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Animal Musicalities
ANIMAL MUSICALITIES
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The closing chapter of my book revisits traditions of the sonic specimen and aural identity in the context of audio field guides to birdsong. These are objects that both replicate and challenge the postmodern divorce between birdsong and human music. In this chapter, I focus on three exceptional cases, in which listening to other species is a guide toward alternate notions of the self located in exotic paradises. Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux, Steven Feld’s Rainforest Soundwalks, and Miyoko Chu’s Birdscapes offer a shared yearning for something best described as the Garden of Eden. These cases conclude my book with three imagined paradises that respond to a world that has been partially determined by the restriction of things of the spirit to the human experience. I end the chapter with questions about how we might imagine paradise beyond the restrictions of the postwar, postmodern, posthuman division between human and nonhuman life.
In the course of these seven chapters, seven themes emerge that offer a foothold for rethinking the more-than-human conditions of culture that emerge from this history. In the conclusion of this book, I imagine these themes as the foundation of the practice I call the animanities, the more-than-human study of culture. I chart a path into the animanities through the stakes raised by each chapter—personhood, identity, difference, knowledge, postmodern humanity, subjectivity, and paradise—as they lay claim to this imagined field of inquiry. Neither quite posthuman nor merely animal, my mapping of the animanities closes with an assertion of the urgency of considering these stakes in a world where human identity itself is being remade at all levels, from our dependence on a rapidly changing environment to the medically altered molecules of our DNA.
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