Crafting Sound: Ethnographic Reflections on “Culture Work” in Belém, Brazil’s Informal Sound System Economy

• In Event: Media, Music, and Popular Culture

Abstract

In the city of Belém do Pará in the eastern Brazilian Amazon, locally-assembled sound systems have been an integral part of an informal economy of “live” musical entertainment for over half a century. By crafting sound and designing stage spectacle, sound system engineers, builders, and technicians have carved out individual livelihoods, accumulated modest "patrimonies", while also animating social life on the urban peripheries. Since the 1990s, however, the rise of industrially-manufactured sound equipment has rendered their trade increasingly marginalized and their patrimony increasingly precarious. In the face of this devaluation of local labor, some have sought to capitalize on discourses of cultural patrimony by playing up the “artisanal” aspects of their work (Herzfeld 2004). In so doing, they hope to effectively transition into a mode of immaterial production that is experiencing exponential growth in Brazil, yet is increasingly mediated by professionalized culture-workers including journalists, film-makers, and academics.

Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, a collaborative multimedia archiving project, and existing literature on circum-Caribbean sound system cultures (Pacini Hernandez 1996, Veal 2007, Ragland 2003), this paper examines the subjective effects of precarization on a class of "sound artisans" and the possibilities and limitations of collaborative ethnographic research to influence the politics of value surrounding culture work in a neoliberal, deindustrial global economy.

Author

• Darien V Lamen, University of Wiscosin/Madison