Afro-Atlantic Voices: Revisiting Lorenzo Dow Turner's 1941 Sound Archives, November 18, 2008
Olivia Gomes de Cunha, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Brazilian anthropologist Olivia Gomes da Cunha spoke of her ongoing work with the Lorenzo Dow Turner (LDT) archives housed both at Indiana University and Northwestern University. Turner was an African-American linguist and sociologist at Fisk University who investigated African "survivals: in Brazil in 1940-1941. He conducted numerous interviews with speakers of Yoruba and other African languages and made extensive recordings of sacred chants, legends, and oral histories, including sessions featuring practitioners of candombé and capoeira. His collection consists of some 52 hours of recorded sound, composed of 329 sound recordings. Since 2000, Dr. da Cunha has been actively involved with the LDT archives. She is at the forefront of a collaborative project between Indiana University's Archive of Traditional Music, where the sound recordings are stored, and the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, to mine the riches of the LDT archives.
In working her way into the holdings, Dr. da Cunha came to the realization that the people of Bahia deserved to hear these voices, to see these photos. She arranged to take samples of the collection to Salvador, Brazil, to share with the descendants of the recordings' informants but found that they were often less interested to hear them than she had suspected they would be.
This result has led her to raise a series of questions about ethnographic archives: what is their value, meaning, and purpose? For whom are they intended? Who are the "owners" of these materials? Critical elements here are how were the materials assembled, and from whom?
The upshot is that Dr. da Cunha's talk presented ethnographic archives as excellent candidates for "an ethnography of the archives." Recognizing that archives are far from neutral places, da Cunha investigates what she refers to as the archives' "borders." Here, in the borders, is where da Cunha examines the role of Turner himself and investigates the process of turning songs, chants, and legends into a collection of recorded documents. As da Cunha pointed out in her talk, Turner's own voice is nearly absent from the recordings; the archives do not contain the questions that elicited the informants' responses. In investigating the impact of Turner's work and in working to understand the various meanings of the archives for the multitude of actors involved, da Cunha then asks: Why are his questions and his voice not included? How do we understand the collection without the questions?
Further insights and queries came to the forefront. Who are the people who tend to talk to outside researchers and how are they positioned in the host community? How does it happen that something like a "tour" gets established, with successive visitors finding themselves in the company of the same set of consultants?
IU professor Dr. Steve Selka served as discussant and he emphasized the value of da Cunha's focus on the process of "archivization." He identified three main questions that Dr. da Cunha"s project can effectively address: 1) How can we look at ethnographic archives as reflecting changes in disciplines and transnational subjectivities? 2) What distinguishes the ethnographic archive from other collections of photos and recordings? 3) What are the practices that authorize these archives?
