Podcast Summary:

New Books Network — Interview with Birgit Abels and Patrik Eisenlohr on "Atmospheric Knowledge: Environmentality, Latency, and Sonic Multimodality" (U California Press, 2025)
Host: Khadija
Date: November 7, 2025

Episode Overview

In this intellectual and wide-ranging conversation, host Khadija interviews Birgit Abels and Patrik Eisenlohr on their co-authored open-access book, Atmospheric Knowledge: Environmentality, Latency, and Sonic Multimodality. The book explores the ways in which sensory experiences—especially sonic ones—form alternative and often overlooked types of knowledge. Drawing from ethnographic research in the Pacific Islands, Mauritius, and Mumbai, the authors interrogate how sound, ritual, and multisensory practices shape our embodied understanding of environments, time, community, and belonging, especially as these concepts relate to indigeneity and religious life.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introducing “Atmospheric Knowledge”

• The Book’s Central Aim
  • An interdisciplinary investigation of “felt bodily knowledge” and how sensory practices, chiefly sonic, generate forms of understanding beyond language.
    • “It’s really about ethnographic cases...about the ways in which sound-based practices establish a relationship to our environments and lead to a particular form of knowledge that is non-verbal, pre-verbal, and holistically felt bodily.” — Patrik Eisenlohr [02:47]
  • Explores dialogues between different epistemologies: the academic and the lived, indigenous and scientific.
    • “Modes of knowledge, ways of knowing, can enter dialogue and enter conversations themselves...the meeting of epistemologies of different kinds...” — Birgit Abels [03:55]

2. Why “Atmosphere”? (Concept & Modality)

• Inspired by neo-phenomenology, especially through fieldwork in Micronesia, Abels highlights that “atmospheric knowledge” is a kind of understanding neglected by dominant colonial epistemologies but central to many indigenous worldviews.
  • “Atmospheric knowledge...extends into the felt body, opening up felt bodily ways of knowing...accommodated beyond those purely reflective, discourse-oriented ways.” — Birgit Abels [05:26]
• Eisenlohr emphasizes atmosphere’s universality as a precondition for perceiving the world, preceding and shaping reflective thought:
  • “Atmospheres are actually something quite fundamental and absolutely inescapable. They precondition what surrounds us and give us a kind of feel of something before we can verbalize it.” — Patrik Eisenlohr [07:17]

3. Atmosphere and Time (Chapter 1)

• The authors relate atmosphere to the “temporality of latency”—a sense of something about-to-happen, a future-oriented hunch experienced somatically before articulation.
  • “Atmospheres are tied to a temporality of latency...about a holistic, felt bodily sensation of something that is still meaningful but diffuse and may actually come about.” — Patrik Eisenlohr [09:04]

4. Sonic Atmospheres in Religious Practices (Chapter 2)

• Eisenlohr’s research on Nath (devotional poetry) recitation in Mauritius foregrounds the importance of voice and sonic qualities over textual or discursive authenticity:
  • “My friends and interlocutors...always wanted to talk about the voice and about vocal qualities...metaphors of motion, like traveling to Medina, spiritual journeys to encounter the prophet in person.” — Patrik Eisenlohr [11:15]
• The interplay between the discursive meaning and the atmospheric, sonic power of recitation is illustrated as central to religious experience.

5. Sound, Islands, and Relational Belonging (Chapter 3)

• Abels discusses how Pacific Islanders conceive of the ocean not as separation but as “passageway,” linking islands through music and bodily resonance.
  • “The ocean...enables you to get somewhere else...ties in very neatly with the relational component inherence in atmospheric knowledge.” — Birgit Abels [14:21]
  • Analysis of a Palauan cover of “Aloha Oe” illustrates music’s role in evoking belonging across distant places.

6. Atmospheric Belonging and Urban Politics (Chapter 4)

• Eisenlohr addresses how sonic processions by Mumbai’s Twelver Shia Muslims foster a felt sense of belonging—an “atmospheric right to the city”—in an era of increasing marginalization.
  • “Citizenship is not something that is entirely legal...but achieved only through performance...sonic and other practices give...a particular Shia feel that even lingers on after the processions are gone.” — Patrik Eisenlohr [18:12]
• Atmospheres are theorized as collective, externalized affective fields—“feelings that are poured into space.”

