Professional archivists of ethnographic collections1 assume ethical responsibility for the management of “records,” both in the objectified sense of documents, sound recordings, images, digital files, or artifacts, and in the ideational sense of the contents, meanings, and creative intentions those records may encode. Archivists also manage, in increasingly self-conscious ways, the rights of others to access, to study, to publish, to circulate, to remake, to destroy, and to benefit from the objective and ideational contents of the archive, but within structures not merely of our own design and bound to a very troubled history that produced the archives we manage. Certainly when we work in public or public-facing private institutions, we are bound by explicit canons of compliance policy and broad canons of privileged access.2 And in many aspects of our job, we conceive of ourselves, and our institutions, as bound by the law, or rather, by many different laws and systems of legal understanding and interpretation, which refutes any notion of “the” law’s uniformity or rationality.
Controlling access to documents under (direct or indirect) legal authority from the state is inherent in the very idea of the archive as a modern bureaucratic institution. The power of the archive’s invocation of a neutral territoriality and a linear temporality lies, as in Derrida’s famous formulation (1996), in the possession of documents that “speak the law.” But such documents, while found in archives, may not always be found among the documents for which our archives exist to provide controlled access in the interests of preservation, which means they may not be found at all by those wondering “why does this institution own this stuff and get to say who uses it?” These other records are not the primary objects of preservation or access we hold, nor are they typically conceived of as what archivists call “metadata” for those objects, although in this chapter that is exactly how I will propose we view them: as metadata for the archive itself.
Rather than being accessible to users of the archive, such records are frequently to be found in the files of the institution’s General Counsel, or in a locked cabinet in the archive Director’s office. They are the legal documents, and associated communications, that constitute the archive’s sovereignty. “The Archive,” as it turns out, has an archive of its own, which in turn has an archive, and so on ad infinitum. Archiving documents of cultural history is an inherently recursive project, and such recursivity is the source of the archive’s power to define the reality it represents. Archiving is a generative activity; it always produces more documents than it purports to preserve and protect. And some of those documents, are contracts and opinions and memoranda drawn up by (and for) lawyers, administrators, donors, and collectors sometimes in ways that have profound implications for a critique of the ethnographic archive as a neutral institution, or even a legitimate one.
In recent years, archivists working in academic and museum-based settings and especially those charged with managing collections of materials identified as products of Indigenous communities have been compelled to pay increasingly critical attention to the management of the explicit and potential rights (of access, interpretation, and profit) inherent in the documents or objects in our collections, and not (just) to the media or objects or ideas they contain. This has put us in the position of restricting access more vigorously than our predecessors did, at the same time as we have sought to open up access or “repatriation” to “stakeholders” (a revealing current term of art in the trade) who have previously had little access to these collections, both through our own direct outreach and via online catalogs and databases that can open the archive to searches by anyone on earth.
But archivists of Indigenous cultural heritage and property are in a position somewhat at odds with the politics of “open access” championed by a broader community of information science and archiving in public-facing and publicly funded private and non-profit institutions. Many archivists and librarians working in university or museum settings, especially, have lately embraced an ideological commitment to providing “open access” to formerly restricted collections, concerned about the hastening commercial privatization of the commons and compelled by the power of knowledge to reach the entire globe in digital form at a low cost.
Among open access advocates, a rights regime dominated by profit-making interests is seen as the primary hegemonic power. In resisting this the archive serves the public good by removing economic and other barriers to the open and non-discriminatory circulation of knowledge produced, especially, through public investment. The handling of fragile physical materials has become a trivial burden in an era of high-resolution digital copies and technologies of mediation that allow for immediate global circulation of something that might have taken an intercontinental journey to view or hear only 30 years ago. The utopian vision of everyone having access to everything – the opening of the archive – has a powerful force among professionals in archive management, and I am not immune to its charms.
But the more utopian visions of open access also entail a throwing up of hands at historical facts and political realities that will not be so easily converted to archival objects of contemplation, and not just from those who profit economically from keeping the price of knowledge high. Those of us who are gatekeepers to ethnographic archives containing documents of formerly colonized people, and of Indigenous or Aboriginal people and communities in particular, have lately been driven by the opposite ambition. We wonder if we might somehow reduce access, further restrict unfettered circulation of things that have been allowed to leak out of archives for decades, limit or control digital circulation, and enforce archive policies and interpret questions of legality not only as representatives of science or our employing institutions – as keepers of an asset for research – but as advocates for the cultural rights and sensibilities and feelings of Indigenous people. In this position we have become agents for these interests in the archive within our institutional and disciplinary settings. We also caution our institutions in their refined concern with legality over decades of archive building. These institutions have in fact put themselves in a position of something that shades over into illegality, registering and protecting claims of institutional “ownership” that cannot withstand a rational process of legal “discovery,” and that remain vulnerable to future litigation as a result.
Many archivists of ethnographic collections of Indigenous provenance have meanwhile embraced a critical practice centered on the “repatriation” of documents and objects from the collections we manage to the communities from which they were extracted. Although the word is fraught with ambiguity, it presents a prospect enhanced by the rise of digital technology that has severely eroded what were once major technical barriers to more widespread access to sound archives. The global digital public sphere, for all its proven capacity to abet the informal, indiscriminate, and “illegal” circulation of documents such as recordings, also provides far greater potential for the serendipitous discovery of archival collections of interest by descendants of people whose voices and images are represented in ethnographic archives, and a low-cost and high-utility medium for not only delivering repatriated documents to their stakeholders or subjecting them to communal interpretation, but retaining them as archival resources for “research” and community-based institutional and scholarly collaboration as well.
This approach to the archive as a social justice project, evinced by a growing number of repatriation projects and an increase in grant support for them3, is especially seductive for the media archivist dealing with sounds, images, films or videos, or textual documents as primary archival objects. For when conceived of as “merely” a document that can be reproduced and distributed easily, the sonic (or filmic or photographic or textual) archival object is considered (typically) as format-independent and replicable, presenting no significant or apparent barriers (in practical terms of economic cost and technical expertise) to archive–community reciprocity mediated via digital reproduction. This approach however, centered on repatriation as a form of compensation for appropriation and very belated reciprocity to Indigenous people for helping us build our disciplines by sharing their culture with our predecessors, perpetuates and naturalizes a structural legitimation of the alienation of rights inherent in the manner in which our archives were assembled and aggregated over the course of the twentieth century in the first place.
