Sound Returns: Toward Ethical “Best Practices” at
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings *
Sita Reddy and D. A. Sonneborn
Abstract: Intangible cultural heritage archives face a dilemma when it comes to
repatriation. Claims and counterclaims from source communities must be
balanced within legal frames and ethical obligations of museums to give back,
restitute, or redress past perceived injustices, while maintaining the essential
preservation functions of a heritage archive. This paper examines this dilemma
through the illustrative case study of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, a unique
collection that is at once an archival collection of traditional music and recorded
sound from all over the world, and a nonprofit record label housed in the U.S.
national museum since 1987.With a duty to keep its catalogue available in
perpetuity, a mandate to pay its own way, and a mission of cultural
documentation, collaborative curation, and broad appeal to global audiences,
Smithsonian Folkways practices digital repatriation (of audio recordings) and
circulation of indigenous knowledge (through publication, payment of royalties
and license fees). The paper describes four cases of returns from Folkways’
evolving repatriation practice, offering useful ways of thinking about museum
obligations with intangible heritage returns, and several ways of redistributing
individual artists’ rights and their communities’ rights to control use of their
music even when legal rights of ownership remain with the institution.
[Keywords: Cultural Heritage Archives, Anthropology, Museums, Archives,
Museum Archives, Museology, Heritage, Intangible Cultural Heritage, Music,
Repatriation, Applied Ethnomusicology, Cultural Repatriation, Museum
Community Relationships. Keywords in italics are derived from the American
Folklore Society Ethnographic Thesaurus, a standard nomenclature for the
ethnographic disciplines.]
We have been saved by our music.
- Aaron Kintu Moses, Headmaster, Abayudaya Primary School
A hundred years from now, we want our children’s children to be able to hear the
voices of our ancestors.
- Donald Topfi, Kiowa tribal council chairman
Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community,
to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. Everyone
has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from
any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
*
This peer-reviewed work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a
copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171
Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
Museum Anthropology Review 7(1-2) Spring-Fall 2013
- Article 27, Universal Declaration of Human Rights1
A Museum of Sound
Even among the world’s museums and heritage repositories of music, Smithsonian Folkways
Recordings—referred to in the late 1980s as a “museum of sound” by founding director and
curator emeritus Anthony Seeger—is somewhat unique. It is at once an archival collection of
traditional music and recorded sound from all over the world as well as a nonprofit record label
housed in the U.S. national museum. With a duty to keep its catalogue available in perpetuity
and a mission that balances revenue needs with cultural documentation, collaborative curation,
and broad appeal to global audiences, Smithsonian Folkways embodies two central constructs of
the conference title: digital repatriation (of music); and circulation of indigenous knowledge
(through publication, payment of royalties and license fees).2 This brief article suggests that
Smithsonian Folkways’ evolving repatriation practice may offer useful ways of thinking about
museum obligations with intangible heritage returns, and several ways of redistributing
individual artists’ rights and their communities’ rights to control use of their music, even when
legal rights of ownership remain with the museum.
Our two points of reference from the After the Return workshop are the Keynote by Jim Enote
and the Endnote by Rosemary Coombe. In the opening session, Enote, director of New Mexico’s
A:shiwi A:wan Musuem and Heritage Center in Zuni Pueblo, suggested that digital repatriation
as a concept was fundamentally flawed—in that the return of a copy to native communities, but
not the original object, was an empty gesture, neither a real catalyst for social change nor a
transfer of real power and authority.3 Final conference speaker Rosemary Coombe, on the other
hand, argued that digital returns of indigenous knowledge and intangible heritage, seen from the
point of view of cultural rights (as a category of human rights), could be transformative for
communities. Relying on a global framework for digital returns—in other words, moving beyond
U.S.-centric perspectives and looking to UNESCO Conventions as framework—she
recommended looking at other intangible cultural heritage genres beyond just the visual, music
being key among them. In her view, music is an ideal heritage genre “to think with” in digital
repatriation cases for two reasons:(1) recorded music embodies the heart of the worldwide
“cultural wars”, where the fiercest battles are being fought across continents and international
business interests; and (2) music as a category in Western law has the capacity to divorce
ethnological content (as in potlatch songs) from the social capacities of song, especially through
digital technology. In this view, digital returns can thus have far-reaching effects on cultural
renewal, social justice, agency and indigenous self-determination, which go well beyond
property claims or individual artistic expressions.
