Steven Feld has written a in teresting book, an ethnomusicology/anthropology book call “Sound and sentiment: Birds, Weeping, poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, it is a book interpreting how Kaluli people read sound and sentiment, and connecting between them with Bird songs, Weeping and poetics. Kaluli people is a small group living in the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea.
The subject of the book is reveal in the beginning: “This is an ethnographic study of sound as a Cultural system, that is, a system of symbols, among the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea”
In order to gather date of Kaluli, he move to live with Kaluli people, and acknowledgement to the Schieffelins work amongst the Kaluli.
In Chapter 1 he bring the Kaluli myth of the boy who became a bird because he repeatedly refused food by his sister. His sister weeping and cry afterward. The bird is symbol for the sadness and loss. And Steven feld give structural analysis for the myth, “food, birds, weeping”’ relationships with myth and meaning in Kaluli’ s life, he also analyze six song form in Bosavi; He sketch separated seven topic areas relevant to an understanding of” the boy who became a muni bird”;
“to you they are birds, to me they are voice in the forest.”In Chapter 2 he illustrates the Kaluli folk Ornithology, he demonstrate the category of the bird that live in Kaluli to provide meaning under the “bird voice” of different type, because “kaluli recognize and acknowledge their existence primarily through sound, and because they are the spirit reflections of deceased men and women. The Colors ,habits, genders, sounds, he use diagram to classify the bird and their relations with human weeping and son...
