TY - JOUR
T1 - Modernity, Cultural Anesthesia, and Sensory Agency
T2 - Technologies of the Listening Self in a US Collegiate Jazz Music Program
AU - Wilf, Eitan
N1 - Funding Information: I would like to thank Jean Comaroff, Michael Silverstein, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Ingrid Monson for providing detailed comments on an earlier version of this article. E. Summerson Carr served as a discussant when I presented this material at the Michicagoan conference in May 2009 at the University of Michigan in Anne Arbor. Sue Gal and Webb Keane provided helpful comments at that event. This research was supported by a University of Chicago Century Fellowship, a Dan David Prize, the Josephine de Kármán Fellowship, and a Mellon Foundation Dissertation Year Fellowship. Finally, this article would not have been possible without the generosity of my interlocutors in the field of U.S. collegiate jazz music education. Publisher Copyright: © 2013, © 2013 Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis.
PY - 2015/1/1
Y1 - 2015/1/1
N2 - ABSTRACT: In this article, I rely on Michel Foucault's notion of ‘technologies of the self’ to theorize the micro-practices by which individuals actively negotiate the reconfiguration of their sensory skills as a result of modernization processes. In doing so, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in a collegiate jazz music program in the USA. By exploring a number of interactional games in which jazz students attempt to negotiate the challenge of cultivating aural skills in a pedagogical context that embraces visually mediated modes of knowledge production and transmission as a result of the professionalization and rationalization of jazz training, I inquire into the conditions of possibility for sensory agency under modernity.
AB - ABSTRACT: In this article, I rely on Michel Foucault's notion of ‘technologies of the self’ to theorize the micro-practices by which individuals actively negotiate the reconfiguration of their sensory skills as a result of modernization processes. In doing so, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in a collegiate jazz music program in the USA. By exploring a number of interactional games in which jazz students attempt to negotiate the challenge of cultivating aural skills in a pedagogical context that embraces visually mediated modes of knowledge production and transmission as a result of the professionalization and rationalization of jazz training, I inquire into the conditions of possibility for sensory agency under modernity.
KW - Sensory agency
KW - USA
KW - improvisation
KW - modernization
KW - technologies of the self
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84920202394&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2012.751930
DO - https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2012.751930
M3 - Article
SN - 0014-1844
VL - 80
SP - 1
EP - 22
JO - Ethnos
JF - Ethnos
IS - 1
ER -