Our article on Smithsonian Folkways’ “music returns” lies somewhere between these two
positions. On the one hand, it suggests (contra Enote) that digital returns in practice are not a
new phenomenon with music recordings, that they make a significant difference to the
communities concerned in both legal (what is mandated to happen) as well as ethical practice
(what should happen) within the constraints of international law. On the other hand, it suggests
(following Coombe) that music may be one missing link in any discussions of heritage return,
often leading the way in policy circles because of the realities of recording history, technologies,
128
Museum Anthropology Review 7(1-2) Spring-Fall 2013
ownership, distribution, and use, with cutting edge models of benefit-sharing, redistribution,
justice, and reengagement for the communities and artists concerned. As Coombe argues
elsewhere, the “mnemonic power of music” makes it easy to understand the repatriation of audio
recordings as an assertion of cultural rights (as opposed to property claims): namely, one
category of claims to collective cultural heritage that appear proprietary in nature but that are
vital to indigenous self-determination.4 Viewed as a bundle of cultural rights, “repatriation can
be considered not only as a partial means of restitution for historical injuries suffered but as a
provision of unique resources necessary to enable distinct futures to be articulated (Coleman
with Coombe and MacAlairt 2009:181).”5 It may be important to add here that both advocates
and critics of international repatriation have tended to view the returns process through either the
property lens, as cultural objects to be owned and reclaimed by nations or tribes on grounds of
their sacred and ceremonial content, or through the lens of artistic expression, which assumes
individual authorship and free choice. Seeing repatriation and returns as a set of cultural rights
moves the discussion in a different direction toward the category of inalienable human rights, to
which we add the complementary notion of museum responsibility and cultural obligations of
stewardship.
If music is the missing link or missing genre in heritage returns theory, the elephant in the room
for museums is ongoing repatriation practice—the long history of actual return of heritage
intellectual property to its place of origin that has been quietly taking place from “universal
museums” and archives for years. And so a third point of reference we introduce here is the set
of ethical and institutional dilemmas peculiar to international museum returns in 21st century
practice. Do museums around the world, with their functions of collection, interpretation, and
display, have special obligations with music returns, which parallel issues of moral rights for
artists or cultural rights for communities to collective cultural heritage, as with other genres (arts,
antiquities, photographs, human remains)?6 Should museum practitioners—curators, archivists,
conservators, interpreters—be mediators, facilitators or “cultural brokers” when it comes to
returning music and its traditional knowledge to source communities worldwide (Kurin 1997)?
With digital music collections, especially those that fall into the category termed “world music”
(as does the Smithsonian Folkways catalogue), is it more accurate to speak of restitution in terms
of the ethical responsibility of museums in the West to “give back” to the Rest, rather than
repatriation (which assumes prior ownership), or reparation (which assumes guilt), or even
reunification, which seems to be the preferred term in some European debates on material
culture, for example over the return of the Elgin marbles to Greece?7
At Smithsonian Folkways, while ownership of sound recordings remains with the museum,
control over use has—in several cases—been returned to the communities and artists that made
the music. Although this is still some distance from a best practice for all concerned, we describe
some actual returns as case studies. Taken together, they map several ways in which returns can
and do make differences to communities by changing access, reuse, or revitalization of the
music, and redistribution of the cultural knowledge that contextualizes that music. The examples
also point to ways in which ad hoc practice, typically decided on a case by case basis, could
inform better policy, allowing us to foreground both the cultural rights of musical performers and
the ethical responsibilities of museums as cultural stewards in civil society.8
129
Museum Anthropology Review 7(1-2) Spring-Fall 2013
Brief History of Smithsonian Folkways: Restitution for a Song
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings may in some ways be a pioneer in thinking through the
practice of traditional and indigenous knowledge returns. In Folkways Records and Service
Corporation’s private sector period (1948-1986), its founder Moses Asch paid modest royalties
and license fees to compilers or artists, depending on the contract, or bought the recording and all
its rights outright. If there were obligations to artists, it was up to the compiler to inform Asch of
them for inclusion in the contract. A few years after the 1987 acquisition of Folkways Records
by the U.S. national museum, in what may have been an unprecedented move in the history of
the recording industry, Smithsonian Folkways director Anthony Seeger instituted comprehensive
royalty reform (ca. 1991) and unilaterally raised the royalty payout rate for every archival
Folkways royaltor. Of course no one refused the higher rates. The reform is part of the hidden
history of Smithsonian Folkways, a commitment to the fundamental value of audible
performance and recognition of obligations to artists engendered when they are recorded by a
third party.
