The Sounds of Aguante: Sonic (Anti)Sociality, Transnationalism, and Violent Conflict in the Soccer Culture of the Southern Cone

Achondo Parra, Luis Alberto

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Year:: 2021
Contributor:: Achondo Parra, Luis Alberto (creator); Tucker, Joshua (Advisor); Miller, Kiri (Reader); Perlman, Marc (Reader); Herrera, Eduardo (Reader); Brown University. Department of Music (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Violence; Transnationalism; Ethnomusicology; sound studies; sociality; Conflict; Musicology; Soccer
Extent:: xii, 244 p.

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Abstract:: Drawing on fieldwork in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, this dissertation examines how sound mediates (anti)social and translocal relations in the soccer culture of Latin America’s Southern Cone. Soccer fans belong to the working-class communities that have been most viscerally affected by the neoliberal deterioration of proletarian life in the region. These marginalized subjects rely on a shared set of transnationally circulating practices to create alternative cosmopolitan imaginaries amid alienation, commodification, and inequality. Through sonic practices ranging from drumming to launching pyrotechnics to singing soccer chants, fans not only cheer for their teams but also foster community bonds, express dissent, accrue honor and prestige, and compete over which fanbase is the most creative and intense one in the Southern Cone. But although these sounds have empowered them, their hostile vocalizations, aggressive body movements, and disruptive chants—filled with death threats, stories of combat, and discriminatory slurs—have also radicalized subjectivities, contributed to violence, glorified criminality, and eroded social bonds with peers and rivals. This dissertation intervenes in larger humanistic and social scientific conversations about the sociality of music by arguing that sound practice must be conceptualized as simultaneously social and anti-social in contexts of violent conflict. Sound practice has fostered an alternative mode of sociality with both productive and destructive effects. Sound functions as a source and expression of power among fans: a viscerally-felt, subject-disorienting force capable of affecting other entities, and an exercise of agency within larger disciplinary forces. This research thus theorizes the co-constitution, co-existence, and co-organization of sonic production and destruction in contexts of violent conflict. This dissertation also contributes to writings on transnationalism by contending that the circulation of fan practice functions as a culture-making process that has fostered cosmopolitan identities and subjectivities. Music scholars have discussed music’s affordances to gather disparate subjects around shared sonic practices. This study intervenes in these conversations by arguing that sounded expressions of violence and anti-sociality can also allow subalterns to participate in transnational circuits of communication and configure cosmopolitan formations.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2021

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Citation

Achondo Parra, Luis Alberto, "The Sounds of Aguante: Sonic (Anti)Sociality, Transnationalism, and Violent Conflict in the Soccer Culture of the Southern Cone" (2021). Music Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:8t4d7k99/

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Music Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Music department.
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