ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses modern academic disciplinary boundaries, questioning why certain fields focus on either speech, utterance, or song. Briefly overviewing the colonial history of the academe, I suggest that nineteenth-century European scholars separated orality from vocality in order to further colonialist doctrines of purity as the hallmark of civilization. I contrast these more modern notions with the vocal and oral classifications that existed in first-millennium BCE Mesopotamia, a region the colonial Europeans called ‘the cradle of civilization’. My analysis strips this metaphor to reveal the reproductive politics of both ancient and modern imperialism. I find that orality and vocality were intertwined in very different ways in the ancient Near East, producing imperialist ideology suited to the contemporary political climate of ancient Mesopotamia. In this context, the varied wetness and sounds of mouths were emphasized to draw politically, socially, and economically significant boundaries around sex, gender, and reproduction.
