Where Are the DJs?

Imagine entering a listening session with anthropologists. It is hosted at a big venue with several hazy rooms. On a regular night, a dense, dimly visible crowd that faces the sound system would hold space for the low-frequency sounds of kick drums. However, on this occasion the beat is absent as the DJ takes a different pathway. The DJ aspires to make their research heard, in conversation with the listeners and sounds. Some spectators stand and face the decks; others lean back on pillows and intentionally close their eyes as they listen to the mix emerging from pointed speakers across the room. Ethnographic samplings from field recordings are mediated through digital turntables to a mixing console. The spectators gather, listen, and share in attunement to the carefully selected, ordered, and sequenced ethnographic materials. Recordings blend like words in a narrated text.

In the collective attunement to mixing, people center the sense of hearing to mutually explore and gain knowledge with the attendees and the DJ. “DJ Scholarship” (coined by Lynnée Denise in 2013) is not simply academic, but also experiential and embodied. In this piece, I demonstrate how DJ Scholarship can enrich ethnographic understanding through the example of my scholarship with listeners and reciters of Islamic poetry in Chad. I move beyond the ideas of experiential epistemology, or learning by doing, and phenomenology, or experiencing by embodying, to assist in making sense of social relations. How can we further anthropological knowledge by tuning in to who is making sound, the speed of actions, the environment, and the timing of sonorities? It is through the act of listening that people can reach profound understanding of societies. Pauline Oliveros introduced the practice of Deep Listening in “Sonic Meditations” (1971). She differentiated between involuntary hearing and voluntary listening to address how listening reveals details and a more profound awareness of the environment. Oliveros’s participatory performances aimed to create collective presence and “community growth”¹. What role can a Deep Listening practice play in enhancing anthropology’s participatory methods? How can aural participation in an ethnographic DJ performance engage audiences as collaborators?

Anthropologist Steven Feld coined the term “acoustemology”—acoustic epistemology—to account for the knowledges that hearing, editing, and theorizing sound produces (Feld 2015). Sonic ethnographers argue that sound is a valuable method of representation. It is as the field’s pioneer Feld questioned in an interview: “What about ethnographies which are tape recordings?” (Lane and Carlyle 2013, 208) Inspired by the mixtape, “‘The People Who Keep on Going’: A Listening Party, Vol. I” that accompanies Redmond and Phillips’s chapter in The Futures of Black Radicalism (2017) and the experimentalism in Katherine Dunham’s embodied ethnographic dancing performances described by Elizabeth Chin (2014), I imagine a listening session with DJing anthropologists to be a playful possibility to perform anthropological knowledge. The performance set-up has the potential to encourage encounters with collaborators outside the discipline, which may further the production of knowledge. When I envision the opening vignette, it is surreal as a fever dream, yet it is a radical and liberating imagination of anthropology’s potential.

DJ sets—whether ambient or club-oriented or ethnographic—are the product of collective desire and power dynamics between the performer and the audience. The performer aims to engage the crowd with their selections, pleasing or challenging the listeners to be inspired by the music. But audiences are no less powerful: They, too, can direct the performance through bodily dialogue. Being a DJ is historically and culturally situated. DJs create sonic narratives that frequently cross cultural boundaries through elements of rhythm, texture, key, and tempo. The discipline uses technological devices like mixers, turntables, microphones, and CDJs (Compact Disc Jockeys) and their sound-making and -sharing capacities to sense in different ways.

Like ethnography, DJing is a discipline that brings people together and asks audiences to temporarily let go of a fast-paced world. Historically, both anthropologists and DJs address the complex politics from which their findings and selections emerge—with African Americans and Caribbean Americans having laid the foundations of DJing as an art form (Katz 2012). What the domains moreover share is attention to improvisation. Both DJs’ and anthropologists’ emphasis on collaboration—between audience and performer or interlocutors and anthropologist—require that the involved be responsive to the unexpected. But where DJ sets are performance oriented, aiming to bring music, speech, and gestures alive, ethnography is discursive, seeking to recognize and produce forms of knowledge. What emerges, then, when DJing spills over into ethnography?

