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. From the perspective of indigenous specialists, humans, animals, songs, natural sounds, sound carriers, and other entities constitute a social community that has been destroyed by colonial ways of working in ethnographic museum archives. Music recordings need to be resocialized in a collaborative manner, as they are forms of existence and therefore part of the social life of indigenous communities. Accordingly, the project hopes to gain a systematic understanding of how sound archives can ensure that indigenous auditory knowledge is appropriately accessed, documented, archived, and made audible inside and outside their source communities. It addresses 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? These questions will be answered in three work packages, drawing on the experiences and reflections of indigenous researchers in relation to their own documentation of rituals involving sound and non-human entities. The starting point will be an inquiry into the recording and documentation practices of sound performances by indigenous researchers. The relationships of material and immaterial cultural heritage will be addressed collaboratively, taking as a point of departure the historical collections (sound recordings, objects, photos) of the Musée d'ethnographie de Genève on the Apalai-Wayana, Tiriyó and Awaete (Assurini) communities and the collection of Manfred Rauschert’s recordings of the Apalai-Wayana at the University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar. Finally, based on an analysis of past exhibitions at ethnological museums and with the collaboration of indigenous specialists, the requirements for the dissemination of indigenous auditory knowledge in a European setting will be laid out. Our research will be conducted in close collaboration with our partners from Laboratory for the Archiving of Indigenous Sound Performances at the Federal University of Pará, Belém, Brazil; the Associação dos Povos Indígenas Wayana e Apalai in Macapá and Tumucumaque Park; and the indigenous Instituto Janeraka. Methodologically, the project is oriented towards linguistic discourse analysis, which aims to incorporate indigenous research methods. Further methods are sensitive participant observation and episodic interviews based on and analyzed using grounded theory, as well as intersemiotic translation (between verbal-and nonverbal codes). 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. 

Projektteam:

• Prof. Dr. Matthias Lewy (Antragssteller und Koordination)
• Dr. Thiago da Costa Oliveira (Projektleiter)
• Bruno Britto (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter)
• Silvino Almeida (wissenschaftliche Assistenz)

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Projektpartner/innen:

•  Arinaware Apalai Waiana (Präsident der Associação dos Povos Indígenas Aparai e Wayana – APIWA)
•  Líliam Cristina Barros Cohen, LabEtno Instituto de Ciências da Arte - ICA Universidade Federal do Pará, Brazil
• Eliane Camargo, IPÊ Association pour le dialogue interculturelle, France
• Tiago de Oliveira Pinto, Institut für Musikwissenschaft Hochschule für Musik FRANZ LISZT Weimar, Germany
• Günther Giovannoni, Swiss National Spound Archive, Switzerland
• Natasha Amaruay Hauer Gordon (Pemón) 
• Madeleine Leclair, Musée d'Ethnographie, Switzerland
• Andrea Scholz, Ethnologisches Museum im Humboldt Forum, Germany