And here it is worthwhile to pause over the ease with which disciplines that have been involved in producing these archives have rationalized their practices as disinterested science about – or interested advocacy for – Indigenous people, in particular. The ethnographic archive of Indigenous cultural expressions has a particular and fraught centrality in the history of anthropological (and ethnomusicological and museological) disciplines, which can frankly be said to directly owe their existence to the genocide of Indigenous people by European colonists and their successor settler-colonial nation-states. A North American ethnographic archivist working in an institutional context today cannot escape being the lineal professional descendant of predecessors whose work was funded and publicly engaged with primarily for the purposes of rationally administering the containment and assimilation of militarily defeated Native populations. The archive can thus be seen as a site of intelligence gathering and surveillance casting traditional cultures and contemporary Indigenous people as “vanishing” remnants of a distant collective past suitable for salvage, appropriation, and nostalgia, amounting to a denial of the living continuity and modernity of the peoples thus represented, and glossing over historical accountability for complicity in the marginalization of Indigenous communities. (Anderson 2005; Deloria 2004; Kreps 2013; Morse 2012)
From the perspective of the formerly colonized community or the modern Indigenous subject, ethnographic archives are all too easy to see as war memorials built by the victors, as well as treasure troves of meaningful patrimony. When vast historical territories become a few inches on a shelf, when the tapes on those shelves are in a language that no one can translate, when someone has commercially released that recording for money, or sold it as a “collection” to a university, the archive is a metonym for a larger loss, and not just a site of preservation and recovery. From engaging many times in recent years with the descendants of people whose voices fill the tapes that line the shelves of my own office space, I know that such encounters are routinely and simultaneously ecstatic and traumatic. The tears that often flow on a listener’s first encounter with an ancestor’s distant, barely audible voice are never simply tears of joy.
Archivists base their professional ethics on the assertion that they serve the interests of other people, a diverse public. Of course the identity of this public can be, and has been, understood in diverse ways, related fundamentally to a shifting and complex calculus of legitimacy (are you a “credentialed scholar?”), authenticity (“do you represent the tribal government?”), and power (“might you wish to fund our operations or my research?”). Imagining this public and their interests is a primary focus for the archivist. Doing so in the present entails critically thinking about the relationships between the explicit institutional archival mission to preserve a record of the past, and the deep historical complicity of that mission in legitimating the elimination or marginalization of certain people from that past, their descendants’ exclusion from participation in determining the meaning of the past in the present, and their communities’ rights to reclaim or re-interpret the treasures we claim to be holding safely for the future.
My arguments in this chapter also demand that I say explicitly that many of us make good livings managing ethnographic archives, and that my talk of complicity is not just addressed to a general “archivist” subject. I thus include myself when invoking the terms “archivist” and “anthropologist.” Acknowledging our personal complicity in the structures I criticize here is necessary, even (especially) if we approach such work with an intention to decolonize our professions, to recognize emergent historical claims to the archive, or to right what we have come to see as the ethical and technical failures (and in some cases, even the crimes) of our predecessors.
For the remainder of this chapter, I will turn to a more concrete and narrow exercise: an analysis of a series of documents in which the “ownership” of a collection of field recordings I now manage, made by a single collector over a 30-year period in the mid-twentieth century, was asserted, defined, specified, claimed, transferred, sold, resold, divided up, and dispersed: the archive of the archive. The broader history of these documents and their assertions is vastly beyond my scope here, although I will try to address it prospectively.
My focus will be on a series of transactions and representations that came well after the sounds of Indigenous performers that are now “owned” by Columbia University were first inscribed on acetate or aluminum discs or ferrous-oxide coated reel-to-reel tapes, or more recently on CDs and hard drives and cloud-storage backup servers. This is one piece – albeit an important one for thinking past the metanarratives I described above – of a holistic critical historical analysis that must invoke the multiple temporalities and geographies that intersect in the ethnographic archive. A complex unfolding of related events, practices, and agencies produced (and continue to produce) the modern ethnomusicological sound archive.4
I am concerned primarily with the phase of the cycle during which a single collector’s work, much of it conducted in “drive by” fashion, among people of whom she had little real knowledge, wound up dignified with a high-priced sale and became an institutional research collection at one of the world’s leading universities. Specifically, I am interested in contracts that defined the boundaries of the object being “purchased,” and the arguments produced that continued to reshape those boundaries in the mountains of memoranda, minutes, and personal correspondence that produced those contracts.
My aim is to show here how Laura Boulton’s recordings were constituted as a collection, and thence as “non-profit” intellectual property through a messy process from which many people and institutions have benefited. Moreover many other agendas and goals and desires that shaped this conversion of Boulton’s recordings to “The Laura Boulton Collection of Traditional and Liturgical Music, in the Center for Ethnomusicology, within the Department of Music, at Columbia University in the City of New York” were left unstated, justified rhetorically by an appeal to the ethnographic archive as having self-evident scholarly and publicity value, and to the intentions of a “non-profit” enterprise as an Ivy League university as above suspicion. Virtually no person or institution involved in the construction of the “Laura Boulton Collection,” over a period of many decades, at Columbia and other institutions alike, and not excepting Boulton herself, ever approached the constitution of the “Laura Boulton Collection” without a personal agenda unrelated to the contents of the archive, and in most cases unrelated to the value of the archive for the stated purpose of its creation, disinterested scientific research and teaching.
Since 2003, I have been the institutional gatekeeper5 of the Laura Boulton Collection of Traditional and Liturgical Music (hereafter LBCTLM, or just “The Boulton Collection,” as it is widely but confusingly known, given the existence of different, if overlapping, “Boulton collections” at two other institutions). The Boulton Collection is an archive of several thousand hours of recordings housed in Columbia University’s Center for Ethnomusicology, in the form of reel-to-reel tape copies of original master discs now at the Library of Congress (on “permanent loan” from Columbia), and in the form of hard drives full of digital data on my office desk, and existing in a nearly (but not perfectly) duplicate set of tapes at Indiana University’s Archives of Traditional Music, to which Boulton left her estate, including her personal tape copy of her collection.
Boulton, born Laura Craytor in 1899 in Ohio, and educated to the BA in Music at Denison College, had parlayed an amateur interest in recording what she thought of as “primitive” and “ancient” music into a wide-ranging career as a public intellectual, author, filmmaker, and lecturer – or as she later memorably described herself, a “Music Hunter” (Boulton 1969). She traveled widely and recorded, filmed, and photographed in dozens of Indigenous communities. She wrote and spoke with commanding assurance about a wide range of cultures she had encountered, but possessed very little anthropological expertise.
She was a fine performer, however, with a theatrical bearing in person and in prose, and something of a mid-century self-made American type. She had a strong ability to project herself heroically into dramatic stories of life among the “primitives,” to draw recognizably stereotyped (if often affectionately patronizing) caricatures of Indigenous people with her descriptions, and to deploy other tropes and conventions of mid-century American travel writing, film, and photography, then still a male-dominated enterprise in which she stood out as a woman.
