Vol. 2, Fall 2024
Sonic Devotion
LORENZO FERRARINI / University of Manchester
Sonic Devotion is a short piece of sonic ethnography dealing with conflict over the acoustic space of Catholic pilgrimages in Basilicata, Italy. Here, sounds can bring people together in devotion and highlight frictions over the proper ways to relate to the sacred.
Nested on a mountainside in the heart of the Pollino National Park (Basilicata, southern Italy), the sanctuary dedicated to the Madonna del Pollino hosts many pilgrims who ascend the steep roads to camp and pray there over several days each year. During the pilgrimage, it is possible to witness forms of “sonic devotion” (Scaldaferri 2006, 16), the production and listening experience of sounds dedicated to a sacred figure, especially as music – playing an instrument, singing, and, by extension, dancing. Beyond music, sonic devotion includes the soundscape of pilgrims’ campsites, with their cooking, eating, drinking, and shouting. Some of the manifestations of sonic devotion traditionally extend to the inside of the sanctuary, as pilgrims play, sing, and dance in front of the statue of the Madonna. For certain components of the Catholic Church, though, these embodied modalities of relating to the sacred are backward examples of folk religiosity that should be eliminated from such festivals. The first restrictions were put in place after the diffusion on national television of an ethnographic documentary that spotlighted the more dramatic displays of devotion, which included crawling, chest-beating, and sometimes licking the floor from the entrance of the sanctuary to the statue (Di Gianni 1971). Subsequently, relying on a division between sacred and profane that the pilgrims do not share, the Church directed some of its attempts to control the festival towards controlling its soundscape. They separated the campsite from the sanctuary to delimit the pilgrims’ sonic productions as noise, restricted the devotional sounds inside the sanctuary to prayers and hymns, and installed sound amplification systems to guarantee dissymmetry in the production of sounds. Through these strategies, the clergy brought the conflict over sonic devotion to a breaking point.
This augmented sound piece, mainly composed of field recordings I made in 2014 (Madonna del Pollino, San Severino Lucano) with the addition of a 2016 recording (Madonna di Conserva, San Costantino Albanese), treats the acoustic as a primary domain in which power struggles at mountain pilgrimages are played out, instead of being echoed. Using the methods of sonic ethnography (Ferrarini and Scaldaferri 2020), it locates itself in an emerging series of works that treat images as “extradiegetic” (Larcher 2022) or even secondary, including Cox et al.’s Zawawa (2017), Karel and Kusumaryati’s Expedition Content (2020), and Feld’s cinematic rendition of Voices of the Rainforest (Feld, Leonard, and Richards 2019).
On the one hand, the editing principles guiding these sonic ethnographies have their roots in essay film’s horizontal montage—in André Bazin’s definition, a choice of shots that relies on their relationship to the soundtrack rather than with each other (Stob 2012)—and in some experimental filmmaking’s asynchronicity between visual and acoustic components (Heuson and Allen 2014). On the other, they take forward Feld’s challenge to practice an anthropology in sound by subverting to variable degrees documentary’s traditional subservience of sounds to synchronous images, what Henley called “despotism of the eye” (2007).
After establishing each setting with brief still photographs, my piece uses extended black screens to assign a central role to the soundtrack. It uses strategies of juxtaposition to foreground contrasts and conflict over the spaces that pilgrims share in and around the sanctuary. The shouts of the players of morra (a hand game) set the scene of the camps where pilgrims spend the night cooking, singing, and dancing. A brief soundwalk around the sanctuary showcases the diversity of the pilgrims’ sonic devotion through transitions in musical space that almost sound like crossfades between different recordings.
This devotional music is interrupted by the loudspeakers broadcasting the priest’s voice from inside the church, who happens to speak about “proper” forms of devotion. Shortly afterward, the sanctuary is the setting for a conflict that involves the police, called by the sanctuary staff, and some musicians with their devotional songs. Eventually, the policemen have to retreat, their voices drowned by a wave of music. This is the only portion in the piece with synchronous video images, marking a stylistic rupture precisely when conflict culminates.
Beyond being a document of this particularly striking episode, my piece highlights dynamics that are not limited to settings with a religious character: broadcasting institutional sounds and disciplining the production of informal sounds is an effective strategy to enact control over space and the people in it. The domain of sound is, then, a reflection of these struggles for control and the arena in which they are fought.
References
Cox, Rupert, Angus Carlyle, Kozo Hiramatsu, and Atsushi Nishimura, dirs. 2017. Zawawa: The Sound of Sugar Cane in the Wind. HD video. University of Manchester.
Di Gianni, Luigi, dir. 1971. La Madonna del Pollino. 16mm. Nexus Film.
Feld, Steven, Dennis Leonard, and Jeremiah Ra Richards. 2019. Voices of the Rainforest. A Day in the Life of Bosavi Papua New Guinea. 2nd Edition CD. Santa Fe: VoxLox. Photo book with CD and concert film 7.1 Bluray.
Ferrarini, Lorenzo, and Nicola Scaldaferri. 2020. Sonic Ethnography: Identity, Heritage and Creative Research Practice in Basilicata, Southern Italy. Sonic Ethnography. Manchester: Manchester University Press. https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/view/9781526151988/9781526151988.xml.
Henley, Paul. 2007. “Seeing, Hearing, Feeling: Sound and the Despotism of the Eye in ‘Visual’ Anthropology.” Visual Anthropology Review 23 (1): 54–63. https://doi.org/10.1525/var.2007.23.1.54.
Heuson, Jennifer L., and Kevin T. Allen. 2014. “Asynchronicity: Rethinking the Relation of Ear and Eye in Ethnographic Practice.” In Experimental Film and Anthropology, edited by Arnd Schneider and Caterina Pasqualino, 113–30. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Karel, Ernst, and Veronika Kusumaryati, dirs. 2020. Expedition Content. DCP. Cinema Guild.
Larcher, Jonathan. 2022. “Des images extradiégétiques? Le tournant acoustique en anthropologie visuelle.” La Revue Documentaires, no. 32 (October): 73–84.
Scaldaferri, Nicola. 2006. “Mezzo secolo di etnomusicologia in Basilicata.” In Nel paese dei cupa-cupa. Suoni e immagini della tradizione lucana, by Nicola Scaldaferri and Stefano Vaja, 9–39. Sinestesie. Roma: Squilibri.
Stob, Jennifer. 2012. “Cut and Spark: Chris Marker, André Bazin and the Metaphors of Horizontal Montage.” Studies in French Cinema 12 (1): 35–46. https://doi.org/10.1386/sfc.12.1.35_1.
Lorenzo Ferrarini
Lorenzo Ferrarini is a documentary filmmaker, photographer, and sound recordist, and a lecturer at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester. He works in Burkina Faso and southern Italy on themes relating to ecology and perception. In 2020, he authored the award-winning book Sonic Ethnography (Manchester University Press, with Nicola Scaldaferri), on the role of sound-making and listening practices in the formation of local identities in the southern Italian region of Basilicata.