rivers, and the Thai navy. The author describes the dueling use of whistles by Red Shirt demonstrators and police at a specific rally, and suggests that by examining whistles we can understand how the Red Shirts aspired to a relatively conventional form of political power through their movement.

Bangkok is Ringing

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2019-03-28 · 47 citations

<italic>Bangkok Is Ringing</italic> is an on-the-ground sound studies analysis of the political protests that transformed Thailand in 2010–11. Bringing the reader through sixteen distinct “sonic niches” where dissidents used media to broadcast to both local and diffuse audiences, the book catalogues these mass protests in a way that few movements have ever been catalogued. The Red Shirt and Yellow Shirt protests that shook Thailand took place just before other international political movements, including the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. <italic>Bangkok Is Ringing</italic> analyzes the Thai protests in comparison with these, seeking to understand the logic not only of political change in Thailand, but across the globe. The book is attuned to sound in a great variety of forms. The author traces the history and use in protest of specific media forms, including community radio, megaphones, CDs, and live concerts. The research took place over the course of sixteen months, and the author worked closely with musicians, concert promoters, activists, and rank-and-file protesters. The result is a detailed and sensitive ethnography that argues for an understanding of sound and political movements in tandem. In particular, it emphasizes the necessity of thinking through <italic>constraint</italic> as a fundamental condition of both political movements and the sound that these movements produce. In order to produce political transformations, the book argues, dissidents must be sensitive to the ways that their sounding is constrained and channeled.

Megaphonic Somsak Comes by His Goddamn Self

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2019-03-28

This chapter explains the use of the megaphone by Red Shirt protesters as an act of figuration, in Donna Haraway’s sense. The figured performance of megaphone singing or oration specifically suggested that Red Shirts were self-motivated, rather than agents provoked or paid by outside forces. Megaphone lectures gave the impression that the Red Shirts were authentically motivated. The author calls this sense of self-motivation <italic>kuu maa’eng</italic> (“I came by my goddamn self”) protest, after a slogan commonly used by the Red Shirts themselves. The chapter focuses ethnographically on one particular megaphone orator who came to most large Red Shirt protests in 2010–11.

Wireless Road and the Ground of Modernity

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2019-03-28

Red Shirt protest occupation spaces were situated in the center of Bangkok. One of the roads that was occupied is called Wireless Road, and is named after Bangkok’s first radio station, which was founded there in 1920. This chapter considers how Red Shirt radio stations played a key role in mobilizing the movement. It further reflects on the meaning of the occupation taking place at the inaugural site of radio in the country, an important symbol of modernity. Red Shirt radio in the present is in some ways closely connected to the history of radio in the country, but in other ways it breaks from it sharply. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that Red Shirt radio suggests a kind of neoliberal turn within the movement.