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John M. D. Pohl and Claire L. Lyons (eds.), Altera Roma: Art and Empire from Mérida to Mexico (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Los Angeles, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2016), pp. xxvi + 359, $77.95, pb.

their study of philology in the design of jurisprudence, education and religious affairs. In that respect, scholarly efforts to record and categorise sound were integral to wider projects of nation-building. Yet sound is also fascinating in its capacity to escape scholarly efforts to contain it: ‘the acoustic object simultaneously names the potential of its governmentalization and the difficulty of its proper containment, its tendency to come out of bounds’ (p. ). That is, nineteenth-century scholars were in the ambivalent position of trying to marshal their understanding of the sounds around them for the better development of society, while at the same time being highly conscious of the disconnect between what they heard and what they could record using the written word. Aurality draws on a variety of historical archives, from the well-known travel diaries of Alexander von Humboldt to the unpublished and understudied papers of Colombian philologists like Jorge Isaacs (–). While the author makes good use of these sources there is a striking predominance of texts by elite white men. I would have liked to see at least some space given to female and indigenous authors. To some extent the absence of these voices is a reflection of the times: in the nineteenth century disciplines such as philology and orthography were dominated by men and were often used to uphold certain racial and gender hierarchies. Ochoa Gautier’s analysis of Candelario Obeso (–), hailed as the first Colombian Afrodescendant writer, does show how he challenged existing transcription methods to better reflect the beauty he heard in popular poetry, while at the same time seeking acceptance from the lettered elite, which tended to attribute variations in diction to mispronunciation (p. ). Yet this is an isolated case, and the study as a whole would be considerably enriched by greater reference to non-elite sources. In Chapter , for example, we learn very little about how the bogas understood the sounds they made or about their role in defining the relation between the human and the non-human; instead we are given a series of speculations on indigenous peoples’ perceptions of the connection between voice and personhood based largely on a Western corpus of anthropological literature. This book raises important questions about the role of sound and efforts to categorise it in defining the relationship between the human and the non-human, and between different social groups within Colombian society. Unfortunately, the prose style is somewhat dense and often weighed down by excessive referencing of theoretical literature, which is likely to restrict the readership to a specialist academic audience. This is a shame since the issues tackled are of great importance for understanding both the cultural dimensions of nation-building in nineteenth-century Latin America and the politics of ongoing efforts to discipline music and language: celebrating certain dimensions of orality while silencing others. Nevertheless, Aurality will undoubtedly serve the specialist researcher well and it is to be hoped that the rich lines of inquiry it opens up will receive further attention in future.