The organization of the Folkways music collection began with a fixation on a new way of presenting albums as singular artworks that spoke for themselves in a conscious effort to remove Folkways from participating in comparative musicology. More often than not, they did not document the names of artists in favor of looking at composition over culture. By comparing them to the progress of western-style music, the musicologists deemed certain tracks “primitive” or at an earlier “stage” of development. During this era, comparative musicologists analyzed certain musical characteristics, such as elements of composition, for complexity and style. These processes of production reflected musicological practices of the time which focused on in-depth descriptions of music, written as forms of scientific data, in order to measure a community’s “development” in relation to the Western world. As a result, the recordist or the compiler produced albums with whatever level of detail they deemed useful in the liner notes. Music executives, such as Folkways founder Moses Asch, operated on trust in individual relationships between the recordist and artist to produce albums. At ethnomusicology’s inception in the late nineteenth century, recordists set out to preserve what they believed were dying cultures-a very progressive initiative for the time. We engaged with these questions during our summer internship in the hopes of gaining a deeper understanding of the collection.ĭefinitions of ethical standards are subjective in many such cases, as the practices of ethnography and acquisition of recordings evolved rapidly within the fields of anthropology and archival studies. This prompts several questions: how many of these albums were collected under misguided pretenses? Furthermore, how many hold sacred, secret, or personal content that should not be heard by just anyone with a link? How can we, as anthropologists and curators, identify sensitive content? And how many lack artist names or the cultural recognition they are entitled to? Many of those who recorded the tracks are no longer around to provide context and lend additional insight. Some date to the 1930s, when anthropological approaches to ethnography were less culturally sensitive. There are more than 4,000 accessible Indigenous tracks from around the world within the Folkways catalog. Leopold explained the policy: “Shared stewardship (sometimes called ‘co-curation’) refers to sharing authority, expertise, and responsibility for the respectful attribution, documentation, interpretation, display, care, storage, public access, and disposition of a collection item with the advice of the source community.”Ī definition is one thing. In October 2019, Robert Leopold, deputy director for research and collections, wrote “ What is Shared Stewardship? New Guidelines for Ethical Archiving” to highlight the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s commitment to shared stewardship. What does this mean for Smithsonian Folkways? How did this happen, and how can it be prevented in the future?
You enter into a music world, naive of the history and culture it represents because only limited information is available. But that’s all you know about the song, and that’s nearly all there is to know. You select an album in the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings catalog, and your room is flushed with the sounds of “native” drums and flutes.
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