Overview

An examination of sound, violence, and transnationalism in South American Football The Sounds of Aguante is an ethnographic study of the use of sound by hinchas (football fans) in the Latin American Southern Cone. Deeply affected by the neoliberal deterioration of working-class life in the region, hinchas use practices such as drumming, launching pyrotechnics, and singing contrafacta of popular music--activities that circulate transnationally through both digital and analog media--to cheer for their teams. Hinchas discuss and compete, both domestically and internationally, over which hinchada is the most musically creative, dominantly assertive, unwaveringly loyal, and sonically intense in South America. Drawing on first person accounts as well as media coverage, Luis Achondo shows that hinchas use sound to create alternative imaginaries, make their deprived social conditions audible, and sometimes to engage in deadly conflicts where violence often becomes the primary mode of resolution. This study demonstrates that fan (re)mediation has constructed a transnational public assembly that considers itself a central component of soccer, challenging the notion of sports as mere athletic events and fanbases as simple consumer bases. Examining how sound mediates necropolitical relations among fans, the book also highlights how sound functions as both a source and expression of necropower among hinchas.

Full Product Details

9780819501936

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Reviews

""Using intense ethnographic vignettes located in various Latin American countries, Achondo complicates any simple analysis of the sounds of the futbol (soccer). He illustrates how diehard fans creatively write song lyrics, destroy their vocal cords, and use stadium acoustics as well as violence to make themselves heard in a society that continues to marginalize them, both politically and economically. I won't listen to a Latin American soccer game the same way again.""--Juan Eduardo Wolf, author of Styling Blackness in Chile

Author Information

LUIS ACHONDO is an Assistant Professor at Memorial University. His work has been published in edited volumes, Twentieth-Century Music, Journal of the Society for American Music, Ethnomusicology Forum, Soccer and Society, Sound Studies, Journal of Musicological Research, and Resonancias. He was also awarded the Society for Ethnomusicology's James T. Koetting Prize and LACSEM Prize.

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