As someone who He teaches and examines music and religionI have always been fascinating inspiration and how he connects people with other beings.
Musicians can be inspired by great artists, living and dead; by technologies that expand their experience, like Artist Brian House's macrophones Are capturing low -frequency infradzing; By Plants and animals; And through the imperceptible, unprecedented presence of supernatural. After all, the word inspiration sounds rooted in Latin for “breathing”. This was often related to Spiritual or divine influence – inspiration from other kingdoms.
IN My research and teachingThe recognition of non-human beings is ethically vital and is an act of intellectual humility. It will ensure that I honor other people's religious and musical experiences, and admits that we cannot know exactly what they know. The reality of one person may not translate into our own understanding.
This was what prompted me to design this course: “music, sound and research with non-human.”
What does the course explore?
The key is “Z” in the title of the course: I want students to find out how human knowledge exists in a relationship with non-human. To do this, we read and listen widely.
In research using Actor-network theoryYou and your smartphone; People and gods. In any case, people and non-people are considered to be actors who really have a difference in the world.
Music scholar Peter McMurray He uses a similar lens in his work on the ritual “Semah” Alevi, which includes music, movement and poetry. Alevism is the mystical tradition of Islam in Turkey, which has Long discrimination. Part of the sung poetry used for SEMAH is inspired by holy animals such as cranes. Participants in SEMAH Experience a crane flight through the music and dance that are Alevi central ritual.
Or consider the traditions of chanting revealed in texts such as the Koran, which means “recitation” in Arabic. The spiritually goal is not only the teaching of the Holy Scriptures, but also approaching its sound essence. The recitation resembles a moments of meeting between people and divine, most importantly is the prophet Muhammad receiving Koran by Angel Gabriel.
We also look beyond music, for everything, from medicine and biology to economics, to studying relationships between people and non-human. For example, one of our favorite readings is “Mushroom at the end of the world“By anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. This is a wealthy ethnographic relationship of relationships between people and Matsutake mushrooms, which are highly valued in Japanese cuisine: pine forests in which Matsutake grow, human activity that makes them develop, gathering gathering, and global markets on which they are rotated.
My students Luana Espinoza AND Sofia Ahmed are Describe our course as a study of the type of symbiosis: they employ the word biologists to describe loved ones, often mutually favorable relationships between species.
What is the critical lesson in the course?
This course prepares students to confront with solemn, tough forms of intellectual diversity, considering how the possibilities of different truths and paradigms can inform about their research.
Both students in this semester are the main scientific fields working on older theses: espinosis in chemistry and seid in neuroscience. Reading and listening to the accounts of other human and non-human people, they say that they no longer feel obliged to leave a significant part of themselves at the class door.
Music and sound physical and metaphysical, natural and supernatural bridge. For this reason, they are invaluable to the meeting of complicated truths.
Amherst College students Sofia Ahmed Seid and Luana Espinosis have contributed to the preparation of this article.
Uncalmon Courses are an occasional series of conversations that emphasizes an unconventional approach to teaching.
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