Shortly after the U.S. presidential election of 2000, in a meeting with State Department cultural
attachés in DC about repatriation, Smithsonian Folkways thought through and offered a schema
of return for the catalogue’s North African recordings. The suggestion was to use the help of the
State Department to return music to its place of origin. The concept was simply to license back
recording rights to communities of origin gratis, or for one dollar, in exchange for a royalty to
Smithsonian for each copy made by the licensee. There was no discussion of the question of
ownership because under U.S. and international law, the Smithsonian owns rights to the
recordings and any financial benefit accruing to publication by virtue of its acquisition of the
Moses and Frances Asch Collection.
But the Smithsonian only owns the recordings insofar as Asch owned the rights. What rights did
he own? In the world of field recordings, s/he who owned the recording device often owned the
recordings and thus could enjoy any financial benefit that might accrue from its publication. The
concept of traditional community artists’ rights first emerged in the 1940s but became somewhat
more formalized in the 1970s as “moral rights”, which is one side of the equation.9 But in
addition to the legal rights established in contracts and legislation, there are the complicated
questions and issues of museum obligations and responsibilities to the communities and artists
whose music comprises these collections. We present here four cases to show the wide-ranging
and varied forms that museum restitution can take—namely, the ways in which Smithsonian
Folkways responded in practice to ethical issues of rights and redistributive justice for everchanging communities.
Case One. Revitalizing Community
Abayudaya: Music from the Jewish People of Uganda
Recorded and annotated by Jeffrey Summit, 2003. SFW40504
Delicious Peace: Coffee, Music, & Interfaith Harmony in Uganda
Recorded and annotated by Jeffrey Summit, 2012. SFW50417
130
Museum Anthropology Review 7(1-2) Spring-Fall 2013
In 2000 at the joint Society for Ethnomusicology/American Musicological Society/College
Music Society conference in Toronto, ethnomusicologist, professor and rabbi Jeffrey Summit
offered a recording to Smithsonian Folkways that documented the religious music of the
Abayudaya Jewish community of Uganda. After audition of the music and review of
accompanying photography and text, our response was that it was significant and beautiful
material indeed, but to be a great Folkways album we needed to hear the musical life of the
entire community—including lullabies, children’s songs, political songs, work music, teenage
music-making—as well as the religious aspect. Summit raised funds to support another field
recording trip and returned with an array of recordings that revealed a striking documentation of
the community’s culture via local Ugandan music, infused with rich choral singing, Afropop,
19th century European music, and traditional drumming. The resulting Smithsonian Folkways
album was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2005 for Best Traditional World Music Album.
More to the point on the details of repatriation, to date the royalties from the album have funded,
on their choice, nineteen university scholarships for members of the community.
