Paper short abstract:

This paper will present cultural and methodological questions that arise out of a project of the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology entitled Archives and Community Partnership carried out in Western Rajasthan and Goa. It will examine the attempt at evolving the archival space from academic use to focus on practitioners and tradition bearers.

Paper long abstract:

Though it has been clichéd to talk of change, and threats to what may be called traditional cultural expressions, or more recently elements of Intangible Cultural Heritage for many decades now due to the influence of mass media, industrialisation and urbanisation, we now talk of globalisation as one of the major factors that has accelerated this change. However we do not think of documentation and research as an intervention , as we identify, attribute authenticity or conduct "fieldwork" to corroborate our hypotheses.

This paper will examine a recently concluded pilot project of the ARCE entitled Archives and Community Partnership which attempted to reverse some of the trends discussed earlier by "bottom up" documentation and archiving of musical traditions working with communities to record what they wished to archive. Archives such as ours have been the preserve of academia, and this project also thus attempted the evolution of the archival space and the role of audio visual recordings from research to practice. I will look at the issues that emerged from this work on the methodology, rights issues, and identity.