Sounding Absences. How migrants make themselves heard through sound and silence

This article re-evaluates the status of sound in accessing the individual and intimate life in the worlds of migrants. It asks for the reasons why sound is mobilized by migrants in a privileged way in order to make audible their multifaceted affective and emotional states. This article is based on ethnographic collaborative fieldwork both in South Albania in native communities affected by waves of migration and in a refugee reception center in central Germany. The article discusses as well the productive interrelation between sound and silence as two specific forms of a cultural reaction towards uprooting. The refugee camp is presented in this context as an emerging ethnographic site in constant reconfiguration a fact which requires a new form of humanist and engaged musicological research, which will in the long-term transform our practices and experiences as researchers.