The story does not end there for the Abayudaya. On September 11 2001, JJ Keki, one of the
community’s leaders, was onsite at the World Trade Center disaster, and in the days that
followed was deeply disturbed that the attacks had been made in the name of one of the great
world religions. He vowed to do something with his own religious community and beyond “in
the name of peace”. Back in Uganda, Keki established an interfaith coffee cooperative with his
Muslim and Christian neighbors called Delicious Peace (Mirembe Kawomera) that sells its
entire harvest at fair trade prices. Today, the cooperative includes over a thousand Jewish,
Muslim, and Christian members and has helped “make a difference in multiple spheres:
economic empowerment for women, medical care, education and sustainable farming
practice.”10
The Smithsonian publication of these Summit field recordings documents the music of more than
1,000 farmers of the coffee-growers’ cooperative:in community gatherings such as local farmer
days, meetings, wedding receptions of its constituent village communities and more, expressing
a variety of themes relevant locally and worldwide, from the benefits of fair trade to the
importance of peace. Royalties from the Delicious Peace album may spark the creation of new
group identities, novel expressions of agency and self-determination for a changing community,
an instance where interfaith cooperation has proven to be economically and socially
advantageous to Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike. As noted in the epigraph, the liner notes
for the first Abayudaya album included the jubilant quotation, “We have been saved by our
music” by Aaron Kintu Moses, headmaster of the Abayadaya primary school, but only the
passage of time will demonstrate any lasting social effects of projects like these two.11
Case Two. Rights to Control Use
Voices of the Rainforest
Recorded and annotated by Steven Feld, 1991. HRT15009
Bosavi: Rainforest Music from Papua New Guinea
Recorded and annotated by Steven Feld, 2001. SFW40487
131
Museum Anthropology Review 7(1-2) Spring-Fall 2013
For more than 20 years, anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Steven Feld worked closely with
the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea to explore the links between their musical expression
and the sound world of the Bosavi rainforest in which they live. Feld was sympathetic to the
ideal of cross-cultural collaboration, but he consistently pointed out that the music industry’s
profit motives can re-entrench already existing power relations between different cultures. In
1991, with the help of former Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart—who provided
equipment and post-production support—Feld produced Voices of the Rainforest (now
HRT15009 in the Smithsonian’s Mickey Hart Collection), a CD of Bosavi music and rainforest
soundscape. Shortly thereafter, he set up the Bosavi People’s Fund, a non-governmental
organization that the Kaluli control, to receive all the royalties from both the recording as well as
Feld’s writings on Bosavi. To determine how the royalties should be distributed, the Fund put
together a Bosavi community group that has financed projects as various as the building of
schools and clinics, the creation of a Bosavi-English dictionary, and the re-release of a 3-CD set
of Bosavi music on the Smithsonian’s Folkways label.
The album Bosavi: Rainforest Music from Papua New Guinea draws on two generations of
Bosavi musicians and 25 years of field recordings to present a comprehensive and intimate
musical portrait of life in a Papua New Guinea rainforest, including not only the contemporary
music of the youngest generation of guitar band composers but also the traditional ritual and
everyday styles of their parents. With royalties received from recordings over the past ten years,
the community has used a portion in support of the Bosavi Digital Archive Project, to digitize all
recordings, images, and texts gathered by Feld and two other researchers.12 A major part of the
royalties went to fund educational scholarships to support the talents of the younger generations
of Bosavi.13 The digital archive project and the return of revenue to the community represent an
example of redistribution inspired by the exemplary gesture of the compiler. It also flags the
ultimate irony of the return of traditional music to its place of origin—recording Bosavi music as
the intangible cultural heritage of the Kaluli led to the return of material benefits (through
royalties) and educational benefits that in turn will change the music that the Kaluli will produce
and record for posterity. Music from the past thus paves the way for the future even as the
changing music of the future will transform perspectives on the past, a topic which has been
addressed more generally in the case of other genres by several scholars at the After the Return
workshop.
Case Three. Rights to Secrecy and Sacred Rites
Songs of the Western Australian Desert Aborigines
Recorded by R. A. Gould. Asch Mankind Series, 1972. AHM 4210
In 2006, Richard Kurin, then the director of the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (the
institutional home for Folkways at the Smithsonian), got a call from an anthropologist with
extensive field experience among the Western Australian desert aborigines regarding questions
about the propriety of the recording Songs of the Western Australian Desert Aborigines and
whether it should be available to the public. On hearing of these questions, Smithsonian
Folkways immediately removed the material from public availability while investigating. The
132
Museum Anthropology Review 7(1-2) Spring-Fall 2013
Ngatatjara people of the Western Australian desert form a dialect group of a single language
(Pitjantjajara), whose sacred traditions are primarily told through song and ceremony. Traditions
for initiation rites such as circumcision and bloodletting include varying degrees of restriction of
access to one or the other gender, sometimes with harsh penalties if persons of the opposite sex
should witness them. At least half of this particular recording included male initiation rite
songs—such as the Dingo and Kangaroo cycles sung by adult men for novices (malulu) prior to
their circumcisions at Cundelee during May-June 1966.
