‘I Shout at It

and It No Longer Howls’:

Sonic Flux as a Metaphysical Continuity between Humans, non-Humans, and Machineries. Report from the North of Armenia

contexts
Delving more into the peculiarities of our anthropological field, several things are worth being described for further elaborating on human-jackal co-existence. In the early 1990s, Tumanyan-town, as well as the rest of Armenia, confronted a great disaster of an earthquake in 1988 and the collapse of a socialistic regime and the First Nagorno-Karabakh War that followed resulting in so-called ‘Cold and Dark Years’ [3] and, in the process of abandoning many buildings and spaces, forming a phenomenon of social emptiness and nothingness in the background of energy crisis and post-Soviet peoples existing in a liminal space between socialism having left and capitalism not fully having been accepted and appropriated [4]. The town of Tumanyan possesses such an abandoned building as well – a former weaving factory the work of which collapsed in 1993 with the lack of energy, electricity, food supplies, and the general crisis in the context of the earthquake, the War, and ‘Cold and Dark Years’. At the moment, the space of the former factory is being revitalized by volunteers, artists, and researchers [5] including us so that we have permanent access to the spaces of the factory and its archive of documents and artifacts that allowed us to conduct an archive study and broaden our inquiry to the machineries that come to inter-act and communicate with humans and jackals as well.

Taking a deeper dive into the Tumanyan’s physical context, its area might be defined as a hi-fi space, ‘A hi-fi system is one possessing a favorable signal-to-noise ratio. The hi-fi soundscape is one in which discrete sounds can be heard clearly because of the low ambient noise level. The country is generally more hi-fi than the city…’ [6]. Contrary to urban lo-fi spaces with permanent backgrounds of noise, Tumanyan as a rural zone truly possesses no constant sound frame and represents a hi-fi assemblage of signals – we managed to experience this effect on our own while living here, e. g., we got used to waking up at the certain sound of a garbage machine’s klaxon which [the machine] collects wastes passing every house twice a week early in the morning. It stands to reason that the jackal howl is a certain signal that might be heard approximately at the same hours in the evenings and that is strictly identified by the locals whose narratives about the spatiality of the location tend to be centered at the jackal scream. The latter, on the one hand, is perceived as something exotic and rather unconventional but, on the other hand, comes described in human categories: some of my informants would compare the jackal howl to a children’s crying or, vice versa, laughing, others would even hear it as a siren alarm, ‘It's funny that every evening such a siren turns on for the whole town’.


theory
Before the analysis of the siren and the jackal howling and other cosmological sonic policies in Tumanyan is to be conducted, a substantial intersection of several theoretical objectives should be made. As already stated in the introduction, in this research we adopted Viveiros de Castro’s theses about Amerindian perspectivism and admitted an assumption about different physical bodies, that exist in the same territory, seeing, ‘representing’, the multiplicity of natures in the same manner with the shared volume of cultural and metaphysical categories – in Viveiros de Castro’s terms, we deal with a matter of a physical discontinuity and a metaphysical continuity. In his other monograph, Viveiros de Castro appeals to the sound and ritual songs used by shamans to traverse between the worlds and trespass the enemies’ metaphysical spaces to maintain a dialogue between physically diverse agents (dead, spirits, animals, etc.) [7] of different worlds who come to interact and communicate with each other through sound and voice, in particular. At this point, both providing critics for the signal-to-noise ratio concept by Schaffer mentioned above and trying to propose probably not quite legitimate but still rather a heuristically potential for anthropology sound studies concept, we refer to sonic flux headlined.

