Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

This paper merges the fields of sound studies and anthropology. It is about the meanings that we attach to sounds and how and why we come to construct dawsha [noise] as sound ‘out-of-place’ in Cairo. Dawsha is, simultaneously, sound that is marginalised but can also be sound power and resistance and the re-territorialisation of space from the margins. As an avenue for thinking through Cairo, acoustic ecology and dawsha are uniquely generative when working with the fleeting and relationally constructed categories of borders and peripheries. I trace territories and boundaries in Cairo as ‘thing-in-the-making’. I engage the possibilities of borders in Cairo through aural engagements and encounters with dawsha. I explore the way we come to hear sounds in the city and to apprehend the sensorial orderings, otherings, and hierarchisation of sonic regimes crystallised in the order-word of dawsha which, I argue, functions to render sources of dawsha ‘out-of-place’ (but whose place?). Building on Herzogenrath’s (2017) ‘sonic thinking’, this project explores dawsha in/as Cairo as a process-oriented ontology of becoming and making; recognizing entities, sounds, flows, and spaces as events that make us in/and the city. Dawsha is a site of becoming where we make a claims about our identities, mark differences, redraw borders, and situate ourselves within them. Acoustic ecology is a way of thinking about Cairo that emphasises the importance of connections and movement. It apprehends dawsha as an epistemology that can begin to get us thinking about borders, margins, and possibilities.