"Encounter and Memory in Ottoman Soundscapes: An Audiovisual Album of Street Vendors’ Cries” - HAL-SHS - Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Historiká. Studi di storia greca e romana Année : 2022

"Encounter and Memory in Ottoman Soundscapes: An Audiovisual Album of Street Vendors’ Cries”

Nazan Maksudyan
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Résumé

This paper focuses on the sonic presence of street vendors’ in nineteenth century Ottoman soundscapes through a unique and extraordinary audiovisual media object: an album of photos and musical transcriptions of street vendors’ cries in Western staff notation. My research is conceived as a sonic history tracing several encounters of vendors with passersby on the streets, as I emphasize that sound should be analyzed as a relationship between a listener and something listened to. The paper analyzes different listening habits and subjectivities along the lines of religion, class, language, ethnicity, gender and other categories of difference. I stress the way cultural difference, especially intra-imperial difference, emerges in an urban soundscape like Istanbul. I use the term, then, in the plural, as “soundscapes”, taking into account multiple sensory experiences of a diversity of peoples. Relying on Ottoman archival material, literature in different Ottoman languages, ego-documents, travelogues, scientific writings, newspapers, letters, diaries, legal documents, musical notes, court records, I analyze four encounters and relations that itinerant sellers’ cries delineate: migration (how rural migrants listened to Ottoman urbanites, and vice versa); multilingualism and diversity; human-nonhuman encounters; and the audibility of gender. Lastly, I touch upon the romantic fascination with the practice of itinerant merchants, due to their imagined “oriental” character, originality, and anticipated extinction.
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Dates et versions

halshs-03895462 , version 1 (12-12-2022)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-03895462 , version 1

Citer

Nazan Maksudyan. "Encounter and Memory in Ottoman Soundscapes: An Audiovisual Album of Street Vendors’ Cries”. Historiká. Studi di storia greca e romana, 2022, 74, pp.32-60. ⟨halshs-03895462⟩

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