Christoph Cox supplies us with abundant historiography and philosophical genesis of a phenomenon that he names sonic flux [8]. The latter is attempted to be defined in the context of a definition of culture that somehow resembles Geertz’s, ‘Culture is construed as a field or system of signs that operate within intricate relations of referral to other signs and to subjects and objects considered as effects of signification’ [9]. Furthermore, referring to Schopenhauer’s ‘will’, Nietzsche’s naturalization of art and Dionysian world of energy uniting humans, animals, etc.,
and Annmarie Mol’s assumption that ‘there has never been a separate, non-political realm of nature’ [10], Christoph Cox contemplates as follows: an array of sounds, noises, signals, screams, vibrations, which surrounds us in the world as an assemblage of a continuous stream of sound waves, turns out to be a supra-semiotic structure, from the flow of which agents involved in semiotic actions (people, animals, machines, stones, plants, etc.) can capture certain sounds, structure them into writing, music, and speech, and, thus, activate space, including performing acts of semiotic, sonic, and speech communications.

Consequently, along with shared monocultural and mono-metaphysical volumes of categories, concepts, and habits, we manifest sonic flux as a metaphysical continuity in de Castro’s sense since, referring to A. Lucier’s artworks, Ch. Cox says, ‘Lucier also draws no rigorous boundaries between the human, the animal, and the machine. Instead, his work consistently explores the continuum that stretches from one domain into the others’ [11]. Thus, it happens to be that all the different domains, realms, of variedly physically acting beings are installed into the monogenetic cultural and sonic structure of semiotic action. In his monograph ‘How Forests Think’ [12], a descendant of Viveiros de Castro and Descola E. Kohn conducts fastidious work on providing us a theory of an iconic sound image used by human and non-human actors to perform acts of communication. Through his ethnographic studies of Amazonian indigenous communities, Kohn examines how humans interpret and engage with the soundscape of the forest. He highlights the rich array of sounds emitted by various organisms and argues that these sounds hold meaning beyond mere noise. According to Kohn, understanding and interpreting the sounds of the forest requires attunement and sensitivity to the specific context and cultural frameworks in which they occur. He suggests that these sounds convey messages, intentions, and relationships between different beings, contributing to the formation of a shared world of meaning. The latter is very what is constituted by sonic flux as a library and collection of sounds and noises supplying all beings with the possibilities of capturing the needed sonic wave so as to perform a symbolic act of communication. What is also crucial for us, E. Kohn operates with sound as a means of an extension of beings’ selves that makes them extracorporeal with the beings producing a sound or capturing some kind of energy and, thus, letting themselves initiate contact with other agents of a space – G. Agamben proposes, ‘The animal voice derives from its punctiliousness, from its conceptual nature, and as the totality of this it belongs to the senses; if most animals scream at the danger of death, that is clearly only an expression of subjectivity’ [13].

case study
As it comes, different physical Tumanyan’s actors, humans, jackals, dogs, wolves, domestic animals, and the machineries of the factory, get to interact with each other in the space united both with the same cultural and metaphysical entities and with sonic flux, i. e., a chaotic and irresistible array of sound policies constituting semiotic systems. This space is an object multiple – having researched the human-jackal relations in the Romanian Danube Delta, an anthropologist M. Tănăsescu states, ‘… space is not mere extension or the background of action, but rather itself an active medium, constantly being recomposed and always-already multiple’ [14]. That is a key point from where we start our diving into the anthropological materials we were able to collect and interpret: in the parlance of a prominent body anthropologist A. Mol [15], the space of Tumanyan, as well as the space of the Danube Delta, is enacted by different actors and is perceived in various perspectives according to what physical body is proceeding ‘representation’ of the world. As a result, we deal with a matter of a complexed object which, in terms of T. Ingold [16], is articulated by ‘all those organisms, human and non-human, contemporary and ancestral, that have contributed to its formation’.

