UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines select sounds made and heard in post-coup Myanmar, that is, sounds made and heard in Myanmar since February 2021. In the context of a near-total media blockade, and the internal displacement of an estimated 1.5 million people, the stakes of the dissertation are high. The dissertation shows how a vernacular politics of reproduction informs sonic activity—ranging from popular music to acts of sonic dissent. In Chapter One, “Between the Beats,” I draw on an archive of sources collected through virtual ethnography, including sound art, social media posts, journalistic sources, and fundraising materials, to show how solidarity can be made through and heard in thanbone hti, a practice of banging on metal pots, pans, buckets, and tins with metal utensils. Chapter Two, “Blood and Bonds,” focuses on the forms of relationality that 1988 copy thachin-as-protest-song “Kabar Ma Kyay Bu” and Rap Against Junta’s 2022 track, “Blood” produce, drawing on blood as a powerful rhetorical device that forges links between generations of activists, musical cover versions, and a global audience. Chapter Three, “Recording Disappearance,” marks a shift towards thinking about kinship in the wake of absence and loss. The tracks on Operation Hanoi Hannah’s (an anonymous activist collective) second album Redemption, present a history of violence through mothers’ and sons’ voices that speak of the visceral experience of separation. Chapter Four, “Participatory Audio Recording’s Potential,” finally, recounts my own ethnographic experience in developing and implementing a research protocol wherein participants’ audio collages, sound maps, and field recordings—and their explanations of that work—inform my own anthropological conceptions of disconnected kinship. The phrase “sonic kinship,” as per the dissertation’s title, refers to those kinds of meaningful relationships between beings and sounds that are produced through the acts of producing or perceiving sound. Sonic kinship arises in the act of apprehending sound together, the perception of shared material or substance within songs and sounds, and practices of care directed towards sonic products or performed through sonic actions, all of which build relationships between humans, sounds, music, the environment, and other beings. By thinking through the stakes of sound reproduction via these materials, this dissertation shows how, far from being ephemeral under post-coup conditions in Myanmar, sounds persist as a durable means for preserving and reproducing kin relations.