Page - 58 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 3/2017

58 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 3 2o17 Agata Stanisz | Tractor unit acoustemology sounds” by John Blacking (1973). Anthropology of sound supports the idea of taking into consideration variety of sounds and widening the notion of music by including e.g.  language, poetry, voice, natural sounds and sounds produced by other species than human beings, ma- chines, and environment acoustics. It is also crucial not to ignore the technological mediation of sound and the ways sound circulates in a given socio-cultural context. Therefore, sound reproduction and distribution should always be taken into consideration. At the same time, it should be noted that acoustemology rejects the most important legacy of acoustic ecology, i.e. soundscape (Schafer 1977). This is caused by the fact that the landscape analogy is inadequate as it evokes physical distance to the already mentioned relationality, agen- cy and perception. Acoustemology is not supposed to serve yet another essentialization and its application does not result in substituting a visualistic ocularcentrism with sonocentrism (see also Helmreich 2010, 10; Ingold 2007, 10-13). From the anthropological point of view, when we take into consideration the acoustic dimension of social life, listening should be located in its center and engaged in a specific time-space context. Thus, tractor unit acoustemology, which is the subject of this article, would be founded on a rather unoriginal idea that everyday life of tractor unit drivers is shared with various Others and based on real, virtual and imagined relations and co-activities. This relationality is the basic condition of dwelling on the road, a product of conscious or unconscious ways of multisensual participation in the world, conditioned by, e.g. listening to its auditory: verbal and non-verbal, human and non-human, musical and non-musical, aspects. Sound should be studied in such situations where the subject who is listening is mentally and physically involved. Avoiding the acoustic in anthropological practices, especially among communities living in acoustically rich environments, is an unfair privilege awarded to visuality. What is sonic in a given culture is also socially situated and manifested to the people experienc- ing it, if we assume that sound is something that influences and resonates in them. The ability to assimilate, express and reflect sounds is one of the basic tools that allows people to orientate themselves in the reality surrounding them. It becomes an element of various cosmologies and a medium for communication and expression. However, applying sound anthropology in studies conducted among tractor unit drivers, so in a context filled with intensive buzz and noisy ac - oustics, turned out to be difficult and not so obvious, especially due to methodological reasons. Sound anthropology is a rather narrow specialization characterized by interdisciplinarity, often entering scientific discourses which are not always very useful in the context of the reflec- tions on the urban and western European audiosphere. It is not a simple task to keep these re- flections in the anthropological paradigm, considering this interdisciplinarity, which is a blend of philosophical, musical reflection and acoustic ecology. Moreover, most of the publications on this subject which can be called anthropological refer to studies located outside Europe and describing small communities (Feld 1990; Roseman 1991; Yamada 1997) where the auditory reality with all its literal and cultural distinctness makes it very difficult for the anthropological reflection on a complex, urbanized and postindustrial community to defend itself. It is not a simple task to look outside the fenomenoligizing, aesthetizing, ecologizing sonic experience of roadside, parking or factory spaces. In the case of my studies, doing ethnographic research through sound means listening, recording, editing registered sounds and, with their help, developing acoustic representations