Page - 57 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 3/2017

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 3 2o17 Agata Stanisz | Tractor unit acoustemology 57 Masculinity and male work ethos were the two elements that I had expected to be the most pro- nounced. However, they had a different quality. My expectations and ideas were imbued with stereotypes concerning tractor unit drivers. What actually turned out to be most significant in this context was the link between masculinity (especially male body) and machines (especially tractor units) in ambivalent conditions: simultaneous mobility and immobility, mutilisitedness and locality, internationality and nationalism. These seemingly mutually exclusive oppositions existed side by side in the context of, firstly, a specific type of dwelling, secondly, a specific sound space full of industrial and roadside noises, buzzes and bourdons co-creating the am - biance of tractor unit drivers’ everyday reality. Acoustemology of tractor unit and dwelling on the road Acoustemology is a theory that verges between anthropology and ethnomusicology and deals with acoustic reality. It concerns the cognitive potential of sound and its audibility, which allows for understanding their sense and meanings. This approach emphasizes auditory prac- tices, both the present and the historic ones, as well as collective and individual ones. It offers an alternative for the visual paradigm, which has dominated the western concept of know- ledge and human perception since Renaissance. Ethnomusicologist Steven Feld (2015) was the one who initiated acoustemological approach as an alternative to the anthropology of music, already well-established in the 1960s (Merriam 1964). This scholar demonstrated an impressive potential of sound and listening with reference to the system of cultural meanings and social situa tions where they can be found. His approach should be interpreted as rejection of the tra- ditional, acoustic and musicological sound interpretation, which defined it as a physical pheno- menon that can undergo scientific objectification. Acoustemology is actually a sounded variant of epistemology, where cognitive processes are shaped on the basis of experience, valuation and use. It allows for asking a question about what is already discovered and discoverable through sound and hearing, and how sound influ- ences the social; how and in which contexts the social and the cultural are decisive about some groups of people, phenomena, or identity manifestations etc. being audible or not. The concept of acoustemology does not imply epistemology in the formal sense. As its creator Steven Feld claims, it is not about metaphysical and transcendental proposition pertaining to the notion of truth. It is more about relationality of knowledge production processes, which John Dewey calls contextual and experimental cognition (Dewey, Bantley 1949). Steven Feld introduced acoustemology in 1992 in order to locate in the social studies his research on the cultural dimen sion of sound (Feld 2015, 12-21). This dimension is nothing else than sounded relations between people, non-human reality (things, animals, plants), the environment and technology. Thus, the anthropology of sound studies relations in activities, whose creation is closely linked to the acoustic aspects of everyday life understood as an intrinsic element of the habitus. The scientific discovery through relations makes us aware of the fact that we never acquire know - ledge in a simple way, because this process always includes interaction, communication and it is conditioned by the processes of participation and reflection (Feld 2015, 12-21). Acoustemology is also a notion connected to anthropology of sound, which was developed also by Steven Feld as a critical answer to the limitations of anthropology of music, especial- ly the paradigm of “music in culture” by Alan Merriam (1964) and “human only organized