Boulton was many things, a public intellectual, a travel writer and filmmaker, and performer, but she was not an academic. Her correspondence6 reveals that she was generally resentful of the economic and prestige-earning success of her academic counterparts in the music-collecting business, but barely interested in their more theoretical questions about why different cultures had different musics and what musical styles might reveal about those cultures’ values and histories that other idioms of expression might not. Her haphazard methods, her limited theoretical understandings of cultural difference and change, her constant need to scrabble for funding or lecturing gigs by flattering rather than challenging the prejudices of her sponsors and audiences, her willingness to speculate and confabulate to emphasize her own importance and her bravery in obtaining her recordings, all prevented her from engaging in more than facile ways with the developing field of academic ethnomusicology. This is despite having extensive contact with its pioneering practitioners from the early 1930s and onward.7 Her commitments were to breadth over depth, to comparison over ethnography, to rigid distinctions between traditional and modern cultural practices, and for the explanation of human cultural difference and “primitive” cultures in broadly evolutionary and natural historical terms.
To the extent that her work had a scholarly basis, it was the late nineteenth-century Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft of Erich M. Von Hornbostel and Carl Stumpf, centered as that paradigm was on developing and analyzing the ethnographic archive in service of comparative, evolutionist, and naturalistic psychological explanations for cultural difference (Christensen 1991; Reed 1993). Comparative musicology proposed to examine the relationship between cultural difference and differences in formal elements of musical style, in search of a non-linguistic approach to the question of the universality (or non-universality) of the human mind. Psychological dispositions specific to (racialized) cultural groups were thought to be uniquely discoverable through the decontextualized technical and transcription-based analysis of variations in musical style. These views were already anachronistic, at the level of scholarly theories of cultural and musical difference, by the time Boulton began her recording career in the 1930s.
But despite corresponding with many figures in academic anthropology, folklore, and ethnomusicology, Boulton had little knowledge of the scholarship they were producing, or the way the function of sound archives was changing as ethnomusicology became institutionalized within American university music departments during the 1950s and 60s. And indeed, the comparativist and evolutionist framework invoked in Boulton’s rhetoric was sustained in the academic setting of the 1960s, when her engagement with Columbia occurred. The academic institutionalization of ethnomusicology within music departments (rather than anthropology departments) ensured its continuing relevance to the discipline’s legitimacy in the Eurocentric and score-fetishizing American musical academy.
Beginning in the early 1950s, Boulton had begun to seek out academic employment to work on her collection. From her correspondence it is clear that she had also begun to think of the products of her collecting work as an economic asset under her ownership as intellectual property even earlier. Her communication with several attorneys in the 1940s begun as she proceeded to produce commercial recordings and sign royalty agreements with Folkways Records (and other publishers) throughout the 1950s. The important point here is that the conception of these recordings as an intellectual property asset was in Boulton’s mind during the period of her most prolific recording efforts.
By the early 1960s, entering her sixth decade, Boulton had become less able to travel the world with her gear and retinue, and was palpably tired of the constant hustle to raise funds and find supporters. Having accumulated a hoard of recordings, photographs, films, books, musical instruments, and notes from her travels, and having tasted the success of monetizing recordings for Folkways Records, while also keenly observing the remarkable emergence of ethnomusicology as a discipline in the booming Cold War US academy, Boulton looked for a “patron” whose support could bring this material together and secure her legacy, fame – and retirement.
PhD programs in ethnomusicology were created at UCLA, Wesleyan University, and Indiana University (with many others following quickly) in the early and mid-1960s, each centered on a comparative sound archive as a primary program asset and a necessity for the training of ethnomusicologists for research. Despite the cultural relativist trajectory of the fledgling subdiscipline, it asserted continuity with the comparative paradigm of Von Hornbostel, especially at the level of methods, emphasizing the importance, for training graduate students at least, of transcribing diverse styles of music from archival recordings as a primary research technique. The persistent emphasis on comparison, music transcription and analysis, and scientific archive building, remained as a European influence on the American discipline well into the last years of the last century, reflecting an intertwined and sometimes fraught relationship between “anthropological” and “musicological” emphases within the field that persists to this day.8
Much of this dynamic, in which the colonial ethnomusicological research archive was centrally figured and constructed as an essential asset for a forward-looking program of music research, is owed to the pioneering discipline-building influence of Hungarian ethnomusicologist and anthropologist George Herzog (1901–1983). Herzog, a student of both Von Hornbostel and Boas, pursued a career-long goal of replicating the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv in the United States (Christensen 1991), beginning at Columbia and Yale during the 1930s and 40s, and later fully realized with his efforts to found the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University (hereafter, IUATM) beginning in the late 1940s. The IUATM would in fact go on to become the pre-eminent ethnomusicological archive in North America, and a vitally important institution for the discipline.9
By the early 1960s, Boulton (who had recorded under Herzog’s supervision in 1933) was shopping her “collection,” which she often represented as including instruments, photos, films, and books as well as recordings, with her services as curator hopefully attached, to various universities and wealthy friends in search of a sinecure. She had also begun a romantic involvement with the wealthy and recently widowed New York architect and painter Julian Clarence Levi (1874–1971), then the oldest living alumnus of Columbia University’s undergraduate College.
It was due to Levi’s significant financial influence on Columbia – and in turn to Boulton’s significant emotional influence on Levi – that “The Boulton Collection” became for the first time recognized as a single entity, a unitary bundle of diverse yet somehow comparable objects, with uniform underlying property rights belonging to the recordist, that could thus be purchased from the recordist as a “collection,” which is to say as her intellectual property.
The LBCTLM was formally constituted as a research archive belonging to Columbia University in a purchase agreement with the collector first executed by all parties in June 1962, with a date of sale set in 1964 (first January, later extended to March). Boulton and her collection were initially to be under the aegis of the Columbia Libraries, and remained so until late 1964. The Center for Ethnomusicological Studies (later Center for Studies in Ethnomusicology, then Center for Ethnomusicology), with Boulton as its inaugural curator, was subsequently constituted as the institutional home of the collection within the Department of Music in February 1965 by a (second) vote of the senior faculty of the Department.
The story of Columbia’s pursuit of the collection – or rather of Levi’s money by means of the collection – unfolds over several years, beginning with a 1962 agreement that the University would acquire Boulton’s collection including:
“notes concerning it and all [her] right, title, and interest [and] a transcription of [her] notes describing each recording in the collection to the satisfaction of Columbia University” for the price of “$5,000 of February 15 and August 15 of each year during [her] lifetime”
(Letter from Stanley Salmen to Laura Boulton, June 14, 1962 [IUATM, CE 029a-b])
The sale was announced in advance of the signing of the agreement in the New York Times, on May 23, 1963, referring to the $150,000 purchase price, in the name of the late Alice Fries Levi, as a “gift to the Music Department” of a collection containing “over 15,000 selections.” The final sale agreement, executed in June, also provided Boulton with an unsalaried appointment. Instead, she was separately compensated from the purchase of her collection with Levi’s money, invested in an annuity for her and with the title “Curator” of what was then being called “The Laura Boulton Collection of Traditional and Exotic Music.” The initial date of transfer of ownership was set as January 1, 1964, at which point the University Libraries expected Boulton to complete work cataloging the “collection” thus enumerated and then to assimilate the collection into the library system’s holdings.
