To pierce through the overwhelming soundscape of Oaxaca, Mexico’s garbage dump, the local workers’ union, Los Pepenadores, developed a system of communicative whistle cadences. As frontline recyclers from 1980 to 2022, they navigated and sifted through the materials that arrived in the dump, collecting items to sell for their livelihood. This system of cadences—practiced and understood by all 130 union members—served as an intergenerational, union-wide, communicative tactic. Drawing on my fieldwork data and interviews, I argue that these whistling cadences were highly effective due to union members’ virtuosic listening and sound-making daily practices, their deep communal bonds, and their shared ancestral heritage as Zapotec descendants. I situate my findings within scholarship on deep and active listening (Oliveros 2005; Kapchan 2017), community sound and music practices (Higgins 2012), and linguistic assertions of tonal nuance present among Spanish-speaking Zapotec descendants (Sicoli 2015). This paper presents Los Pepenadores as a case study of how a deeply bonded community, navigating a hazardous environment, developed and sustained a sophisticated communication system. Their whistling cadences not only ensured safety and facilitated financial gain but also functioned as a cultural and social practice that reinforced their communal bond and collective identity. By framing these cadences within the union’s 42-year working history in the dump, I demonstrate how this sound-making system sustained and reinforced this community’s survival, solidarity, and cultural preservation.

Martyrdom has become a central theme in Azerbaijani music in the aftermath of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh war (27 September 2020 – 10 November 2020). Relying on ethnographic research, comprised of interviews with war veterans and mourners, I investigate how local people experience the idea of martyrdom through music. I focus on the composition “bayati shiraz” sung by Tajir Shahmalioglu, which has become the main soundtrack of war and the ongoing post-Soviet conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Juxtaposing recent discussions of voice as liminal, affective, and relational (Eisenlohr 2018; Feldman 2015; Meizel 2020) with frameworks from the anthropology of death (Engelke 2019), I argue that the efficacy of this composition lies in the qualities of its singer’s voice to enact emotional work necessary to make sense of death. In addition to the patriotic poetic text used in “bayati shiraz,” the specific timbre of a child’s voice with its high melismatic register serves as a powerful symbol of the contested region, poignantly evoking themes of loss and sacrifice. I discuss how this voice gives a sense of continuity, as it transcends boundaries of time, space, as well as physical and spiritual realms, providing a chronotope (Bakhtin 1981) to encounter martyrs in one's imagination and understand loss as sacrifice for the nation united in suffering. The voice, in other words, performs a type of transaction and exchange, marking martyrdom as “good death” that is essential to the nation’s regeneration.

Though separated by national borders, the sovereign country of Mongolia and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in northern China share urtyn duu or long-song as common cultural heritage. Among Mongol communities in both Mongolia and Inner Mongolia, the tradition of long-song is intrinsically connected with nature: the songs illustrate the landscapes, animals, nomadic lifestyle habits, and local legends of specific regions through their melodies, vocal techniques, and lyrics. Mongol clans historically cycled their migratory patterns around a particular region, and thus long-songs–which illustrate a sonic map– have become an avenue for singers to perform ethnic and regional identity.

In this paper, I argue that because of long-song’s deep connection to place, Mongols from both Mongolia and Inner Mongolia are able to use the tradition to navigate their complex regional identities and maintain a connection to a nomadic past, present, and future in the face of colonization and loss of traditional culture. I analyze the intrinsic relationship between long-song and place before highlighting two long-term case studies of two contemporary professional long-song singers with contrasting backgrounds: B. Nomin Erdene, a Khalkh singer from Bayankhongor, Mongolia who currently resides in Ulaanbaatar, and Amgalan, a Khorchin singer from Inner Mongolia who primarily works in Beijing. I explore the two singers’ repertoire, training, and personal thoughts, examining how they incorporate modernity into long-song traditions to perform and negotiate Mongol identity. Finally, I contend that professional singers use staged long-song to maintain a connection to nomadic culture and navigate their shifting identities across different audiences.