From the point of view of the museum, our initial discussion went the other way—should not the
recordings remain available to, for example, a female adolescent in the USA—say a 12 year old
girl in the Midwest? The issue of her rights of access to the recording by virtue of the U.S.
concepts of free speech, the recording contract with Folkways Records, and copyright law,
needed consideration. Yet she certainly would be forbidden by virtue of gender alone from
access to these songs in Australia. To consult on how to best navigate this issue, Sonneborn
contacted Jane Anderson, then at AIATSIS (Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Studies) to request consultation with the communities and the recording collections in
question. What we learned from Anderson at AIATSIS was more interesting than anticipated—
the recordings in question were restricted not only from female adolescents or females but from
everyone! In Australia, they had never been made publicly available to anyone outside the rite:
the initiates, and their dreamtime collaborators. R. A. Gould, the original recordist in 1966, was
contacted and he wholeheartedly agreed that given contemporary concepts of best practices in
anthropology and other disciplines that use fieldwork-based material, the album should definitely
be taken out of print.
But the issue of access is complicated by the fact that a thousand or more copies had been sold
over the years—to students, research libraries, and anyone else who may have been interested,
including libraries and institutions in Australia. While returning control over the use of a
recording such as this is an important goal in theory, it raises several questions in practice. How
should privacy, and restricted access to traditional knowledge, be balanced against greater public
access to such material? What are museum obligations to balance respect for the privacy or
secrecy of those groups who were recorded, with requests to hear and study them? Should
museums consult elders on how recordings must be used after they are collected? There are no
simple answers in a museum setting, especially in cases that pit what is known as “indigenism”
(which is sometimes linked with corollaries of secrecy and privacy to restricted members of the
community) against the open access model facing the public domain (with its romantic idea of
the commons), both of which have their extreme proponents and critics when taken to
extremes.14 As in the past, Smithsonian Folkways has decided these on a case-by-case basis,
when and as questions are raised with particular recordings regarding privacy or being in the
public domain. It seems appropriate as our understanding increases that a more proactive policy
be developed that will guide ethical returns in terms of control over use—both retroactively with
prior recordings that were published in the past, as well as proactively for new recordings that
will need all our cultural sensitivities and enduring respect. The album remains unavailable to the
public except by in-person consultation visit to the Rinzler Archives.
133
Museum Anthropology Review 7(1-2) Spring-Fall 2013
Case Four. Right to Hear Ancestors’ Voices
Washo-Peyote Songs. Songs of the American Native Church-Peyotist.
Recorded by Warren d’Azevedo. Ethnic Folkways Library, 1972. Album No. FW04601 / FE
4384
The Kiowa-Peyote Meeting.
Recorded by Harry Smith. Ethnic Folkways Library, 1973. FW04601 / FE 601
Like many Native American communities into which the Native American Church introduced
Peyotist practices, the Washo [more often spelled today “Washoe”] practice of the ceremonies of
the Native American Church began relatively recently, around 1939. The Washoe are a people of
Nevada and California; a small Hokan-speaking group of the Great Basin region. Peyotists rely,
as a sacrament and a sacred medicine, on the peyote cactus (Lophophora williamsii). Based on
recordings collected by Warren d’Azevedo over a period of nine months in 1954-55, the WashoPeyote Songs in the collection consist of five song cycles sung by three Washoe members at “an
open prayer meeting”—an informal social gathering of Peyotists for the purpose of singing
practice and religious discussion. The liner notes, written by D’Azevedo and Alan Merriam,
describe singing for the Washoe Peyotists as a measure of prestige and spiritual eminence, the
degree by which a Peyotist found “the Way” through “the medicine” reflected by competence
with song, drum and rattle.
