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, within, and outside of 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.