7. Multisensory and Multimodal Atmospheres (Chapter 5)

• The discussion expands from the sonic to highlight that atmospheric experience is inherently multimodal, encompassing sound, light, touch, and movement.
  • “Atmospheres are really about an entire range of sensory modalities that play into each other. Multisensory perception and feeling is prior to the separation of different, separate modalities.” — Patrik Eisenlohr [24:25]
  • Abels stresses “holistic appraisal” and “felt bodily resonance” as the crux of atmospheric knowledge:
    • “What atmospheres do is they afford a change of perspective...they make us look at intensity, at proximity, at the processes with which we respond to those suggestions of motion.” — Birgit Abels [28:16]

8. Choreo-Music Analysis & Aesthetic Labor (Chapter 6)

• Abels introduces the idea that dance—better termed “structured movement”—in Pacific societies is a way of spatially and somatically relating to one’s environment.
  • “Structured movement is by nature space as felt bodily connection...atmospheric knowledge is something that allows us to make sense of how we felt bodily extend into our environment.” — Birgit Abels [29:59]
  • “Aesthetic labor” is framed as the creative process by which individuals mold their spatial and environmental awareness through movement.

9. Latency, Somatic Time, and Mediatization (Chapter 7)

• Eisenlohr elaborates on “latency” as both a phenomenological and specifically religious (Twelver Shia) experience, focusing on the Urdu term “mahol” (atmosphere/mood).
  • “Atmospheres are powerful because they modulate the sense of past, present, future by intervening into the projection of motion.” — Patrik Eisenlohr [34:54]
• Discusses how media (analog and digital) shape atmospheric knowledge by storing, reproducing, and even generating new sensory moments, connecting the somatic body with digital space.

10. Atmosphere, Environmentality, and Indigenous Stewardship (Chapter 8)

• Abels concludes by situating atmospheric knowledge within discussions of indigenous responsibility and environmental wisdom in Micronesian chant.
  • “Chanting is a way of making resonate that which is meaningful for the community...atmospheres...give me an opportunity to frame that in a way that makes it more accessible to North Atlantic academics.” — Birgit Abels [43:09]
• Atmospheric understanding emphasizes relationships, stewardship, and bodily ways of knowing over rational discourse.

Memorable Quotes and Moments

• On Meeting of Epistemologies:
  “Modes of knowledge, ways of knowing, can enter dialogue and enter conversations themselves. And then something very interesting and very productive happens.”— Birgit Abels [03:55]

• On Atmosphere’s Pre-Reflective Power:
  “Atmospheres are actually something quite fundamental and absolutely inescapable. They precondition what surrounds us and give us a kind of feel...before we can verbalize it.”— Patrik Eisenlohr [07:17]

• On Sonic Recitation and Motion:
  “They used a lot of metaphors of motion, like getting on a bus or traveling to Medina, spiritual journeys to encounter the prophet in person. This is really what really got me interested.”— Patrik Eisenlohr [11:15]

• On Dance and Spatial Relation:
  “Structured movement...is the space as experienced by the felt body. And that is not necessarily something...to do with distances, with dimensionality in the Cartesian sense. But it has to do with how the felt bodily, how the felt body moves through space and makes sense of that space.”— Birgit Abels [29:59]

• On the Power of Latency and Mediatization:
  “Atmospheres are powerful precisely because they modulate the sense of past, present, future by intervening into the projection of motion, which is really this fat bodily correlate of the potential as future.”— Patrik Eisenlohr [34:54]

• On Multisensory Atmospheres:
  “What atmospheres do is they afford a change of perspective. They direct our attention to more holistic appraisal of the multisensorial...what happens in between and beyond those sensory modes.”— Birgit Abels [28:16]

Notable Timestamps

• [02:47] — Book introduction and discussion of “felt bodily knowledge”
• [05:26] — Defining “atmosphere” as concept and beyond neo-phenomenology
• [09:04] — Atmosphere’s connection to time and latency
• [11:15] — Nath recitation and debates over vocal authenticity in Mauritius
• [14:21] — Music, resonance, and Pacific relationality through “sound ties”
• [18:12] — Sound, citizenship, and belonging for Shia Muslims in Mumbai
• [24:25] — Atmospheres as multisensory, multimodal phenomena
• [28:16] — The importance of resonance and “suggestion of motion”
• [29:59] — Dance/structured movement as environmental and atmospheric knowledge
• [34:54] — Latency, the felt body, and media in devotional practices
• [43:09] — Chanting, indigenous stewardship, and the explanatory power of atmospheric knowledge

Conclusion

Abels and Eisenlohr’s Atmospheric Knowledge offers a rigorous, nuanced reflection on how embodied, sensory, and especially sonic practices generate alternative forms of knowing the world—forms that interweave time, place, community, and environment across cultures. The authors encourage interrogating and learning from non-discursive, multisensory knowledge traditions, with implications ranging from religious practice to environmental stewardship and digital mediation. Their dialogue is rich with ethnographic detail, theoretical insight, and an insistence on the importance of atmosphere as both concept and lived experience.