In 2004, Smithsonian Folkways was approached by a spokesperson for the Washoe tribe
regarding the Washoe-Peyote Songs album. They had consulted an anthropologist who had
recommended that the album should not be available to the public because of its sacred content.
Smithsonian Folkways complied and took the album out of distribution. As Center for Folklife
and Cultural Heritage archives policy holds, it remains available for researchers and visitors to
the Rinzler Archives.
The concerns raised by the Washoe case brought attention to another Smithsonian Folkways
recording of Peyotists of the American Indian Native Church: namely, the Kiowa Peyote Meeting
(Album FW04601). Recorded by Harry Everett Smith in 1964-65 in Anadarko, Oklahoma, this
album consists of songs sung in more casual performances—recorded either in a truck or in hotel
rooms, but not at an actual “Peyote Meeting” ceremony even though there had been
opportunities for the latter. This deliberate privileging of recording casual over ceremonial
versions of the songs means that the album lacks samples of drumming, considered by some
practitioners to be the pre-eminent peyote instrument.
The responses of the Kiowa Peyotists also differed from the Washoe tribe on issues of control
over use and return of the recording. Smithsonian Folkways made attempts over several years to
gain the attention of tribal authorities, and in 2009, with the help of colleagues at the National
Museum of the American Indian, ultimately interested Juanita Ahtone, the tribal librarian at
Carnegie, OK. She in turn was able to contact Donald Topfi, then chief of the Kiowa tribal
council, who assembled the living descendants of the singers on the album. We expected strong
similarity between the Kiowa and the Washoe in their concerns but the Kiowa response went in
an opposite direction. The consensus of the descendants was that they wanted the material to
134
Museum Anthropology Review 7(1-2) Spring-Fall 2013
remain online and widely available. “A hundred years from now, we want our children’s children
to be able to hear the voices of their ancestors,” summarized Topfi. In cultural rights parlance,
the current generation not only has a moral claim on recordings that their ancestors made,
namely their past heritage, but also has the rights to hear their ancestors’ voices and pass this on
to future generations as historical legacy. The album remains publicly available. This relatively
amicable ending to one recurrent type of dilemma of museum restitution—for community-based
heirs and the national museum alike—is a fitting note on which to close our section on
Smithsonian Folkways case studies.
Coda: Listening Forward
Is there a bigger picture, or even an anthem, that emerges when we examine these different cases
of music returns at Smithsonian Folkways?15 Can we describe a collective body of best practices
without losing the detail and nuance of the particular case? As with music, so with returns
policy—seen from the larger perspective of the original material (or that of the archive), we learn
as much from the chorus as we do from the silences, gaps, fault-lines and any discordant notes.
In the vexed field of international museum restitution where practice is the only short-term
reality and precedent, we would do well to listen to these gaps and fault-lines as ethnographers
would—one ear pressed close to the ground in the ethnographic present, the other oriented to
pick up sounds from a more distant past or an imagined future.
Each of our four cases raises as many questions about the music restitution process as it resolves.
Taken together, they suggest that even the questions raised by each of these returns differ—
questions about how to define community, identity, authenticity, tradition, sovereignty, and the
past itself. The Abayudaya case challenges our definitions of a changing community as the
newly-created music created through the returns process changes the community itself. The
Bosavi case raises the question of what traditional knowledge is in the first place in our
continuously changing world, and if we could indeed “save” it. It suggests that museums could
shoulder the same sorts of responsibilities for reciprocity shown by this ethical and generous
compiler. The Western Desert aboriginal case asks us to think about the limits of restricting
traditional knowledge on the grounds of secrecy or privacy from the public domain, and about
who controls the rights over such knowledge—the community, the elders or the initiates. And the
Kiowa Peyote music case asks (depending on the circumstances of collection and recording)
whether in some cases sacred knowledge should remain in the public domain to enable the rights
of the community—or their children’s children—to hear their ancestor’s voices.
The larger problem is that if even within a single archive (or cultural form or belief system
within that archive, as with the Peyotists) cultural claims do not always share similar definitions
or ask the same questions, how can we begin to theorize returns or ethical obligations across
such pluralities of traditional music or museums? In A Broken Record (2009), Coleman, Coombe
and MacAlairt describe three broad philosophical arguments for the restitution of rights in
indigenous or traditional music:(1) as a subject of customary rights within the originating
society; (2) as rights arising from agreement between performer and publisher; and (3) as a
consequentialist argument of the power of music where repatriation of recordings may be
important for cultural renewal and self-determination.