During the intervening 18 months, Boulton was to be compensated with $1,000 a month (around $8,000 in 2015 dollars)10 for her “consulting services” and a “lease” of the collection by the University. The eventual transfer was then postponed, to March of 1964, in a revised letter of agreement which specifically states that Boulton would “transfer title” to the recordings at that time. This revision was necessary after Boulton failed to meet the January deadline which also meant she was paid for 21 months of consulting. The letter, from Salmen, stated that the University “understand[s] from you that you are the owner of the collection of recorded music described by you as the Laura Boulton Collection of Traditional and Exotic [sic] Music. This letter will express the agreement of the Trustees of the . . . University . . . [to] purchase your collection, and your agreement to sell your collection together with any notes concerning it and all your right, title, and interest thereto,” before going on to reiterate the same financial terms as the earlier agreement (Letter from Salmen to Boulton, Jan. 17, 1964 [IUATM, CE059a-b]).
In the intervening two years, during which the collection was “leased” from Boulton by Columbia, Boulton was initially placed under the supervision of the Columbia University Libraries. She chafed at oversight from professional librarians, who showed little respect for her amateurism either. Boulton’s ambition was to establish a Center to house the collection and form a base for her own work. Evidently she also saw this as a way to maintain control over the collection after it ceased being her legal property. Her initial location in the Libraries (not the Music Department) quickly and predictably generated conflict that threatened the entire enterprise she envisioned.
By as early as late 1963, Boulton and Levi put pressure on the University administration to move her appointment fully into the Department of Music. Here she had a nominal ally in Prof. William Rhodes, who was interested in building a graduate program in ethnomusicology and was shrewd enough to see an angle in the courting of Levi on behalf of the administration. This was a view he shared with Prof. Jack Beeson, who was Acting Chair of the Music Department in 1963–1964.11 The Music Department’s senior faculty however initially resisted absorbing the Boulton enterprise, largely out of concern over Boulton’s amateurism and Levi’s heavy-handed influence. But in early 1965, Levi proposed to the administration and the Department that they revisit the question of a separate Center within the Music Department. In a new twist, Levi would offer full financial support with a second major gift, while the proposed Center could develop plans to seek external foundation funding and pursue new acquisitions for its archives.
On February 16, 1965, Prof. William Mitchell persuaded his senior colleagues to vote in support of the Center, after Levi committed a significant additional amount of funding to the enterprise, now to be called “The Center for Ethnomusicological Studies” with a planned affiliated graduate program. This was the Department’s main local interest in the acquisition which was to be governed very strictly by a committee of faculty. Rhodes and Mitchell persuaded their colleagues that the situation could be controlled and bring many new assets into the Department, both directly from Levi and indirectly from the administration.
In summary, and as I have described elsewhere in further detail (Fox 2014), this sequence of events – the purchase of a “research collection” from Boulton, and the subsequent negotiations that led to the establishment of a special Center in the Department of Music (the oldest and among the most distinguished such departments in the US) – was a pretext understood by all parties as focused on satisfying a wealthy alumnus. Administrators and faculty members, despite their misgivings about the scholarly value of the project, allowed this alumnus to purchase the Laura Boulton Collection on behalf of the University, with the proceeds from the sale going to Ms. Boulton. Levi’s money – what he spent up front on the collection and in subsequent years greasing the skids at Columbia to install Boulton as Curator of a new Center (around $250,000 between 1962 and 1970),12 and the much larger sum he eventually left the University when he died in 1971 ($4.8 million)13 – created the motivation and the institutional political context in which Boulton’s collection could become an “archive.” From the outset of these discussions it was imagined as an “asset” and an investment with very little regard to its contents.
The strategy for the University was in having the archive as an archive. It was not very interested in what it contained as such an archive was increasingly irrelevant to the enterprise of ethnomusicology as it had taken shape by the late 1960s which centered around ethnographic field research rather than archival analysis. But the archive’s acquisition would nonetheless establish Columbia’s foothold in the emerging discipline.
The University’s administration was seeking to profit to the tune of millions of dollars from flattering Mr. Levi, and looking for a partner in doing so. The Music Department was willing to go along for a cut of the eventual action that would fund the creation of a new PhD program in ethnomusicology for which the Center and the Boulton Collection were projected as key assets. Clarence Levi was primarily interested in helping Boulton achieve the recognition she sought. As Boulton wrote in a grandiose 1963 essay entitled “I Search for Ancient Music,” and published in Columns, the journal of the Friends of Columbia’s Libraries, as an accompaniment to an announcement of Columbia’s initial acquisition of the Laura Boulton Collection:
When I began, there was no word for the specialization which I chose, but now if you look in a new dictionary, you may find the term “Ethnomusicologist.” My interest has been, and still is, centered in people and their music; not just to analyse the music, but to see how it functions in their lives, the role it plays in work, in worship, and in every emotional aspect of society, primitive and exotic. My collection, said to be one of the largest private ones of its kind, has become invaluable to students in all parts of the world, because there is so much music and documented information in it which can never be recorded again.
(Boulton 1963:13)
Laura Boulton craved legitimation commensurate with her self-aggrandizing view of her work. Nearly everyone involved in the history of Boulton’s relationship with Columbia, with the exception of Boulton and Levi themselves, saw Ms. Boulton as an amateur collector at best, and a theatrical fraud at worst, peddling what Columbia faculty member and ethnomusicologist Nicholas England (a prominent scholar of West African music) called a “travelogue through exotica” in a disparaging private memo to his colleagues on the senior faculty prior to their February 1965 meeting to vote on whether to accept Boulton and her new Center in exchange for Levi’s money.14
England (and pioneering sociomusicologist Paul Henry Lang) were the lone dissenting voices on the faculty. England’s senior colleagues supported the administration out of their own interest in gaining the resources needed for a graduate program in his discipline. For this they all agreed to a fiction: that this collector’s “travelogue” was a systematic academic “archive” produced by an expert on musics which could be transformed into an asset worthy of Columbia University and sufficient to make Columbia competitive in the emergent subdiscipline of ethnomusicology. Of course, this involved projecting, successfully as it turned out, what would happen once Levi died and his major bequest came in. The Oct. 14 1971 edition of the New York Times called it “one of the largest gifts in the University’s history.”
