Making sense of social history - New Topics And Historians

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2003 by Mark M. Smith

Thanks to Raymond Smdor and Emily Thompson, we are beginning to get a sense of the role, use, and significance of sound in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America; thanks to work by Richard Cullen Rath, we now know a good deal about the sonic order of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. In his 2001 dissertation, "Worlds Chanted into Being: Soundways in Early America," Rath recovers colonial American modes of hearing and soundways. He shows how sound shaped identities, delimited space and community, and located social relations of power and authority. Rath's approach is temporally and geographically broad (he covers the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and examines "trans-oceanic," Atlantic connections) and he, like many social historians, argues that "[g]ender, ethnicity, and social status" are integral to his examination. Although Rath is sensitive to the vocal, spoken world--and there has been quite a lot written on that topic--he is more interested in the paralinguistic aspects of early America. (31)

Early American soundways, argues Rath, "supplied a perceptual base for ways of thinking that have since been traded away in the acquisition of literacy and the promotion of print culture," and he is quite critical of work by literary critic Walter Ong and anthropologist Jack Goody whose "narrow focus on orality is symptomatic of a sort of tunnel vision into the past, where the audible world served only to set the stage for the rise of print and mass literacy after the Reformation." Although a reading of Foucault is important to Rath's investigative schema, he seems equally influenced by Marshall McLuhan and is well aware, like Schmidt and Corbin, of the role of early Annales school historians, including Lucien Febvre, in helping to identify a history of the senses. (32)

Rath makes a compelling case that to continue to focus on orality is a tremendous disservice to the historical actors who made and experienced a far broader range of sounds, and he rightly shows that unhelpful, artificial distinctions between premodern (oral) and modern (literate) cultures do not withstand scrutiny when we begin to listen differently and to different sounds. Rath is interested in both the historically situated shift in modes of perception in early America--from ear to eye--and the material as well as cultural bases for that shift. He is particularly interested in the ways that sound was used to regulate and create sonic order that arranged social hierarchies and extended civil society's authority. Rath's comparative analysis of North American regions, an analysis based on not only a deep reading of the historical record but also an impressive understanding of architectural acoustics, shows, for example, how bells were used to regulate civil society and mark public space. He also shows how the spatial and acoustical properties of churches and meetings houses reflected and reaffirmed political and social ordering. Moreover, in various sections that would doubtless earn Hobsbawm's applause, Rath remains sensitive not only to elite uses of sound to establish social hierarchies but also to ways in which slaves and Native Americans used aurality, musical instruments, and an understanding of acoustics to both police their own environments and resist authority (his examination of the meaning and almost militaristic use of sound during the 1739 Stono Rebellion is particularly fascinating). In short, although Rath tends to slight the aurality associated with economic development, his meticulous attention to the physical and symbolic significance of sound and hearing, his ability to connect culture with politics, and his drive to consider elites and nonelites gives his study the tenor of a social history project. (33)