Attunement and Multispecies Communication in Fermentation

Abstract

Terada Honke is a natural sake brewery that utilizes practices like call-and-response and work song to coordinate its fermentation processes across human and microbial participants. I call attention to the concept of attunement, which is the ability to notice, apprehend, and connect with others in meaningful response. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I explain why brewers must attune to the social, spatial, and temporal scales of life within the brewhouse, including the microbes who remain invisible to the brewers. I then analyze how the brewers practice attunement by attending to the relations between (inter-), within (intra-), and outside of (extra-) their bodies. These practices enable brewers to practice an embodied relationality that spans multiple scales and multiple species, or what others have called response-ability. I argue that this form of attunement could extend the idea of collective ethics to include microbial others and help rewrite the metaphysics of what it means to be human.