This Friday, the 24th, a new talk in the Listening and Posthumanism series will be held, featuring Bolivian anthropologist Bernardo Rozo, director of the Ontological and Multispecies Studies Laboratory (ONTOlab/multiESP-IIAA). He holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology (UFBA, Brazil – FAPESB and CNPQ scholarships), a Master’s degree in Social Sciences (Universidad de la Cordillera), and over 20 years of documentary and field research experience in the Highlands and Lowlands of Bolivia (and other South American countries). Entitled “Overwhelming Perception: Ways of Educating Our Attention from Ritual Experience,” the talk addresses listening as a relational and situated process and relates it to specific processes of social (in)justice that have occurred and continue to exist in Latin America.

Bernardo Rozo advances: “From my experience, I have sustained affective and communicative encounters with non-human and more-than-human beings. Therefore, I have rethought—and inevitably, resented—key issues that gradually stir up and sediment ideas that could be useful for possible practical and conceptual expansions of ritual and music, from other perspectives. Indeed, these are efforts at (re)conceptualization that resonate with efforts at (re)integration of issues that, it seems, have been artificially separated by hegemonic ways of thinking. In this way, I propose rethinking ritual as a form of attentional education for life, based on multiscalar aurality, improvisation, and reversive perception. I want to believe that exercises like this can contribute to reflecting on the place that music and ritual occupy, beyond any essentialist cultural commitment, and to imagining new practices and commitments to sound-musical research these days.”

This series of talks is organized by the Music, Sound, and Listening Research Center (NIMSE) of Fondecyt (fund 11240463), “From Sound to Listening: Theories and Methods in Aurality Studies.” The project is directed by CMUS research associate Natalia Bieletto.

Bernardo Rozo: “Overwhelming perception. Ways to educate our attention through ritual experience”
Friday, October 24, 2025, from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. (GMT -3)
Meeting Room, CIAH (Universidad Mayor, Av. Portugal 351)
Online streaming link on the CMUS’ Youtube channel