La Sonorité du vide

• Main Author: Eckehard Pistrick
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université de Provence 2018-11-01
• Series: Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée
• Subjects: migration; Albania; refugee camp; ethnomusicology
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/remmm/11804

This article re-evaluates the status of sound in accessing the individual and intimate life in the worlds of migrants. It asks for the reasons why sound is mobilized by migrants in a privileged way in order to make audible their multifaceted affective and emotional states. This article is based on ethnographic collaborative fieldwork both in South Albania - in native communities affected by waves of migration - and in a refugee reception center in central Germany. The article discusses as well the productive interrelation between sound and silence as two specific forms of a cultural reaction towards uprooting. The refugee camp is presented in this context as an emerging ethnographic site in constant reconfiguration - a fact which requires a new form of humanist and engaged musicological research, which will in the long-term transform our practices and experiences as researchers.