What Voice Carries

From the sonic textures that reality television prize as unique, to literary metaphors through which we understand voice as a marker of agency and selfhood, the voice demands an extraordinary investment of labor, care, and cultivation to produce and sustain. Drawing on linguistic Anthropology, musicology, and technology studies, we will examine the acoustic properties that make a voice recognizable, the bodily techniques through which speakers learn to project themselves, and the socio-political consequences of whose voice is legible. Moving away from the familiar focus on what words mean and what speakers intend, we turn instead to the form and texture of voice itself, asking: what does it take to have a voice, and what does it take to be heard?



Skylar Tiange Kaat is a doctoral candidate in the Anthropology and Education program at Teachers College,Columbia University. Their dissertation draws on twelve months of ethnographic and oral history research conducted in Inner Mongolia, China, with ethnic Mongolian Chinese who are learning Traditional Mongolian —— a language they never had the opportunity to learn earlier in their lives. Skylar's work sits at the intersection of minority language vitality and aging in the context of China by asking how a minority language can still be a part of people's lives and culture even if it is not through speaking and daily use.