135
Museum Anthropology Review 7(1-2) Spring-Fall 2013
In the case of Smithsonian Folkways, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the organization
does all three of the above.16 Archives of recorded music are not only sound sites, they are also
contested sites of power, sites of reinvention, and self-determination. If we treat these diverse
recordings as mere records or documentation of information about music traditions (some of
which were recorded more than 70 years ago), we may end up reifying stereotypes about
indigenous groups, denying them some capacity to recover their own traditional resources for
creating their own futures. But if we see the full social capacity of recorded songs (in terms of
the real cultural work that they accomplish), and if we try consistently to redistribute this power
and knowledge—to ethically transfer control over use—we will be in a better position to
articulate the mission of museum collections such as Smithsonian Folkways: an archive of
“music of the people, by the people, for the people.”Seen collectively, the slowly accumulating
body of music returns described above begin to tell a powerful story—that activities of
restitution can, with all their flaws in practice, serve both contemporary archival as well as
indigenous social needs, at once documents as well as advocates for sound museum practice.
Acknowledgments
We thank Joan Hua, Smithsonian Folkways production assistant, and James Early, Director of
Cultural Heritage Policy, at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage for their
comments.
Notes
1. As noted later in this paper, the first epigraph appears in (Summit 2003), the second derives
from Smithsonian Folkways Records consultations (personal communication with Donald Topfi
via teleconference, January 30, 2009), and the third is from United Nations (1948).
2. Jon Pareles, writing in The New York Times on April 15, 2005, noted that Smithsonian
Folkways’ online offering, then called Smithsonian Global Sound was “the ethnographic answer
to iTunes”. See http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/15/arts/music/15glob.html/, accessed January
20, 2013. Smithsonian Folkways also aligns with the core values of the Center for Folklife and
Cultural Heritage (its home in the Smithsonian) in addressing heritage protection through
grassroots justice and global policy.
3. For the A:shiwi A:wan Musuem and Heritage Center, see http://www.ashiwi-museum.org/,
accessed January 20, 2013.
4. For more on Coombe’s views on music and cultural rights, see Coleman with Coombe and
MacAlairt (2009) and also Weintraub and Yung (2009).
5. See Coleman with Coombe and MacAlairt (2009). Within the large, diverse and growing
literature on culture and rights that has developed in the last few years, several works have direct
136
Museum Anthropology Review 7(1-2) Spring-Fall 2013
relevance to the repatriation and circulation of arts, music, film and new media. See for instance,
Anderson and Christen, and Hennessy in this volume.
6. For international returns, this goes well beyond NAGPRA legislation as operational
framework for U.S. museum practice. See for instance the University of Manchester-based
Museums
and
Restitution
International
conference,
(http://www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/museology/museumsandrestitution/ , accessed November 2,
2013) and its foregrounding of the 2002 Declaration of the Value of Universal Museums and
their ethical obligations.
7. See for instance the term “Elginism” in the Museums and Restitution 2009 conference, blog,
(and forthcoming book) that refers to the reunification of the Elgin marbles currently in the
British Museum with Greece.
8. For early views on the role of civil society institutions such as archives and museums in
heritage protection, see Brown (2003) and http://web.williams.edu/go/native/, accessed
November 2, 2013. See also a range of UNESCO, WIPO, and AAM white papers and reports on
museum
and
archive
repatriations,
including:
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001401/140184eo.pdf
http://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/freepublications/en/tk/1023/wipo_pub_1023.pdf
http://www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/publications/library/2012/2012-01.pdf, all accessed
November 2, 2013.
9. See the Berne Convention for the Preservation of Literary and Artistic Works of September 9,
1886,
as
amended
on
September
28,
1979,
available
at:
www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.html, accessed November 2, 2013.
