Tunnels of Voices. Mining Soundscapes and Memories in South West Sardinia

Tiragallo, Felice

doi:0137-4079

Tunnels of Voices. Mining Soundscapes and Memories in South West Sardinia Tiragallo, Felice

Object structure

Tunnels of Voices. Mining Soundscapes and Memories in South West Sardinia

Ethnologia Polona 39 2018 (2019)

Tiragallo, Felice

Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology Polish Academy of Sciences

mining soundscapes ; miner voices ; sensorial agency ; memory

For the anthropologist, the work of mining seems to be characterised by a specific set of spatial, material, corporeal and sensorial relations. On-going debates in anthropology emphasize the prominence of a direct approach to this range of features of experience, in correlation with a need to understand how they are connected with social meanings. This article uses such an approach to investigate how the sensory experiences of mining are shared by miners as a community of practice. At the same time, the historical decline of mining activity is inexorably restricting mining landscapes and cultures to the heritageof the past. ; In European mining districts, such as South West Sardinia (Italy), a rich heritage of the memory of an abandoned mining world coexists with a number of advanced, government subsidised mining plants that are just ceasing to be active. In this context, a particular form-of-life seems to appear that links miners, witnesses of a recent mining past, with local communities that are still entangled in mining activity. The existence of a rich aural sensitivity underground, recorded by the research project’s filmmaking, is closely related to the way in which former miners “give voice to” and ”feel” what they are saying. ; Sensory landscapes of mining life are linked to the subjective voices which express their history and memory. Starting from an ethnographic research, I shall discuss the relationship between performative aspects of oral memory, and the aural and visual dimensions of modern-day mining work.

Accardo A. 1998. Politica, economia e cultura nella Sardegna autonomistica (1948–1998). In A. Accardo, P. Maurandi and L. Muoni (eds.), L’isola della rinascita. Cinquant’anni di autonomia della Regione Sardegna. Bari: Laterza, 49–54.
Angioni G. 1974. Rapporti di produzione e cultura subalterna. Cagliari: Edes.
Angioni G. 1986. Il sapere della mano. Palermo: Sellerio.
Atzeni P. 2007. Tra il dire e il fare, Cultura materiale della gente di miniera in Sardegna. Cagliari: Cuec.
Atzeni P. 2012. Knowing how to tell, how to do, how to live. Historical Fragments of Mining Anthropology. Carbonia: Centro Italiano della Cultura del Carbone.
Atzeni P. 2012. Saper dire, saper fare, saper vivere: frammenti storici di antropologia mineraria. Ricerche storiche. Archeologia industriale. XLII, 3, 435–458.
Atzeni P. 2015. Il corpo e il cibo, i discorsi e i paesaggi minerari. nei rapporti di produzione e oltre. In F. Bachis and A. M. Pusceddu (eds.). Cose da prendere sul serio. Le antropologie di Giulio Angioni. Nuoro: Il Maestrale, 71–80
Bachis F. 2017. A Silence Full of Noises: the Aural Environment in a Miner’s Life History. ANUAC 6 (2), 245–270.
Ballard C. and Banks G. 2003. Resource Wars: The Anthropology of Mining. Annual Review of Anthropology, 32, 287–313.
D’Angelo L. and Pijpers R. J. 2018. Mining Temporalities: An Overview. The Extractive Industries and Society, 5, 215–222.
Duranti A. 2007. Etnopragmatica. La forza nel parlare. Roma: Carocci.
Feld S. 1991. Voices of the Rainforest: A Day In The Life Of The Kaluli People. Salem, MA: Rykodisc. CD 10173.
Feld S. 1991. Voices of the Rainforest: Politics of Music. Public Culture. 4 (1), 131–40.
Godoy R. 1985. Mining: Anthropological Perspectives. Annual Review of Anthropology. 14, 199–2017.
Grimshaw A. and Ravetz A. 2016. Observational Cinema. Anthropology, Film, and the Exploration of Social Life. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Ingold T. 2001. Ecologia della cultura, (a cura di C. Grasseni, F. Ronzon). Roma: Meltemi.
Ingold T. 2001. From the Trasmission of Representations to the Education of Attention. In H. Whitehouse (ed.), Mind, Evolution and Cultural Trasmission,. Oxford: Berg, 113–153.
Ingold T. 2007. Against Soundscape. In A. Carlyle (ed.) Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice. Paris: Double Entendre, 10–13.
Ingold T. 2011 [2000]. The Perception of the Environment. Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skills, Oxon, Routledge.
Ingold T. 2011. Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London. Routledge.
Mac Dougall D. 1998. Transcultural Cinema. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Manconi F. (ed.). 1986. Le miniere e i minatori della Sardegna. Cagliari: Edes.
Miller D. (ed.). 2005. Materiality, Durham, London, Duke University Press.
Ottelli L. 2005. Serbariu. Storia di una miniera. Carbonia: Centro Italiano della Cultura del Carbone.
Pandey R. 2015. Ethnographies of Mining in Late Industrialism. Indian Anthropologist 45 (2), 75–86.
Pink S. 2009. Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage.
Portelli A. 2017. Storie orali. Racconto, immaginazione, dialogo, Roma: Donzelli.
Rakowski T. 2016. Hunters, Gatherers, and Practitioners of Powerlessness. An Ethnography of the Degraded in Postsocialist Poland. New York–Oxford: Berghahn.
Ruju S. 2008. I mondi minerari della Sardegna (1860–1960) con dieci testimonianze orali, Cagliari: Cuec.
Samuels D. W., Meintjes L., Ochoa A. M. and Porcello T. 2010. Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 39, 329–345.
Sapelli G. 2008. Storia economica dell’Italia contemporanea, Milano: Mondadori.
Schafer M. 1994 [1977]. Our Sonic Environment and the Soundscape. The Tuning of the World. Rochester: Destiny Books.
Viazzo P. P. 2016. La cultura della miniera nelle Alpi tra storia e antropologia: Stato delle ricerche e questioni aperte. La ricerca folklorica. 71, 13–26
Young C. 1975. Observational Cinema. In P. Hogkings (ed.), Principles of Visual Anthropology. Berlin, New York: Muyton de Gruyter, 65–80.