The multiplicity of the town of Tumanyan starts to be traced to its history that was narrated by a local doctor to our colleagues a year ago. According to the recording of an interview, the places of our field research had never been inhabited before the early 20th century when people used these lands as pastures and cherry orchards. The urban-type settlement of Tumanyan, at that time called Dzakhidzor, was, according to the doctor, formed in Soviet times and built by captured German combatants. Serendipity has brought the jackals to the town of Tumanyan in accurately the same way: almost all our informants mentioned the relatively recent arrival of jackals in the local lands. The main dating fluctuates around the beginning of the 1990s, namely the beginning of the previously mentioned First Nagorno-Karabakh War. ‘They were afraid of the sounds of military helicopters and planes that killed them, so they migrated here’, one of the informants told us while discussing the migration of jackals from the Georgian, Azerbaijani, and Artsakh territories. That is, the jackals are perceived by the locals as newcomers, although the locals themselves are relatively newcomers as well. Both humans and jackals are placed in a recursive plane, where both groups of actors are placed in a system of hostile and distrustful attitude towards each other, perceiving one another as a Stranger and Arrived-From-Afar; probably, jackals could also perceive people as newcomers due to the fact that these lands were recently inhabited by people while the ancestors of jackals, wolves, had lived in the territories long before they were inhabited by humans.

In order to illustrate the multiplicity of Tumanyan's territory and the extensive network of alleged interaction between humans and jackals, we adopted Tănăsescu’s term of an overlapping territory that in his studies he applied to the description of the boundaries and the borders in the human-jackals interactions, ‘This is what we define as the overlapping territory: for humans, it is an area of mobility and economic importance, as well as the wide border between their home and the rest of the Delta; for jackals, it is an important area of feeding and mobility as well as burrowing’ [17]. As stated in the ‘methods’ part, we used a mental mapping of the spots of encounters with jackals so as to graphically depict the overlapping territory of human-jackal interactions:

Similar work on mapping a space was carried out by a Romanian anthropologist who we refer to: just as in his case, we imaged a map in which two phenomena are clearly observed. According to the places where humans meet jackals, which informants told us about, jackals concentrate mainly on the territorial borders of the town, surrounding those borders, both geographical and social, the latter being constituted by the areas of a specter of humans’ activities, e. g., collecting herbs and woods, hunting or fishing. The second phenomenon is rather frequent meetings with jackals in the town, especially, in places of large concentration of people (we even had the opportunity to hear the jackals very close: it turned out that they were in our garden, which, as it turned out later from a conversation with the locals, may indicate abnormally high hunger of jackals, who rarely ‘take risks’, encroaching on human food, and try to look for meals in the forest). It turns out that we are actually dealing with a space multiple which is articulated by both people and jackals (and, as will be revealed later, the mechanisms of the factory as well). In other words, several different Tumanyans exist with its geographical area being enacted and represented by a range of varied physicalities, i. e., humans, jackals, and all the other agents of co-creation and co-articulation of the space.

Hence, what comes essential for us, this very discontinuous multiplicity of physical Tumanyans gets integrated with a metaphysical continuity of a shared volume of cultural concepts and practices and of sonic flux in the array of which humans and non-humans proceed semiotic acts of communication. The sound turns out to be a metaphysically continuous space for the implementation of acts of symbolic references already when we first learn from the informants that the jackals, as mentioned earlier, migrated to Lori province from the places of warfare in the Artsakh region. The jackals developed a symbolic reference in relation to the sound of helicopters and military aircraft: the mechanical roar was associated with death, so the jackals left their habitats, moving further away from the places of the sound of military machineries. It turns out to be curious to investigate the chain of sound reference encircling when other informants point out to us that the howling of jackals is similar to the roar of a military siren. In ‘Silicon Second Nature’ [18], S. Helmreich, studying the communities of programmers and their artificial worlds, reveals the saturation of artificial digital worlds with human categories, such as gender, race, kinship (e. g., ‘motherboard’), sexuality, etc. By applying these conceptual foundations to our research, we are able to include machineries (factory and military mechanisms) in our research fully since factory and military machineries are programmed by people and become pro-human actors of semiotic interactions in the field of Tumanyan's multiple space.

In the course of our archival work in the building of the abandoned weaving factory,
we managed to find the remains of sound alarm mechanisms that used to react to violations of space, in particular, the integrity of windows and doors (see Figure 3 above & Figures 5–6 below). Also, among the various directorial orders of 1990–1993, we found reports on the establishment of a greenhouse and livestock on the territory of the factory so as to support the population of Tumanyan in ‘Cold and Dark Years’. During the research, we were not able to find any evidence of jackals entering the factory but it is known from the stories of informants that jackals tend to steal and hunt livestock from people. Accordingly, it can be assumed that the factory, as an artificial nature produced by humans, could also enter into a system of sound semiotic reference with jackals, reacting with its alarms to the invasion of jackals. In terms of E. Kohn, we can contemplate that the machineries of the factory become extracorporeal selves of humans which go ‘beyond their skins’ [19] and interact with jackals.

