Zawawa : the sound of sugar cane in the wind
- Submitting institution
-
The University of Manchester
: B - Social Anthropology
- Unit of assessment
- 22 - Anthropology and Development Studies : B - Social Anthropology
- Output identifier
- 84792739
- Type
- Q - Digital or visual media
- Publisher
- -
- Month
- July
- Year
- 2017
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
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A - SoSS
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The output is a 50-minute experimental film comprising sound recordings, contemporary and archive film, and text taken from interviews during fieldwork in Okinawa, Japan. The contextual information provided in the accompanying PDF is: an explanatory text explaining the film’s rationale, production, methodology and dissemination; links to the film and a Japanese TV news feature about the film; a Guardian newspaper article; and a testimonial from an Okinawan government official. The film uses the Okinawan onomatopoeic word Zawawa as a departure point to explore the capacities of the environmental sounds to act as a felt memory of the Pacific war and its post-war aftermath for Okinawans. The research process was led by these questions: how does sound make the memory of a place? How do people hear the sounds of the place they live in against an experience of trauma and remember sounds that may no longer be present in that environment? The research aimed to show how sound associated with the conflict and aftermath of the 1945 Battle of Okinawa moves and settles in the bodies of listeners and in the environment, operating as the sense of a place over time. The film’s research findings are that the sonic environment of Okinawa’s military bases, which has mostly been conceived in terms of US-Okinawa-Japan conflicts over island sovereignty and the capacity of communities to endure and contest the effects of noise on health and habitus, needs to take account of the natural sounds and individual experiences of the Okinawan soundscape. These natural sounds can have positive as well as negative associations. Negatively, natural sounds can result in sonic experiences of dissociation from present situations to remembering troubling episodes from the 1945 Pacific war and the post-war period. Positively, natural sounds convey a sense of place that can have cultural value.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
