In Chapter Two, I track anthropology’s colonial legacy in the development of ethnography, a methodology initially designed to make the practices of the Other legible to the West by translating embodiment and orality into scholarly writing. I argue that when the voice is reduced to a conceptual abstraction or a metaphor through the visualist and textualist theoretical frameworks of scriptocentrism, what gets lost in translation is the sonorous and sensuous materiality of vocality.

To probe what philosopher Adriana Cavarero calls the devocalization of logos, I invite the reader to embark on an imaginary visit to ancient Greece and take part in a performative ethnographic encounter with Ion, a skilled rhapsodist and vocal expert whom Plato attempts to silence in his text. Building on Cavarero’s cogent reassessment of Jacques Derrida’s influential critique of voice and presence, I examine possible implications for research on vocality and suggest that Roland Barthes’s passionate engagement with vocal music entices us to delight in the non-discursive, sensory experience of vocality beyond the tyranny of signification.

I further contend that becoming immersed in the material affective efficacy of vocality summoned by Antonin Artaud’s alchemical theatre, which mobilizes the transformative power of breath, energy, and vibration, can provide important insights into his visionary attempt to emancipate performance from the dominance of speech/text in support of the non-representational intensification of presence. This chapter culminates with Artaud’s trip to Mexico, a journey in search of healing that he evokes in a testimony foregrounding the agential role of sound, music, and song as affective material forces within the peyote ceremonial process which he claims he experienced when visiting the Tarahumara.