It is perhaps unsurprising, but nonetheless worthy of note, that in the voluminous meta-archive of letters, memoranda, proposals, draft contracts, fundraising plans and appeals, and meeting minutes related to this phase of Columbia’s acquisition and consolidation of the Laura Boulton Collection as a scholarly research archive, there is not one single mention of the people whose voices are recorded in the Collection, or their descendants, as either stakeholders or beneficiaries of the Collection. They remain an utterly voiceless abstraction to all of the parties engaged in this process, including Boulton herself. Indeed, they were irrelevant to the whole enterprise.
For lack of space, I can only briefly rehearse the next phase of the consolidation of the Laura Boulton Collection as intellectual property, and its dispersal. Boulton installed herself in the new Center in the Music Department beginning in 1965, titled as the Curator, then Director, then Curator Emeritus (after she reached the mandatory retirement age in 1970) of the Center. She toiled for several years annotating the collection, publicizing the Center, lobbying for budgetary resources, and devoting most of her energies to writing an autobiography based on her extensive review of her field notes and material titled The Music Hunter (1969). But Boulton had a personality that agitated others which produced frequent conflicts with faculty members, and led eventually to the University bringing in (at England’s suggestion) a consultant to inventory the Collection, assess whether its contents matched Boulton’s representations of it during the sale, and examine her archival practice. The person brought in to do this was Prof. Dieter Christensen, a trained archivist who had worked under Von Hornbostel’s student Marius Schneider at the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv.
Christensen applied his professional perspective to the situation and asserted that Boulton was alienating (or withholding) significant parts of the collection she had represented as included in the sale. She had structured the sale in increments for tax purposes which allowed her to postpone the transfer of her instruments, photographs, and books. The report also suggested that Boulton’s skills as a recordist, archivist, and amateur ethnomusicologist were inadequate to the job she occupied. It also acknowledged that Columbia had no facilities for proper preservation of the original acetate and aluminum discs, let alone for adding new acquisitions to the archives. The report questioned Boulton’s frequent public representations of the Collection as a world-class archive by comparing the Collection unfavorably with competing institutions’ holdings and challenging many of the objective representations Boulton had made about the Collection’s contents. In a cover letter to the report, addressed to Beeson, Christensen scathingly concluded that “any change in the structure and function of the Collection can be implemented only in the absence of Dr. Boulton . . . because any qualified ethnomusicologist would find it hard to attempt this task in her presence” (Center for Ethnomusicology Administrative Files, Document 027a-c, submitted January 22, 1971).
Christensen’s 1971 report, held in the private files of the Center for Ethnomusicology, which limits its accessibility, recommended the University hire an academically trained, professorial rank archivist if it had any hopes of converting this asset into the basis for a solid graduate program in ethnomusicology. Unsurprisingly, and again illustrative of the competing agendas of all parties in the making of this archive, Christensen himself presented the ideal candidate. The report and the denigration of Boulton served very particular interests and it is hard to know if Boulton was quite as incompetent as she was made out to be by these men of privilege intent on deposing her. In 1972 within a year of the report and following the 1971 death of Clarence Levi and his nearly $5 million bequest to the University, Christensen was hired with tenure and Boulton was forced to depart. She left for retirement in Arizona, where she nursed, perhaps understandably, a grudge against Columbia University that would be posthumously expressed in the disbursal of her estate.
In the intervening thirty years, Christensen led the development of a PhD program in ethnomusicology and devoted considerable efforts to organizing, growing, and modernizing the Boulton Collection, pursuing new acquisitions and a systematic cataloging strategy and then a systematic digitization strategy in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But most importantly, he convinced the University that the value of the Boulton Collection lay not in the physical recordings, but in their content as the University’s intellectual property. This followed directly the same logic that Boulton had leveraged – that the recordings constituted her intellectual property, which was alienable, an asset that could be sold. This inspired two further inflections in the status of Boulton’s recordings.
In correspondence between March and May of 1973, with Associate Provost Robert Brookhart, Christensen discussed a plan to transfer the original master discs in the Boulton Collection to the Library of Congress. This transfer had been initiated prior to her leaving by Boulton as the Curator of the collection, although she lacked official authorization. Although he was brought in following a damaging report that raised questions about Boulton’s legitimacy as a curator, surprisingly Christensen fully concurred with the planned transfer. He wrote to Brookhart explaining that “the value [of the Collection] resides in the recorded information, not in the physical carrier of the information,” and emphasizing that while the materials would be on “permanent loan” to the Library of Congress, “the University retains all rights etc. in the recordings.” He further added that “the material value of the discs is negligible once the information has been duplicated” (Christensen to Assoc. Provost Brookhart, May 8, 1973, held in the Center for Ethnomusicology’s private files).
The Library of Congress’s Archive of Folk Song, under Director Alan Jabbour, had different ideas. They resisted Columbia’s terms of ownership, understanding that this constituted a restriction on the users of the materials at the Library. When Christensen advised Brookhart, in March of 1973, to insist on the University’s maintenance of intellectual property rights following the proposed transfer, Boulton responded to Brookhart’s inquiry about maintaining the University’s ownership rights by saying she did not recognize the authority of the Music Department over the management of her collection. Indeed, it is possible to detect a subtext in the documents of this period that the Department, Christensen, and the administration were actively colluding to make Boulton’s continued involvement with Columbia, even as Director Emeritus, intolerable.
Jabbour eventually accepted the deposit under the stipulation, as written by Christensen, that the recordings would remain “the property of the Trustees of CU under the supervision of the Curator of the Laura Boulton Collection in the Department of Music,” and that the Library of Congress would make high-quality tape duplicates of the collection, including one for the collector and two for the University (Draft Agreement between CU and LoC, May 1, 1973 [Center for Ethnomusicology Private Files, 035a-e]).
In June of 1973, final agreement between Boulton, Columbia University and the Library of Congress was reached. Boulton agreed to cease her involvement with Columbia’s management of her recordings, and took much of her original collection with her, but not taking the copyright in it. In a letter of agreement she signed with Brookhart, she agreed to end her relationship with Columbia, and to the following stipulation concerning the ownership of her Collection:
The Collector recognizes that the University owns all right, title and interest, including the copyright, in the Laura Boulton Collection of Traditional and Liturgical Music, consisting of original recordings (tapes, discs, wax cylinders) purchased by the University by agreements dated June 14 1962 and Jan. 27, 1964.
(Brookhart to Boulton, June 6, 1973; [IUATM; CE 036])
This agreement sharply reduced the original 1962 terms of sale to include only Boulton’s actual field recordings excluding the roughly 200 tracks she had already published commercially on 11 albums released through Folkways Records in the 1950s, and no other parts of her archival collection. It also granted Boulton exclusive rights to use the recordings for her own activities, including publication, with due credit given to Columbia, and provided “no action is taken that shall diminish the university’s rights, including the copyright.” In a very controlling stipulation the University stated that it required the Library of Congress to inform Columbia even if “a person wishes to publish on material in the Boulton Collection” and agreed that it will refer such persons to Boulton for consultation as well. The agreement specifically stipulated that it terminated “with the death of the collector” and that “no rights under this agreement shall accrue to [the collector’s] heirs, executors, administrators, assigns, or successors.”
