Overview
Decolonization debates at European ethnographic museums and their sound archives seem to be shifting their focus from the mere return and restitution of stored recordings to indigenous source communities to include cooperation with representatives of those communities, both for returning and “resocializing” the recordings and for supporting future documentation of indigenous music, archiving, and outreach. These changes are responses to the needs expressed by indigenous collectives, their notions of ownership of auditory knowledge, their ideas about the interplay of material and immaterial entities, and their desire for a sustainable dialog with sound archives and heritage approaches.
The project addresses the following questions around the interaction of indigenous communities and sound archives: How are processes for access and the technical reproducibility of indigenous auditory knowledge and its circulation to be designed and made visible and audible, especially with respect to current digitalization practices? How can indigenous conceptions regarding the resocialization of immaterial and material entities and their relations to each other be made translatable into Western conceptions such as “living cultural heritage”? How can indigenous performances be organized for archiving and collaborative exhibitions?
The results will be disseminated through academic articles, an exhibition in Geneva, a conference and its proceedings, and proposed guidelines for sound archives on the collaborative documentation, archiving, and making audible of indigenous auditory knowledge. The results will contribute to the current debates in music research, ethnomusicology, anthropology, and museum studies on ontological frameworks in the study of indigenous communities and other minority musical cultures.