Sounding Muslim Networks

In February 2025 I began primary fieldwork in Chad. The focus of my dissertation is Muslim networks of the sub-ethnic group of Fulani Maré, who are based in the Chad Basin. I specifically work with women who have Qur’anic schools (khalwa) in N’Djamena and Chad’s southern region Logone Occidental. The group that I was most involved with during my eleven-month fieldwork period was the majmu‘a al-jumu‘a (literally “the Friday group”). They organized weekly Friday congregation ceremonies across and outside of N’Djamena. The study calls attention to changing assemblages of relations that disarrange and rearrange in the context of conflict, by understanding women’s responses to uncertainty and insecurity. Furthermore, the research project addresses the social connections arising from the usage of social media that link and transform notions of place and ideology among Muslims of the Tijani brotherhood in the Sahel. The aim is to map the nodes in “Muslim networks.” There is a tendency to think of networks in visual terms, with nodes connected through edges drawn out in maps or with computational network visualization. Instead of visualizing networks, I tried to understand them through sound, as every place where the majmu‘a al-jumu‘a and I went housed us in different acoustic environments. I wanted to capture the rhythms of the atmospheres in N’Djamena, where each node had its sonic particularities. With a Zoom H5 recorder locked in my hand, I attended Qur’anic schools, road trips, and religious ceremonies.

The field recording of folk songs, rituals, and ceremonies has a long tradition in ethnography (Bates 2019). Feld (1982) expanded those traditions by grasping how people listen and describe their sounded lifeworlds. In conversation with work by media anthropologists who emphasize the importance of the senses (Waltorp 2021), I investigated mediated sounds through the infrastructures of smartphones and their relationship to immediate environments.

Religious Crossroads

In whatever field site I found myself, people negotiated their ethical religious ideals by listening to madiḥ mostly written by the Senegalese Islamic scholar and saint Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse (1900–1975). Madiḥ is a panegyric genre of poetry. Its performance is a marker of piety, as the sounds are a sign of people’s effort to study Sufist sources. The perfection of the performance is an art. Knowing the lyrics by heart is one thing; pitching the poem with emotional expression is another. Men and women take years to practice the texts, but some have the luck to be born with an excellent voice. Well-trained reciters are frequently solicited to perform at religious ceremonies, Friday litanies, and even weddings and funerals. During these events, listeners recorded the madiḥ that aspiring and amateur reciters performed. In these moments of collective listening and chanting, groups of five up to hundreds memorized Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse. The teacher of the majmu‘a al-jumu‘a told me that by listening to madiḥ Muslims can access divine secrets of Niasse. Wherever women listened to eulogies for the Prophet Muhammad, they learned poems by heart and attended to a longing to find closeness to God. The practice of memorization allowed for a collective, embodied experience of Islam, while also giving significance to saints and religious leaders across the Sahel.

Madiḥ reciters had particular power, as their voices enchanted listeners and provided income and gifts. Listeners put faith in these reciting higher powers, as they gave in to their voices and memorization wisdom. At the same time, those listeners gained agency by chanting along and sharing sound resources. As Umi Hsu argues: “Sounds can be a medium of power for individuals to assert their agency.” (2018, 140) After the events, women shared the recorded mp3 or mp4 files through applications like Xender, WhatsApp, or TikTok. Women and young girls who did not attend the many mawalid an-nabi (birthday ceremonies of the Prophet Muhammad), diploma ceremonies, or Friday litanies around the city could still attend through auditive smartphone circulations. Sounds traveled and came to live a life of their own. The sonorities circulated between digital space and physical place, as Chadian Muslims amplified the newly acquired files on their mobile phones at home and cared for the sonic religious objects by attentively saving the files in the mobile archive, on USBs, or by making a playlist.

I tuned into smartphones and found them to be a religious crossroads for listeners. The entanglement between online and offline spheres allowed women to participate in a wide network of Muslims. At home alone or when students visited each other or their teachers, they listened to madiḥ chanters hailing from Chad, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Senegal. As such, listening had significance in the making of a trans-Sahelian network.

During fieldwork I became part of the cadence of file sharing. Women encouraged me to use my recorder and lay it in front of the performer next to piles of mobile phones of the Tekno brand and smartphones, which also served as recording devices. Since I had quality sound and video equipment, teachers and students began inviting me to co-produce TikToks and audiovisual documentation with them. Seyda Fatime, a 38-year-old Fulani woman and a meritorious and knowledgeable Muslim, made me responsible for taking photographs and recordings during her mawlid. She also asked me to record and post videos on her TikTok account, where she had hundreds of thousands of followers. While I gained this trusted position as a recorder for a famous seyda, my research also got recognition. Additionally, the mutual interest of my interlocutors and myself in the poetry, and our wish to record these expressions, strengthened relationships in the field. We worked together, each with our own objectives.

The Semiotics of Mixing

With over ten years of experience as a club and radio DJ, I wanted to bring performance into my academic practice. I felt motivated to incorporate narrative techniques I had learned from playing, like tempo transitions, making room for silences, and correlating beginnings to ends. I also wanted to use mixing technology to expand ethnographic outputs. So, just after finishing preliminary fieldwork I experimented with a lecture-style DJ set during an interdisciplinary art event in 2024 in the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, the Netherlands. I mixed ambient and pop songs from my DJ collection with snippets of field recordings from research I had conducted among Muslims of the Tijani brotherhood in Chad. I layered these with theoretical interpretations and discussions of my ethnographic work and stories about the curated music, with the aim to elaborate on the notion of audio file sharing. I listened, selected, organized, looped, and cut short the tracks in such a way that the texts I discussed contextualized the ethnographic material and functioned as transitions from music to field recordings. Reflecting on this first trial, I figured the emphasis was mostly on the musical selections and theory. The intension was to rework the performance upon returning from fieldwork in 2025 by making audible the lived realities of women I worked with.

