The aim of my article is to make an attempt at critical reflection on devisualisation process of anthropological practices. Taking into consideration a sound both increases ethnographic knowledge and interpretation and becomes a part of cultural critic challenging scopophilia of the Western paradigm of perception and cognition. The paradigm limiting anthropologists to create only textual, verbal and visual representations. The article presents acoustemological approach as a part of a broader perspective established in the anthropology of senses. The perspective that adopts deconstructive attitude with the aim of minimalisation of the authoritarianism of the anthropological knowledge. The potential of the anthropology of senses is inherent in the possibility of the implementation of the sensual semiosis in analysis of cultures, highlights hierarchies and stereotypes of sensual symbolism and allows to apply more appropriate representation of cultures.
The article pertains to the notion of audio-anthropology both as the methodology and the way of practice of the discipline through sound. The audio-anthropology should be understood as application of digital audio technologies relating to recording, editing, arranging, listening and publishing: a) cultural sonic manifestations, b) audio-representations. In other words, the audio-anthropology is the audio-production of anthropological knowledge. As an alternative way of „doing discipline” the audio-anthropology is the result of so called auditory turn which had raised the question of the authoritarianism of Eye – fundamental and irrefutable organ of insight into the socio-cultural reality. Practice of sounded anthropology casts doubt on oculocentric model of anthropological knowledge and leads to appreciation of sonic phenomenon and practices in a social life.
The Józef Burszta Digital Archive [Cyfrowe Archiwum im. Józefa Burszty; http://cyfrowearchiwum.amu.edu.pl] is an online platform established in 2014 for publication of audiovisual materials collected since the 1950s by the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.The Józef Burszta Digital Archive functions on the basis of Creative Commons licenses and has the status of a social archive. There are broad applications for its resources both in academe and beyond. The author discusses the bases for founding the archive, the specifics of its accessible materials, and plans for its future activities.
The article is based on the ethnographic mobile eldwork carried out among Polish tractor unit drivers em- ployed in West European forwarding companies. It is focused on truck drivers’ mobility, whose inherent quality is the contradiction between movement and stillness, multi-sitedness and speci c localisation, and access to protected and monitored industrial zones as opposed to spatial exclusion. The starting point of the re ections are the categories of a non-place and mobility, which in practice appear to less obvious and one-dimensional in the context of trans-local and cross-border activities of tractor unit drivers. It is the stillness a phenomenon that reveals the regimes of distribution and transport logistics.
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