In 1927, Brazilian novelist and (ethno)musicologist Mario de Andrade undertook a journey to northern Brazil. The journey was meant to culminate in a visit to the Wari’, inhabitants of the Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous Land. When this visit proved impossible, Andrade wrote a fictional ethnography, imagining the encounter. The highs and lows of this venture appear in O turista aprendiz, a travelogue that merges memories and fiction. Rather than offering an amusing tale about the curious behavior of the Other, Andrade's fiction estranges Western norms of sonic propriety and parodies positivist ethnography.

This talk examines these issues in two parts. Part I considers Andrade’s earwitness account of a world where sound “is the ultimate sexual gesture.” Andrade’s insertion of polite society’s mores into this imaginary world opens a space to interrogate how sound governs sexual practices and hygienic imagination. In analyzing the practices dramatized in the fiction, I introduce the notion of “sonic propriety” to describe civilizing regimes that discipline bodily noise. Part II turns to the fiction’s parody of late 19th-century ethnographies, revealing how ethnographers translated Western fascination with the Other’s sexual practices into scientific knowledge. The fiction, thus, points to an ethnopornographic tradition (Sigal, Tortorici, and Whitehead 2020) in which the erotic practices of those deemed Others became objects of inquiry. By positing ethnopornography as a constitutive formation of scientia sexualis, I suggest that the latter developed not only in Europe (Foucault 1976) but also in sites of (neo)colonial extraction. Nevertheless, as Andrade’s parody indicates, these discourses were inevitably contested.