Factory alarms, howling jackals, human sounds – all this is one semiotic field of interaction and communication of physically discrete beings placed in one geographical area. Multiple Tumanyan is actualized through sounds produced by different actors. One of the informants Narek told us that the evening screaming of jackals, which is heard from the forests and mountains, is a roll call (‘pereklichka’) of jackal packs, each of which has its own leader. According to the interview, each jackal group occupies its permanent space of about two square kilometers – the howl becomes a marker of this territory, outlining the borders of each pack. In contrast to the human urban development and schematic mapping of Tumanyan's space, jackals inhabit, label, and articulate space mainly through sound. Like human buildings (fences, houses, gardens, etc.), jackals outline their spaces with forests and natural objects (in particular, caves, in which, according to the story of informant Armen, jackals often live in their own groups). Sidestepping, the howling of jackals can be very curiously described through the term of acousmetre by M. Chion [20], which in the context of cinematography is used by him to describe an out-of-body voice the carrier of which is never given to us visually. Tumanyan jackals happen to be present acousmatically all the time: we can hear them very clearly but we cannot see them since they, firstly, act predominantly in the night and, secondly, avoid showing themselves to humans. The words of a couple of our informants Anahit and her husband Veruish about the fear of howling jackals testifies to the acousmatic mode of existence of these animals: very rarely happening to appear in the space of visibility, they encircle the Tumanyan space with their howling and, like shifters, cut through it, starting to control the habitats of people and remaining themselves out-of-body actors of communication with people. In the language of E. Kohn, jackals' selves go beyond their skins and extend in their sound waves which come into contact with the sound spaces of people.

Those sound spaces mentioned above may be described in a perspective of acoustic territories proposed by B. Labelle, ‘Acoustic space thus brings forward a process of acoustic territorialization, in which the disintegration and reconfiguration of space maps becomes a political process. Accordingly, I’ve sought to impart meaning to the ambiguity inherent to acoustic space, as a productive form of tension. The divergent, associative networking of sound comes to provide not only points of contact and appropriation, but also meaningful challenge’ [21]. Our Romanian co-investigator of human-jackal relations, who we adhere to, raises an interesting, though more than relevant to our anthropological study, problem, ‘Through the interaction of geography, ethology, economic subsistence and human psychology, the jackal thus creates its own complicated symbolic space that it activates, for people, through sound. This raises the intriguing question of whether sound might play an analogously important role for how jackals come to know humans’ [22]. We treated this Tănăsescu’s intrigue like a challenge and, as stated in the ‘methods’ part, conducted several ‘interviews’ with jackals by imitating their screams – what we managed to observe and to hear is that jackals reacted to our screams and answered us with their voices. Later, it turned out that people use special mechanisms so as to perform a jackal howling and, as a result, determine the amount of species in the area [23] by counting the voices answering.

Elaborating on the question of how jackals may come to know humans, we appeal to the dogs’ and other domestic animals’ sound policies who act protecting themselves and humans from jackals. Narek told us that many dogs learn to scream in a jackal way so as to lure the jackals and engage them in a battle in order to reterritorialize the space of Tumanyan. In this sense, the sound of dogs really misleads the jackals in the acousmatic mode (just as in the case when we parodied the howl of jackals to which the latter also responded as to the call of their relative) and puts them in a trap situation from which they need to get out. This is really what may be called sound policies. Other informants told us stories about how their livestock, in particular, sheep, learned a special sound extracted from the banging of horns on the walls of a wooden shed, which signals to the owner that they feel danger from which they need to be protected.