10. From dialogue and e-mail correspondence between Jeffrey Summit and D. A. Sonneborn,
June 14, 2012
11. From the Abayudaya: Music from the Jewish People of Uganda CD liner notes (Summit
2003).
12. The other two researchers are Bambi B. Schieffelin and Edward Schieffelin. See
www.bosavipeoplesfund.net, accessed June 15, 2012.
13. E-mail correspondence between Steven Feld and D. A. Sonneborn, June 14, 2012.
14. For romantic perspectives on the public domain and the commons, see Chander and Sunder
(2004). We acknowledge a variety of perspectives on the concept of commons, common-pool
resources, and practices of enclosure.
15. We follow a method of examining diverse case studies glossed under one heuristic or legal
category as developed in our earlier work on heritage genres such as traditional medical
knowledge (Reddy 2006) or music (Sonneborn 2003).
137
Museum Anthropology Review 7(1-2) Spring-Fall 2013
16. The role of the producer/record label, which could not be addressed adequately here, will be
explored in a future article.
References Cited
Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works
1979
Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. Amended on
September 28. www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.html, accessed
November 2, 2013.
Brown, Michael F.
2003
Who Owns Native Culture? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chander, Anupam, and Madhavi Sunder
2004
The Romance of the Public Domain. California Law Review. 92:1331-1373.
http://ssrn.com/abstract=562301, accessed November 2, 2013.
Coleman, Elizabeth, with Rosemary Coombe and Fiona MacAlairt
2009
A Broken Record: Subjecting Music to Cultural Rights In Ethics of Cultural
Appropriation. James O. Young and Conrad G. Brunck, eds. Pp. 179-210. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Kurin, Richard
1997
Reflections of a Culture Broker: A View from the Smithsonian. Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press.
Museums and Restitution International Conference
2010
Museums and Restitution International Conference. [Conference Program]July 8-9.
University of Manchester.
http://www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/museology/museumsandrestitution/, accessed
November 2, 2013.
Pareles, Jon
2005
This is the Sound of Globalization. New York Times, April 15: Arts Critics Notebook
Reddy, Sita
2006
Making Heritage Legible: Who Owns Traditional Medical Knowledge. International
138
Museum Anthropology Review 7(1-2) Spring-Fall 2013
Journal of Cultural Property 13(2):161-188.
Sonneborn, D.A.
2003
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings: A Question of Balance. Folklore Forum, 34(12):111-118. http://hdl.handle.net/2022/2360, accessed November 2, 2013.
Summit, Jeffrey
2003
[Liner Notes] Abayudaya: Music from the Jewish People of Uganda. SFW40504.
Washington: Smithsonian Folkways Records.
United Nations
1948
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/,
accessed March 10, 2013.
Weintraub, Andrew and Bell Yung, eds.
2009
Music and Cultural Rights. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Sita Reddy is a Research Associate affiliated with the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and
Cultural Heritage. A cultural sociologist and a museum practitioner, her current work lies at the
intersections of critical heritage studies, archival histories, and traditional medical knowledge
from South Asia. She has published and presented on topics ranging from global heritage policy
to the repatriation of art, antiquities, music, and medicine, while her curatorial experience
includes exhibitions organized by the Sackler Gallery (Yoga: The Art of Transformation), the
National Library of Medicine (Visible Proofs), and Provisions Library, a DC-based resource
center for arts and social change. She also teaches courses on critical heritage and museum
studies, most recently through the Michigan in Washington program and, in 2014, as visiting
professor at the University of Hyderabad.
D.A. Sonneborn is an applied ethnomusicologist, serving as associate director of Smithsonian
Folkways. He has lectured and presented on four continents, co-authored (with percussionist
Mickey Hart and ethnomusicologist Fredric Lieberman) Planet Drum, published scholarly and
general interest articles, reviews, and photos, chairs the Society for Ethnomusicology's AudioVisual Committee, is a founding member of its Applied Ethnomusicology Section, is active in the
UNESCO-advisory International Council for Traditional Music and is on the advisory board of
the Al Ain Centre for Music in the World of Islam in Abu Dhabi, UAE.He has written original
music, managed and produced world music artists, and traditional music concerts, theatre
festivals, and music recordings.
139