You Might Not Notice It. Sound Ethnography of a Blind Person Circulating in the City of Buenos Aires

• Facundo Petit

This article explores the role of sound and listening in the everyday experience of transiting the urban space from blindness. For this, an ethnography is presented in which sound registrations, images and written anthropological interpretations, produced during a walk with a blind person, are mixed. Thus, the relationship between urban experience, the materiality of the city, and the movements carried out from blind sensoriality are addressed, proposing the possibility that urban studies incorporate an alternative ethnographic sensibility to all that is visual. The basis of this paper is a brief contextualization of the investigation, it continues with a conceptualization on the methodology of the sound ethnography, and then opens the doors to analysis of the blind sensorialities in urban movement and the relationship between the State, city and blindness in the production of an accessible city.

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This text analyzes how turning of foods into heritage is a social process that produces indigeneity via food activism. It presents the case of the Enlace Group for the Promotion of Amaranth in Mexico (Grupo Enlace para la Promoción del Amaranto en México) a player in the argument over food sovereignty, which propels the production, transformation and consumption of this grain. It illustrates its food events, organizational practices and the narratives that provided amaranth with a series of values related to its place in the Mesoamerican diet, which, updated as indigenous and ancestral food, helped it become known as an intangible heritage of Mexico City (CDMX). We display the relevance of this type of activism for the production of indigeneity in the scope of food heritage.

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The purpose behind this article is to analyze the way in which the diversity of beliefs was defined and rebuilt in a cycle organized by a public cultural center in the city of Buenos Aires. For this, we will study the uses of the category of belief and the spiritual references created by participating state agents, artists and religious and spiritual specialists. We ask ourselves the definitions of all that is religious, spiritual and the diversity of beliefs that move outside institutions traditionally linked to religion. Likewise, we set out to show, using a specific case, the way in which the concern over diversity in the design of Latin American cultural public policies can coexist with the selection of specific cultural expressions which, in this case, represent only a part of the existing religious diversity. The data were built from a qualitative strategy that included participatory observations, in-depth interviews and the analysis of documents.

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