[78-L] TODAY: ARSC Webinar (11/17) on Stewarding Ethnographic Recording

[ARSC Continuing Education Series]

Hi everyone,

A final reminder that *today* the Association for Recorded Sound Collections
<http://www.arsc-audio.org/index.php> invites you to join us for the latest
installment in our Continuing Professional Education series of webinars ––
a roundtable conversation about the stewardship of ethnographic sound
collections. *As always, this program is free and open to the public*.

*ARSC Continuing Education Webinar Series Presents:*

Stewarding Ethnographic Sound Collections


Led by *Alan Burdette, Tami Hohn, Allison McClanahan, Guha Shankar, Alan
Burdette, *and* John Vallier*


*Nov 17, 2022 1PM EST/10AM PST*


To register, click here: https://bit.ly/3G8EvJ4


It began in 1890 with Jesse Walter Fewkes, a zoologist by training,
trekking to Maine with a cylinder recorder. His mission? To "capture"
sounds from the Passamaquoddy Tribe.


The 31 wax cylinders he recorded as part of this expedition are regarded as
the first ethnographic field recordings. In the 130 plus years since then,
anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and linguists have generated troves of
sound recordings documenting the music, languages, and culture of people
from around the globe. Motivations have been many. Some recordists were
spurred on by a desire to "salvage" or save sounds being erased by colonial
encroachment and resulting genocides. Others were concerned with the
"cultural gray-out" brought about by the popular commercialization and
feared homogenization of music. [related: what were the motivations of
native ethnographers/documentarians like Frances LaFlesche?]


Whatever the motivation, many of these collections were deposited in
European and North American sound archives. Framed another way, these
sounds were extracted from communities of origin and housed in locations
that were, practically speaking, inaccessible to many, including those
heard on the recordings.


With this discussion, archivists, curators, and educators from the Library
of Congress, Indiana University's Archives of Traditional Music, and the
University of Washington in Seattle, will discuss the challenges and
opportunities of working with such collections. From murky ethical and
rights related issues to the way in which such recordings can stoke
Indigenous language revitalization projects, please join us for a
discussion about both the perils and promise of ethnographic sound archives
today.


Funded by a grant from the National Recording Preservation Board,
administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources.


*Speakers*


*Alan Burdette* has been the Director of the Indiana University Libraries
Archives of Traditional Music since 2007 where he is responsible for
day-to-day operations and long-term planning. He was part of the planning
team for IU’s large scale media preservation effort (MDPI). He formerly
served as the Executive Director of the Society for Ethnomusicology and as
Director of the EVIA Digital Archive Project, and Associate Director of
IU’s Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities. He holds a Ph.D. in
Folklore and Ethnomusicology from Indiana University, where he currently
also serves as an adjunct professor.


*Guha Shankar *is Folklife Specialist at the American Folklife Center,
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. At the Center he develops a range of
multi-media productions, documentation initiatives and public outreach
programs. He serves as co-director of the Civil Rights History Project, an
initiative to document, preserve and provide access to born-digital oral
histories with activists in the Black Freedom Struggle. He is the
coordinator of Ancestral Voices, a collections management and co-curation
project undertaken in collaboration with indigenous communities. Shankar
conducts workshops in ethnographic research methods and skills-based
training in field documentation in a range of communities and institutions.
His research interests and publications include ethnographic media
production, intangible cultural heritage and intellectual property issues
in indigenous communities, and cultural politics and performance in the
Caribbean. Shankar earned his Ph.D. in 2003 from the Department of
Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin, with a concentration in
Folklore and Public Culture.


*Allison McClanahan* is the Collections and Cataloging Librarian at the
Archives of Traditional Music, where she is responsible for managing public
and technical services. Her duties include reference, library maintenance,
cataloging, collection management, and outreach. She also conducts tours of
the ATM and instruction sessions for courses relevant to the scope of ATM
collections. Allison's research interests include representation and
description of indigenous and marginalized groups in cataloging and
description systems, instruction using ethnographic primary sources,
audiovisual and ethnographic field collection cataloging, and the
intersections of public and technical services in libraries and archives. She
received her Master of Library Science with specializations in music
librarianship and archives & records management from Indiana University
Bloomington in 2016.


*Tami Hohn* (Puyallup) is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University
of Washington (UW) Department of American Indian Studies. In this role she
teaches the Southern Lushootseed language and acts as the first Native
Knowledge In Residence Coordinator for UW’s Center for American Indian and
Indigenous Studies (CAIIS). Hohn joined the Department of American Indian
Studies informally in Autumn 2017 by teaching free, drop-in language
learning and conversation sessions with her colleague Nancy Jo Bob. By the
following Autumn, 2018, Hohn was teaching a year-long for-credit course in
Salish Language. More information about Tami Hohn can be found here:
https://magazine.washington.edu/feature/new-generation-learns-the-puget-sound-regions-native-language-southern-lushootseed/


*John Vallier *is Head of the Ethnomusicology Archives at the University of
Washington (UW) in Seattle. In this role he attempts to steward a
collection of over 50,000 recordings and films documenting global,
regional, and local music traditions. At UW he also teaches on such topics
as remix studies, Seattle music, and the colonial legacy of ethnomusicology
archives. For the next three years he is managing UW's participation in a
collaborative curation project led by Professor Kimberly Christen
(Washington State University) and in partnership with nine Native Tribes.
Before coming to UW, John was the archivist at the UCLA Ethnomusicology
Archive where he led repatriation efforts and helped develop documentation
partnerships with Los Angeles-based non-profits.



We hope to see you there!

-- 
Yuri Shimoda
Dan Hockstein