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Paper short abstract

Colonial-era sound recordings in European archives have a dual epistemic status: documents of indigenous sonic practices which are also shaped by European disciplines. Framing them as sonic monuments enables a decolonial perspective that foregrounds aesthetic experience as a source of knowledge.

Paper long abstract

Many sound recordings preserved in European archives today were produced in colonial contexts during anthropological expeditions to former colonial territories. As such, they originate from historical fieldwork shaped by highly asymmetrical encounters. How these recordings can and should be engaged with today?

Against this backdrop, the epistemic potential of these recordings is dual in nature. On the one hand, they may document indigenous sonic practices; on the other, they are co-determined by the disciplinary histories of anthropology, musicology, and colonialism. This duality resonates with Erwin Panofsky’s conceptualizations of document and monument. I argue that conceptualizing archival recordings as sonic monuments opens up the possibility of an aesthetic experience that can be productive for archival research, as it allows both epistemic dimensions to resonate with one another. Such an approach can also reanimate archival recordings, which have received little attention until recently. In anthropology, sensory experience and its reflexive engagement have been primarily associated with fieldwork. However, the sonority of the sounding archive calls for a departure from conventional epistemological assumptions that resonates with decolonial approaches. The aesthetic experience of archived recordings renders audible the archive’s gaps, the colonial encounter, distorted indigenous voices, media formats, orders of knowledge, as well as the disciplinary histories of the institutions and disciplines involved. I will address these issues through case studies and argue that engaging with sound archives and their epistemologies not only illuminates disciplinary histories but also contributes to broader contemporary debates on methodologies of archival research.