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Listening (Imp)Acts: Sound, Trauma and the “Bellephonic”
Abstract
How do traumatic experiences continue to live in the body? Scholarly and popular accounts have gone to great lengths to show the lasting impact that traumatic experiences exert on the body, impacting not only the memories of victims but also their sensory capacities at the deepest level. Popular media depictions and international human rights regimes, however, continue to treat trauma as something visual. In this paper, I attempt to provide an account of trauma that resists such ocularcentrism by engaging what Martin Daughtry calls “the bellephonic,” the sounds that can be associated with combat (Daughtry 2015, 3). The overwhelming body of scholarly literature on PTSD addresses the experiences of soldiers rather than civilians, who also experience the bellephonic. In this paper I offer a fragmented “bellephonic audionarrative” (Daughtry 2015, 80) of the failed coup attempt in Ankara, Turkey on July 15, 2016 as a case study. I construct this narrative through a series of “listening acts,” which for Deborah Kapchan comprise “not just “objects” of the ethnographic ear, so to speak, but … a method of ethnographic translation” (2017, 277). Structured in three Acts that seek to operationalize such a mode of translation, autoethnographic vignette(s) focused on particular sonic phenomena from the event are offered, along with corroborating quantitative evidence and analysis from secondary literature. Much of what has been written about the sonic aspects of July 15 is set in Istanbul and is interested in the seeming contradiction of the bellephonic and ‘Islamic’ sounds converging (Basdurak 2020; Gill, 2016; Koymen, 2017; Öğüt 2016; Tremblay 2016). By contrast, this study operates through a handful of interventions: first, in terms of geography, by offering an account from a position in the capital, in downtown Ankara; second, in terms of scope, by prioritizing the bellephonic and nonverbal over mediated communications; and third, by including autoethnographic discussion of the long-term psychic impacts of the events. Act One emphasizes the sonic omnipresence of F-16 planes that night. Act Two uses seismographic data to quantify sonic booms experienced that night and discusses the bombing of Parliament. Act Three concludes with reflections on PTSD and exposure therapy as a healing modality. I demonstrate how “tactical listening” (Kapchan 2017, 284) may be engaged in a processual manner to ‘make sense’ of trauma experienced.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
None