This document would seem, bearing Boulton’s signature as it does, to end the matter of ownership. But in fact, it did not do so. Boulton created a personal foundation to hold her assets in her last years, to be administered after her death by her long-time assistant, Shirley Porter. However, at the time, in 1973, this seemed to close the matter from Columbia’s point of view. Christensen took over as Director of the Center, the master recordings went to Washington, DC, where they were duplicated on to several sets of 7.5ips ¼” reel-to-reel tapes, two of which went to Columbia University, and one to Laura Boulton herself under the terms of the agreement of June 8, 1973, which stipulated: “It is agreed that Columbia University shall retain all rights to the [Boulton] Collection, including exclusive rights to publication of verbatim transcription of speech and music contained therein” (Draft Agreement, June 1, 1973 [IUATM; CE 035d]).
I pause to note that this is a remarkable assertion of rights for a purportedly scholarly archive, prohibiting not only the duplication of recordings without permission, but even proscribing the transcription and analysis of their contents. The University literally retained the right to prevent quotation from the recordings, which is an assertion of ownership of the underlying intellectual property on the recording, and quite a different matter from prohibiting the publication and sale of copies of the recording as such. As indefensible as it might be, Columbia’s 1973 contractual understanding with a branch of the United States Government was that the University in fact owned the underlying compositions encoded on easily duplicated recordings, by virtue of having bought the recordings from their recordist.
To bring my story forward nearly to the present, briefly, when Boulton died in Arizona in October 1980, she was in possession of a complete tape copy of the recordings “owned” by Columbia, supplied to her by the Library of Congress under the terms of its 1973 agreement with Columbia. She also retained many musical instruments, thousands of books and hundreds of photographs, and many thousands of items of correspondence and documentation of her work and life – she was an obsessive collector, not only of music, but of every record and document of her own doings. Her assets, including money from the sale of her recordings to Columbia, were left in trust to the Laura Boulton Foundation. Shirley Porter diligently carried out Boulton’s intention to deliver all of her materials to the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music then under the direction of the most eminent pioneer in ethical management of ethnomusicological archives, Anthony Seeger. To this day, IUATM receives royalty payments from the sale of her Folkways (now Smithsonian Folkways) Records albums, a modest amount that is of little consequence to a major research university, but that nonetheless has never found its way to the descendants or communities of the people she recorded.
Nevertheless, because Columbia asserted its ongoing ownership over the portion of the Boulton Collection which Columbia had duly purchased in 1962–1964, and to which it had retained rights in the permanent loan to the Library of Congress in 1973, and because Boulton’s personal collection included her copy of the same recordings, Indiana University and Columbia University have had to come to an agreement about future use of and access to those recordings at IUATM. According to Columbia and its legal counsel the majority constitute Columbia’s intellectual property which they became the day Columbia purchased them as a “collection” in 1962. These negotiations have produced their own documentary trail, which again reflects individual (Seeger’s and Christensen’s) and generationally distinct views of the nature of traditional music as intellectual property (Christensen 2002; Seeger 2001). The negotiations resulted eventually in a key document that remains the template for relations between the institutions that now hold Boulton’s recordings. In an “Instrument of Gift” executed on January 22, 1990, between the Boulton Foundation, the Trustees of Indiana University, and the Library of Congress, Boulton’s “Tape Collection,” bequeathed with her Foundation’s assets to Indiana University, is described as a separate entity from the “Laura Boulton Collection” at Columbia and the Library of Congress, even though there is extremely substantial overlap between the two sets. It sets elaborate but generous rules concerning access, use, and commercial licensing for the Tape Collection at Indiana University (a public institution with a mandate to serve all citizens of its state equally, which applies to library access of all sorts). The Instrument of Gift specifically “transfers title to the intellectual and intangible property . . . and to the physical possession of the originals” of the collection from the Foundation (which arguably holds no such title, Boulton having sold it to Columbia in 1962, for many of the recordings). The agreement goes on to transfer all of Boulton’s remaining master recordings (which however do not overlap the Columbia set) to the Library of Congress, which in turn disclaims specifically in its portion of the agreement that its acceptance of the gift of the physical tapes “shall be construed as a conclusive determination by the Library that the University and/or the Foundation do in fact possess such literary property . . . in these materials.” While this may have been boilerplate language, it is remarkable for being the very first instance where a lawyer involved in a transaction around this collection expressed any doubt whatsoever about the legitimacy of the collector’s initial claim to the intellectual property rights they contained. And still, at this point, no party had yet raised any concern with the interests of the participants in these recordings and their descendants (although Seeger would shortly go on to become a champion of such interests as the Director of Smithsonian Folkways Records).
Christensen, on behalf of Columbia University, initially objected strenuously to this agreement as Shirley Porter began to work it out with IUATM in the late 1980s. In a series of letters with Seeger, also held in the private files of the Center for Ethnomusicology, Christensen asserts Columbia’s ongoing claim to original intellectual property rights, and Columbia’s ability to impose terms on the publication of these materials, if not on the access policies of its fellow archiving institutions. In subsequent years, archivists at all three institutions would come to accept an informal arrangement whereby IUATM or the Library of Congress would contact Christensen to authorize what were the very few scholarly uses of the Boulton materials that led to any sort of publication.
The agreement was tested in 1994, when Smithsonian Folkways (then headed by Seeger) sought Columbia’s permission to include Navajo songs Boulton had recorded in 1933 and 1940, in Chicago and in New Mexico and Arizona, on a lavishly produced CD. Christensen agreed to license the songs at no charge, noting that the recording was being curated by the two leading ethnomusicological specialists on Navajo music and had certain educational value, with Columbia given due credit in the CD’s insert booklet. It has since been invoked several more times for small projects using the archive. But it remains mostly a vaguely recalled structure, and until my own repatriation work with the Boulton archive began, very little scholarly interest was attracted to the Boulton materials during the 1980s or 1990s.
A few years later, it was that CD of Navajo songs which ended up triggering the recognition of the voice of Pablo Wellito, a celebrated Navajo healer, by his granddaughter and great-granddaughters in 2002. The liner notes in the CD led one of those great-granddaughters to the door of my office, as the newly installed Director of the Center for Ethnomusicology. That experience, in my first months in charge of the Laura Boulton Collection, initially set me on the agenda of repatriating the collection, which is the next phase of the tale I have been relating here.
