What is sound, and what is its place in anthropology? Is sound a method of ethnographic inquiry? An object of study? In this course, we will begin by broadly examining the interdisciplinary field of “Sound Studies,” and then move towards a sustained reflection on anthropology’s disciplinary specific engagement with sound. Half of the course will be dedicated to reading three full ethnographies of sound, which will serve as a foundation for exploring a wide range of topics: the role of sound in transducing social relations, the aurality of archives, the vibrational tactility and materiality of sound, auditory subject formation, the politics of soundscapes, and, of course, the ethnographic innovations that emerge out of an attention to sensory registers. We will complement our ethnographic readings with practice-based experiments of listening to and visually inscribing actual soundscapes. By the end of the semester, students will have developed an analytical toolkit for analyzing the sonic nature of contemporary phenomena (e.g. racism, religious belonging, trauma) as well as a capacity for attending critically to their own sonic environment.