De incultos y escandalosos: Noise and Social Classification in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Abstract

This article examines listening practices in post-revolutionary Mexico treating noise as a socio-cultural, historical, territorial and epistemic phenomenon, in other words as an acoustemological problem (Feld 1985, 2012, 2013; Erlmann 2010; Ochoa 2014). Through an analysis of written and corporeal inscriptions of sound, I demonstrate that the construction of the concept of noise, or escandab), was defined by opposition to compliance with a listening modality that was silent, circumspect, individualized and purportedly incorporeal. This modality of listening exemplifies the aesthetic perspective of the post-revolutionary regime led by José Vasconcelos, ideologue of the Mexican national identity, whose association of aesthetic pleasure with a supposed spiritual growth underlies the ideology of mestizaje. In spite of the authorities' desire to enforce this spiritualized model of listening, other forms of experiencing music that did not correspond to such ideal coexisted in the changing cultural context that followed the Revolutionary War. In the long term, the power of representation of one aural model over the other had important implications for the development of ideas surrounding the culto (civilized, educated) and the no-culto, thereby establishing new forms of social classification.

This article examines listening practices in post-revolutionary Mexico treating noise as a socio-cultural, historical, territorial and epistemic phenomenon, in other words as an acoustemological problem (Feld 1985, 2012, 2013; Erlmann 2010; Ochoa 2014). Through an analysis of written and corporeal inscriptions of sound, I demonstrate that the construction of the concept of noise, or escandab), was defined by opposition to compliance with a listening modality that was silent, circumspect, individualized and purportedly incorporeal. This modality of listening exemplifies the aesthetic perspective of the post-revolutionary regime led by José Vasconcelos, ideologue of the Mexican national identity, whose association of aesthetic pleasure with a supposed spiritual growth underlies the ideology of mestizaje. In spite of the authorities' desire to enforce this spiritualized model of listening, other forms of experiencing music that did not correspond to such ideal coexisted in the changing cultural context that followed the Revolutionary War. In the long term, the power of representation of one aural model over the other had important implications for the development of ideas surrounding the culto (civilized, educated) and the no-culto, thereby establishing new forms of social classification.