Initially inspired by the idea that Columbia’s ownership of the recordings as intellectual property meant that Columbia could also in fact return rights, or devolve its ownership to communities of origin, I soon learned that the law provides weak possibilities for challenges to its paradigm in such domains. Columbia’s “ownership” of these recordings rested, firstly, on its simple possession of the recordings and its power to aggregate funding, and secondly on a series of fictions about the importance, value, and conditions of production of the Boulton Collection, and thirdly and most profoundly, on a hunger for funding and an obsequiousness before wealth that had prominent scholars and administrators checking their professional and intellectual standards at a wealthy donor’s door. I have discovered that any attempt to interrogate these “rights” yet again can cause them to crumble to brittle bits like an old acetate disc. I have learned that partner institutions have their own understandings of the agreements, of the law and their own legally mandated missions.
A critical perspective on such collections and archives starts by questioning the legitimacy of the archive’s claims to ownership of culture. It proceeds to show how the materials in these collections were not transformed into private intellectual property for any reasons related to the stewardship of their contents, and certainly not with any consideration of the interests of their real creators and those people’s descendants and communities. Instead, they were transformed into intellectual property to create economic value, in exactly the same process that commercial recording companies and publishers have used to mine oral traditions. Their status as intellectual property in Western terms allowed collectors like Boulton to legally alienate traditional cultural expressions from their original contexts.
Through community-based and directed work, of which “repatriation” is only an initial step, a growing number of archivists and scholars, of whom an increasing number identify as Indigenous, are at least now trying to discover who “really” owns these sounds and ideas. This has entailed critical examination of the legal principles and theories of property rights under which any particular assertion of ownership might be made, whether as a general phenomenology of cultural mediation, or as a hegemonic intention to appropriate a particular expression, or as a way of absolving ourselves of the responsibilities that come with assumption of rights.
The laws of intellectual property have rarely, if ever, been available as an instrument of justice for Indigenous musicians and their communities except in occasional tokenistic ways, whether rights under those laws are exercised by commercial or non-profit or scientific interests. Intellectual property law has, instead, primarily been an instrument of appropriation and theft, and not only in the immediate sense, but in the perpetuation of stereotypes of Indigenous people and cultures as in need of protection under laws that have rarely served their interests, no less than our predecessors talked about their cultures as something that could be salvaged for science (Anderson and Christen 2013). Moving forward into an era of honesty about the colonial archive’s deeper history, and being similarly honest about the motivations and realities of “non-profit” activities purportedly serving the public good, are necessary correctives if the archive is to become a site for the advancement of social justice.
I have argued here, in the context of a complex tale of the creation and subsequent transformation of one particular collection of traditional music, that ethnomusicological sound archives are the products of dense and tangled histories of personalities, agendas, interests, constraints, and shifting legal and ethical frameworks surrounding such entities. As these factors accumulate over time, and come into conflict, they in turn change the meaning of the archive itself, and the possibilities for its use for research, teaching, remembrance, and cultural revival. Such histories are often undetectable in the presentation of archival objects themselves, instead remaining submerged in the documentation that constitutes any given archive as a legally defined entity, and in the memories and actions of a diverse range of participants – an “archive of the archive” that recedes from view as time passes, or that requires extraordinary levels of access and research effort to recover. In addition to the ethical critique advanced in this chapter, the practical implication of my argument is that it is incumbent on contemporary sound archivists to make such efforts, and to publicize their findings, so that future users of such collections can understand the full context in which the meaning and significance of any given archive’s contents has been institutionalized.
For assistance with the Laura Boulton papers at Indiana University’s Archive of Traditional Music, and other documents related to the Indiana/Columbia relationship, I thank Daniel Reed, Alan Burdette, Marilyn Graf, and Suzanne Mudge. For conversations salient to my arguments here, I am also especially grateful to Lauren Amsterdam, Emily Clark, Dieter Christensen, Kenneth Crews, Steven Feld, Robin R. R. Gray, Susan Lepselter, Amanda Minks, Marti Newland, Ana Maria Ochoa, Trevor Reed, Chie Sakakibara, Anthony Seeger, and the elders, leaders, and members (too numerous to list here) of the communities where the Center for Ethnomusicology has participated in repatriation projects since 2003. I regret that I can no longer thank the late Jack Beeson and Shirley Porter, both of whom told me things they didn’t have to reveal in the interest of truth. For painstaking work analyzing and cataloging hundreds of documents, I thank Catherine Mullen, Rachel Meirs, Lauren Amsterdam, and Hannah Rose Baker. For editorial comments on this chapter, I thank Jane Anderson and Ryan O’Byrne. I gratefully acknowledge support for research reported on in this chapter from the United States National Science Foundation Arctic Social Sciences Program and from Columbia University.
1 I will speak here of “archivists” in general, but with primary focus on those of us who manage university- or museum-based collections of media that purport to be “documents” of Indigenous and other “traditional” cultures, and an even more specific attention to the curation of ethnomusicological sound recordings in such settings. I will try to make the sense of the term clear in context, but there are significant differences in the politics and phenomenologies of the archive that pertain to audio-visual materials, text documents, singular physical artifacts, and human remains “collected” from Indigenous communities or lands, all of which are aggregated in museums and archives. In particular, the reproducibility of media would seem to contrast with the discrete singularity of an artifact or human remains. The categorical error involved in this common misperception of both the politics and the phenomenology of music recordings, films, photographs, and text documents (the mistaking of map for territory, in classic logical terms, and in actual historical terms to which it is related, map-making being a primary technology or colonial territoriality) is in many ways the subject of this chapter, the point of which is that “the law” (with respect to intellectual property) constructs myriad and changeable distinctions between maps and territories with a sovereign agency that is rooted in the assumption of historical privilege. Maps are indexes and icons of territories, both metonymically and metaphorically representing territory. But they become territories themselves over time in the archive.
2 And yet, as in all bureaucratic contexts, the personal power that can be exercised at the margins is far more substantial for its ability to invoke or bypass structural obstacles encoded in instruments of formal governance such as explicit access policies.
3 This includes my own public support from the US National Science Foundation.
4 To list only the highlights, such an account would need to attend to the longue durée of the colonial project; to the unfolding of multiple logics of elimination to justify the removal and genocide of Native people; to the conversion of the genocidal project from a military to an administrative one under rubrics of assimilation and forced educational and religious deculturation; to the history of recording of Native people by amateurs and commercial interests; to the professionalization of that practice as folklore, ethnomusicology, and commercial music prospecting; to the development of the scholarly sound archive as a pillar of the ethnomusicological project within the academy; to the sale, appropriation, and exhibition of recordings from within the archive; to the digital transformation of audio storage, manipulation, circulation, and mediation; and to the large-scale contemporary effort among archivists of my generation to “repatriate” these recordings.
5 As Director of Columbia University’s Center for Ethnomusicology 2003–2008 and currently, and as the Center’s archivist in the interim.
6 Boulton carefully preserved her extensive correspondence between the late 1920s and the end of her life; this documentation is housed at the Indiana University Archive of Traditional Music.