Calling out for jackals pretending to be their relatives, dogs really become what may be called a shaman who traverse between worlds in a de Castro’s sense – via a special sound, a dog is able to penetrate the Other’s physical world, invade it, and recreate the space. Having taken a participant observation of a conversation of two of our informants, we heard their stories about how dogs hunt for hedgehogs – it was amusing to know that dogs use their voices to kill hedgehogs as well. ‘The dog sees the hedgehog, runs up to it, and starts running around it quickly, barking loudly until the hedgehog has a heart attack. After the hedgehog’s death, the dog makes a sound like it's whining. Then a person learns by whining that a dog has caught a hedgehog’. Not only would dogs come to be pro-human hunters but they also become mediums connecting the humans’ world with the world of jackals: the same informants told us that, when hunting with humans, dogs are used to investigate the path the human is going to follow so that to ensure that there are no jackals that may encounter on the way. If learning the presence of jackals around, dogs start barking very loudly to scare jackals. That is, we deal with a matter of sound reterritorialization again that multiplies the object of a town in the process of co-marking the territory coming to exist in a regime of multilayer worlds dogs may travel between with the help of screaming, i. e., their voices.

Dogs, jackals, sheep, cows, horses, people, factories, and military helicopters are united not only by one sonic flux but also by a metaphysical continuity expressed with the way people apply their own human cultural categories to jackals (and, probably, by jackals – in relation to humans). Anahit and Veruish told us that jackals have souls which is why they cannot hunt for them and kill them, ‘They have a soul. I can make a trap as well and kill them but why should I do that?’ From the map from Figure 4, we have observed that humans permanently reside inside
of the town borders while jackals – outside of it or around the borders and sometimes happen to raid Tumanyan. Almost all our informants would compare such raids to a military invasion and even mentally divide the jackal groups into army fronts. Jackals and humans are situated in the war frame as locals adjust traps for jackals so that to catch them or, at least, their tail as a trophy. Thus, jackals may perceive humans’ activities as military one as well – more than that, we were informed that some locals would even especially hunt for jackals so as to collect their fur and even meat eaten by some people. It turns out that not only jackals pose a threat to people and their livestock, thus reterritorializing the living space, but also people with their aggressive actions are able to transform geographical space which can become dangerous for jackals. From Narek's stories, when one of the jackals falls into a trap, the smell of jackals remains in this place and gets recognized by their relatives as a sign of danger. That is, we are dealing with sensory reference as a result of which a group of jackals develops a semiotic connection between a certain smell (as one of the informants even once told us, the energy of a jackal) and death which can threaten the jackal.

The jackal enters into hostile, military, relations not only with man, but also with domestic animals kept by man. Sheep, cows, goats, and horses, according to our informants, are the main prey of jackals. Although jackals can also feed on human garbage, often overturning bins and garbage containers and bursting cesspools. Sometimes, even the insoles of leather shoes standing in the verandas of the houses are eaten. However, in especially noble moments, when the jackal wants to hunt at least a living creature, it often attacks barns and grazing herds. Then special shepherd dogs enter into a sound and, if necessary, a physical fight with a group of jackals: trained dogs run ahead of the herd in a pack and disperse the jackals after which goats or cows can go.

Finally, jackals are often described by people through the categories of impudence and cunning. There is also a certain semantic connection between the peculiarities of the word usage of the name of the jackal in Russian and Armenian languages and the characteristics of jackals as cunning, ‘Arrogant – that's why it is a jackal’. Also, as we pointed out earlier from an interview with Veruish, the actions of jackals are placed in the category of risk and revenge: the jackal, according to our informants, acts, when entering human territory, for reasons of the degree of risk. Increased hunger also increases the degree of risk that the jackal can take on. The placement of a jackal in the category of revenge stands apart: when a person hunts a jackal with the help of loops or traps, a person's reasoning is built around the fear of revenge on the part of jackals. According to some of our other interlocutors, losses in the household and greenhouse can be associated with the revenge of jackals which they can take out on people, including for hunting in the forest, that is, for entering the territory of the jackals' habitat.

review
Viveiros de Castro's optics turned out to be very productive and heuristically useful this time too. As a result of our incredible adventurous anthropological work, we were able to identify very interesting and at the same time important things in the context of the modern ontological turn in the humanities. Humans, animals, and even technologies can exist in the same metaphysical space, activating it with the same cultural and ontological categories (as in our case: war, cunning, arrogance, competition, etc.), and also articulate this space in a continuous sonic flux which allows different agents to articulate space using sound, speech, and music.