CDJs and a mixing panel are not scientific instruments, but they can be freed from their conventional use to tell an ethnographic story. In the selection and mixing process, the researcher’s interpretation of culture becomes audible. I decided to put a mixer between field recordings to channel and fade them into a narrative, layered with my voice as the writer of a co-authored experience. Sounds are traces of social life and must be interpreted with respect to a particular culture. Like fieldnotes, field recordings are empirical materials that deserve to be analyzed and mediated in ways that consider sonority as epistemology. The transcription of sound (Bauer & Gaskell 2000) and coding of the transcription is one avenue to examine and analyze recordings. This helps to uncover recurring themes and shifting perceptions, as well as who produces sounds, why, when, and for how long. The experimental process of selecting, editing, and organizing materials with multi-track audio editing programs helps to digest a sounded world and capture a qualitative and lived experience of environments. Mixing, then, is an additional layer to think through the material and stitch sounds together like text in a word document. This experimental approach allows for an open-ended listening experience, wherein the audience moves from preconceived assumptions to nuanced insights. Mixing ethnographic material encourages audiences to ask critical questions and be attentive to the ways in which sounds inform us about what it means to be human and part of society. The combination of sounds create meaning, like a semiotics of mixing.

In October 2025, I presented the reworked performance at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum as part of the multimodal ethnography exhibition Out of Focus during the conference of the German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology. This time, the performance consisted solely of field recordings and thoughts around file sharing and digitization in the Chadian context. During the performance, I sat among the audience holding a smartphone in my hand, seeking to engage the crowd in immersive moments of listening to madiḥ and to teach them about the sonic practices through which Chadian women define belonging and identity in relation to a transregional community of Muslims.

Tuning into the network allowed listeners to hear how particular sounds travel in the physical and digital world. For example, in Sound 3, Amina, a student of Seyda Fatime, told me: “People from Nigeria, Cameroon, and elsewhere see her on TikTok and know she is the female leader of madiḥ in Chad.” Dozens of women have sought after and found Seyda Fatime in her hometown because of the circulation of audio and video recordings in WhatsApp groups and on multiple TikTok accounts. File sharing on TikTok was a connector that transcended the online/offline distinction, as the sharing of files directly changed the way Seyda Fatime lived her life. As Seyda travelled to rural and urban areas and the virtual spaces of WhatsApp and TikTok, she strengthened her local, as well as regional, network of support.

Inspired by a phenomenological anthropological argument that “to be listening is to always be on the edge of meaning” (Nancy (2002) 2007, 7), my interpretation is that that raw sensory feeling of sound fosters a spatial, meaningful experience. Indeed, Muslim women found meaning in online participation in file sharing and listening practices. The mixing ethnography lays bare that the majmu‘a al-jumu‘a and their friends and relatives listen to madiḥ out of love for the Islamic panegyric poetry and the fostering of closeness to God and the Prophet Muhammad.

With multimodal anthropology on the rise, I call upon the discipline to substantiate experimental modes of production and publication. The integration of performance and Deep Listening practices demands a suspension of value judgments around textual disciplinary standards, in order to allow ourselves, our collaborators, and our audiences to immerse ourselves in the senses of the people we live with. Mixing amplifies social realities by revealing the sonic dimensions of social life, power dynamics, and changing surroundings. For scholarly and non-scholarly audiences to become attentive listeners, who are attuned to bodily sensation, we need to take seriously the idea of a Deep Listening session. The circles of Chadian women who collectively listen online, at events and in homes, shows that sound does not stick to borders; it travels. Tuning into this mobility gives an empirically more accurate view of the constant shifts in cultural exchange. Moreover, fieldwork taught me that attentiveness to listening and recording practices can offer a key to knowing others and the pluralism of their activities as they negotiate their engagement or withdrawal from sounds. A mixing ethnography has the potential to bring these sonic tensions in conversation, with the crossfader as its talking stick.

Original Tracklist

1. Walking with Majmu‘a al-Jumu‘a
2. Tekno
3. Bus Ride out of Town
4. Saying Goodbye
5. The Place of Ummina
6. Uninterrupted Rituals
7. Passing On the Files
8. A Worldwide Audience
9. Mawlid an-Nabi