7 It is of course true that just being a woman was a significant obstacle to an academic career path in anthropology or ethnomusicology in the mid-twentieth century. In fact, “song-catching” – amateur field recording of traditional or Indigenous musics in a purportedly systematic way – was frequently the alternative path for women with an interest in comparative musicology in the first decades of recording technology’s practical existence. However, several of Boulton’s female contemporaries – most notably Frances Densmore and Helen Roberts – managed to move between public and academic worlds on the basis of similar projects (see Rakhonen 2003).
8 Indeed, it was the strategic decisions taken by Mantle Hood, Bruno Nettl, and even the anthropologists Alan Merriam and David McAllester to align the emergent discipline of American ethnomusicology with deeply Eurocentric departments of music rather than with cultural anthropology. In seeking kinship with archival music historians and analytic music theorists whose singular focus was Western art music, ethnomusicologists were compelled to legitimize their ethnographic practice as rooted in European music scholarship, by emphasizing that they too had an archive, a canon, and an analytic technique, and placed high value on the literate representation of musical sound through a foregrounding of music transcription as a central method.
9 For an important and extended consideration of Herzog’s role in building the IUATM (and American ethnomusicology around the maintenance of the colonial sound archive), see Reed (1993).
10 Around $8,000 a month in 2015 inflation-adjusted dollars, or around $95,000 per year, around the current base salary for a newly hired Associate Professor, for comparison’s sake.
11 I interviewed Prof. Beeson personally about this history in 2004.
12 My estimate of $250,000 is based on $150,000 as the purchase price of the collection in the form of an annuity for Ms. Boulton (that would eventually pay out – at $10,000 a year – at least $200,000 over the remainder of her lifetime, equivalent to around $400,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars). It also includes a $60,000 payment for the operations of the new Center used to soften the Department’s senior faculty who opposed the new Center, and smaller amounts paid out by Levi during the late 1960s to support the Center.
13 At the time, this was the largest individual gift ever made to Columbia, roughly equal to a $30 million gift in 2015.
14 Boulton’s sour relationship with the libraries had led her to prevail upon Levi to intervene, and he did so with both threats and incentives, offering a substantial additional sum to the Music Department ($60,000, or roughly $500,000 in inflation-adjusted 2015 terms) as start-up funding that would benefit the entire department, and intimating that more would soon follow.
Anderson, Jane. 2005. “Indigenous Knowledge, Intellectual Property, Libraries, and Archives: Crises of Access, Control and Future Utility.” Australian Academic and Research Libraries 36(2): 83–94.
Anderson, Jane. 2013. “Anxieties of Authorship in the Colonial Archive” in Media Authorship, C. Chris and D. Gerstner, eds. New York: Routledge, pp. 229–246.
Anderson, Jane, and Kim Christen. 2013. “‘Chuck a Copyright on It:’ Dilemmas of Digital Return and the Possibilities for Traditional Knowledge Licenses and Labels.” Museum Anthropology Review 7(1/2): 105–126.
Boulton, Laura. 1963. “I Search for Ancient Music.” Columbia Library Columns 12(2): 13–22.
Boulton, Laura. 1969. The Music Hunter: The Autobiography of a Career. New York: Doubleday.
Christensen, Dieter. 1973. Unpublished letter to Associate Provost Brookhart, May 8. Columbia University Center for Ethnomusicology Administrative Files.
Christensen, Dieter. 1991. “Erich M. Von Hornbostel, Carl Stumpf, and the Institutionalization of Comparative Musicology” in Comparative Musicology and the Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, Bruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Christensen, Dieter. 2002. “Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv: The First 100 Years.” Music Archiving in the World: Papers Presented at the Conference on the Occasion of the 100th Anniversary of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv. VWB, Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung.
Deloria, Philip J. 2004. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Feld, Steven. 1994. “From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis: The Discourses and Practices of World Music and World Beat” in Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues, Charles Keil and Steven Feld, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 257–289.
Feld, Steven. 1996. “Pygmy POP. A Genealogy of Schizophonic Mimesis.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 28: 1–35.
Feld, Steven. 2000. “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music.” Public Culture 12(1): 145–171.
Fox, Aaron A. 2014. “Repatriation as Re-Animation Through Reciprocity” in The Cambridge History of World Music: Vol. 1 (North America), P. Bohlman, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hopi Cultural Preservation Office. 2013. “Hopi and Zuni Songs Return Home.” Hopi Tumalhoymuy Tutuveniam, September 2013. https://hopimusic.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/htt-september-2013.pdf (accessed 27 March 2017).
Gray, Robin R. R. 2015. “Ts’msyen Revolution: The Poetics and Politics of Reclaiming.” PhD Dissertation, Anthropology. The University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Kreps, Christina. 2013. Liberating Culture: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation, and Heritage Preservation. New York: Routledge.
McMillan, Robert. 1991. “Ethnology and the NFB: The Laura Boulton Mysteries.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 1(2): 67–82.
Morse, Bradford W. 2012. “Indigenous Human Rights and Knowledge in Archives, Museums, and Libraries: Some International Perspectives with Specific Reference to New Zealand and Canada.” Archival Science 12(2):113–140.
Rahkonen, Carl. 2003. “The Real Song Catchers: American Women Pioneers of Ethnomusicology.” Paper presented at the Music Library Association, Women’s Music Round Table, Austin, Texas, February 14. http://www.people.iup.edu/rahkonen/WP/real_song_catchers.htm (accessed 27 March 2017).
Reed, Daniel. 1993. “The Innovator and the Primitives: George Herzog in Historical Perspective.” Folklore Forum 26(1/2): 69–92.
Reed, Trevor. 2009. “Returning Hopi Voices: Toward a Model for Community-Partnered Repatriation of Archived Traditional Music.” MA Thesis. Teachers College, Columbia University, New York.
Reed, Trevor. 2013. “KUYI Hopi Radio Interviews Zuni Elders about Repatriated Songs.” Hopi Music Repatriation Project. https://hopimusic.wordpress.com (accessed 27 March 2017).
Sakakibara, Chie. 2009. “‘No Whale, No Music’: Iñupiaq Drumming and Global Warming.” Polar Record 45(235): 289–303.
Salmen, Stanley. 1964. Unpublished letter to Laura Boulton, January 17. Held in Laura Boulton Papers, Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music, Bloomington, IN.
Seeger, Anthony. 2001. “Intellectual Property and Audiovisual Archives and Collections” in Folk Heritage Collections in Crisis. Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources. http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub96/contents.html/contents.html (accessed 27 March 2017).
Taylor, Timothy D. 2003. “A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery: Transnational Music Sampling and Enigma’s Return to Innocence” in Music and Technoculture, R. Lysloff and L. Gay, eds. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 64–92.
Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8(4): 387–409.
Zemp, Hugo. 1996. “The/An Ethnomusicologist and the Record Business.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 28: 36–56.