‘I shout at it and it no longer howls’, this quote from one of our interviews with a human, who shouts at his dog which imitates the howl of a jackal, expresses a very powerful potential for the study of sound policies. Sound and voice studies have shown us the possibility of studying the interaction, territorialization, re- and deterritorialization of multiple spaces through the creation of acoustic territories that are outlined and supported by the sound of a voice, howling or the skill of issuing horns and barn walls of a certain sound signaling danger. Sheep, issuing an alarm signal with their horns, which can be compared to a factory building that is capable of making siren sounds when danger is detected is not the only surprising comparison that can be found further in similar studies of our area or any other localities with similar agent relationships.

references
[1] Viveiros de Castro, E. (1998) Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism // The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Vol. 4. No. 3. Saint Giles: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. P. 479.
[2] Geertz, C. (1973) The interpretations of cultures. NY.: Basic Books, Inc. P. 3–33.
[3] Gunko, M. (2023) Not Just Rusty Metal: What Fences in Armenia Reveal About the State // EVN Report (URL: https://evnreport.com/raw-unfiltered/not-just-rusty-metal-what-fences-in-armenia-reveal-about-the-state/). Accessed 08/05/2023.
[4] Dzenovska, D. (2020) Emptiness. Capitalism without people in the Latvian countryside // Journal of the American Ethnological Society. Vol. 47. No. 1.
[5] Abastan (URL: https://abastan.space/). Accessed 08/05/2023.
[6] Schaffer, R. Murray (1977) The soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. NY.: Knopf. P. 43.
[7] Viveiros de Castro, E. (1992) From the enemy's point of view: humanity and divinity in an Amazonian society. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. P. 215–252.
[8] Cox, Ch. (2018) Sonic flux: sound, art, and metaphysics. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.
[9] Cox. Sonic flux. P. 25.
[10] Cox. Sonic Flux. P. 27.
[11] Cox. Sonic Flux. P. 115.
[12] Kohn, E. (2013) How forests think: toward an anthropology beyond the human. Berkeley: University of California Press.
[13] Agamben, G. (1991) Language and Death: the Place of Negativity // Theory and History of Literature. Vol. 78. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. P. 48.
[14] Tănăsescu, M. & Constantinescu, Ș. (2019) How Knowledge of the Golden Jackal (Canis aureus) is Formed: Report from the Danube Delta // Environmental Values. Vol. 28. No. 6. Winwick: White Horse Press. P. 668.
[15] Mol, A. (2002) The body multiple: ontology in medical practice. Durham: Duke University Press. P. 29–52.
[16] Ingold, T. (2002) Bush Base, Forest Farm: Culture, Environment and Development. London: Routledge. P. 39–56.
[17] Tănăsescu. How Knowledge of the Golden Jackal (Canis aureus) is Formed. P. 672.
[18] Helmreich, S. (1998) Silicon second nature: culturing artificial life in a digital world. Berkeley: University of California Press.
[19] Kohn. How Forests Think. P. 105–112.
[20] Chion, M. (1999) The voice in cinema. NY.: Columbia University Press. P. 17–30.
[21] Labelle, B. (2019) Acoustic territories. Sound culture and everyday life. NY.: Bloomsbury Academic, Inc. P. xviii.
[22] Tănăsescu. How Knowledge of the Golden Jackal (Canis aureus) is Formed. P. 682.
[23] Шакалов в Сочи теперь считают по голосам (2016)// Vesti Sochi (URL: https://vesti-sochi.tv/obshhestvo/45236-shakalov-v-sochi-teper-schitajut-po-golosam). Accessed 11/05/2023.