Prof Boudina McConnachie [in person] and Dr Dominique Santos [remotely] (Rhodes University, Makhanda, South Africa)

Listening into the Depths: Developing an Ethnographic Methodology for Sounding Transoceanic Afterlives

Historical research into slavery, maritime encounters and oceanic worlds frequently confronts archives marked by fragmentation, silence and profound absence. Colonial records privilege imperial perspectives, while the experiences of enslaved people, bonded crews and coastal communities often remain only partially recoverable. Rather than treating these absences as problems to be overcome, this presentation asks how listening might function as a methodology for engaging with histories that cannot be fully reconstructed through written sources alone (Feld 1996; Mansell 2021; Robinson 2020).

Drawing on ethnomusicology, anthropology and Indigenous Knowledge Systems, we explore listening not simply as a means of collecting or interpreting sound, but as an epistemic and ethnographic practice through which historical, material and affective relationships can be investigated. Listening extends beyond audible sound to include resonance, silence, environmental acoustics, oral memory and embodied musical practice as ways of approaching the past. Rather than seeking definitive historical recovery, we consider how listening might enable researchers to remain in relation with histories that continue to exceed the archive (Birdsall & Tkaczyk 2019; Rice 2018).

The presentation introduces the early methodological development of A Cacophony of Voices: Sounding Afterlives, a creative research project emerging from Out of the Depths. Rather than presenting completed findings, we reflect on the project's first stages of fieldwork along South Africa's Eastern Cape coastline, including community engagement, coastal walking, environmental listening and the initial development of hydro-acoustic ceramic forms. These early experiments ask how sound, material practice and collaborative listening might function not simply as representations of historical research, but as modes of inquiry through which fragmented maritime histories can be explored.

By bringing together historical acoustemology, ethnographic listening and practice-led research, we argue that sonic experimentation can expand historical and ethnographic inquiry beyond the written archive. Rather than recovering lost voices, this developing methodology proposes listening as a collaborative, speculative and ethically situated practice through which researchers engage resonance, silence and absence as productive sites of historical knowledge.

Bios

Professor Boudina McConnachie is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Music and Musicology at Rhodes University, South Africa. An ethnomusicologist and practice-led researcher, her work examines listening, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, sonic heritage, and African musical arts as approaches to historical inquiry and decolonial knowledge production. Through collaborative research with communities, artists, and cultural institutions, she explores how sound, performance, and material practice can generate new ways of engaging with memory, environment, and transoceanic histories. She is Director of the HERE Lab, an interdisciplinary research initiative that supports postgraduate scholarship and collaborative, arts-based approaches to heritage, sustainability, and Indigenous knowledge systems across Southern Africa.

Dr Dominique Santos is the Deputy Dean of Teaching and Learning in the Humanities Faculty and an anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology at Rhodes University, South Africa. Her research explores colonialism, maritime heritage, slavery, memory, and decolonial heritage practices, with a particular focus on Portuguese shipwrecks and the Indian Ocean world. She works collaboratively with museums, artists, and coastal communities, integrating ethnography, oral history, and creative methodologies to investigate marginalised histories and public memory. She is co-lead of the Out of the Depths research project, which examines transoceanic afterlives through archival, community-based, and arts-led approaches.

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