Hearing and Belonging — On Sounds, Faiths, and Laws

‘Belonging’ is a frontier-concept in the field of present-day cultural studies on cities and religion. Although the idea of ‘belonging’ has been considered as central since the early development of city studies — for instance in Human Communities by Robert E. Park (1952) and in the other ground-breaking contributions of the Chicago ‘urban ethnographers’ —, both social researchers and policy makers currently believe that the concepts of ‘sense of belonging’ and ‘feeling of belonging’ urgently require further investigation. The paper deals with the issue of religious belonging in contemporary multicultural cities from the point of view of a sensuous semio-geography. ‘Sensuous semio-geography’ is an expression modeled after the title, and the contents, of Peter Stoller’s book Sensuous Scholarship (1997), which has inspired the most interesting trends in the socio-ethnography of multicultural cities in recent years. The main idea of sensuous semio-geography is to seek to understand how a sense/feeling of religious belonging is articulated not only through visual signs (for instance, the adoption of a certain architectural style for new places of worship, as well as the adoption of a certain style of religious clothing for believers), but also through signs that involve other senses. The paper focuses, in particular, on sounds: what is the phenomenology of soundscapes in present-day ‘Western’ multicultural cities? How does it compare with the phenomenology of ‘non-Western’ or ‘non-multicultural’ cities? Are such soundscapes multi-religious, mono-religious, or a space of acoustic laïcité? How do ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ sounds intertwine in the soundscapes of contemporary multicultural cities? What tensions arise in the management of public urban soundscapes? How do bureaucratic, administrative, and legal frameworks seek to regulate these tensions?