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Contribution short abstract:

The Weiss collection includes a large set of papers, dozens of tape recordings, thousands of slides, and some two hundred cultural objects. A named individual may have their manufacture appreciated, be heard singing, read about, and seen, representing an immense opportunity for nuanced repatriation.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper describes the ethnographic collection created by anthropologist Gerald Weiss (1932-2021) in Ashaninka communities of Peru between 1961 and 1980. A large set of papers, dozens of tape recordings, and thousands of slides are currently being preserved at the California Language Archive (University of California, Berkeley; cla.berkeley.edu), with some two hundred additional cultural objects to be housed at the Museo Nacional de la Cultura Peruana (Lima). The papers include diaries, ethnographic field notes, transcriptions of sound recordings of stories and songs, draft manuscripts, and copious secondary notes on topics such as kinship and ethnobiology. The cultural objects are diverse, and were collected under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History, together with many biological specimens already preserved there. The objects relate to the recordings, which relate to the papers and slides in that, because of the meticulousness of Weiss's tags, a named individual may have their manufacture appreciated, be heard singing, read about, and seen, representing an immense opportunity for nuanced repatriation. The collection was necessarily retrieved in haste from Weiss's home following his death. The paper frames this archival acquisition in terms of a broader program of outreach among anthropologists and linguists who have carried out fieldwork in the region, detailing the practicalities of such acquisitions and emphasizing the quantity of cultural heritage material held in private hands, the importance for proactive relationship building, and the need for specialists for the interpretation of the material and the involvement and empowerment of indigenous participants.