Hearing Heat: An Anthropology of Sound for the Anthropocene

Heat turns cicadas on, sparking an acoustic presence that far exceeds their small size. About the Lecture With over 3,000 species worldwide, these insects act as living thermometers. Much like bells, car horns, or birdsong, their loud choruses have long shaped how humans perceive time, space, and the seasons. In an age marked by both climate anxiety and widespread climate denial, this lecture asks how listening to cicadas might offer new ways to understand environmental change. As natural markers of planetary heat, cicadas carry a deep archive of traditional ecological knowledge, mythology, literature, and art. Drawing on human relationships with cicadas in Papua New Guinea, Japan, and Europe, this talk explores how sound can help us navigate a warming world. About the Speaker Steven Feld is an anthropologist, filmmaker, musician/sound artist, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of New Mexico, and director of VoxLox Media. His academic work concerns the anthropology of sound and acoustemology. Recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1991, Feld also received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2003. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994, and of The British Academy in 2024. About the Chair Fiona Magowan is Professor of Anthropology and has published extensively on the analysis of conflict and the arts, sound, music and emotion in Aboriginal Australia, as well as on sex and gender in anthropology and ethnomusicology. She is the author or editor of eight books including Sounding Conflict: From Resistance to Reconciliation (2023 co-edited), Christianity, Conflict and Renewal in Australia and the Pacific (2016 co-edited), Performing Gender, Place and Emotion: Global Perspectives (2013 co-edited), The Anthropology of Sex (2010 co-authored) and Melodies of Mourning: Music and Emotion in Northern Australia (2007), as well as more than fifty chapters and journal articles. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. About the British Academy Delivered by the most outstanding academics in the UK and beyond, the British Academy’s flagship Lecture programme showcases the very best scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. This lecture is part of the prestigious Radcliffe-Brown Lectures in Social Anthropology, established by the British Academy and the Association of Social Anthropologists, and named after the Association’s first President, A R Radcliffe-Brown FBA. The lecture was first delivered in 1972.