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Contribution short abstract

This contribution explores singing-the-archive as a way of making marginalised pasts public. Drawing on my performances of Yiddish songs of the Jewish urban poor, I examine how voice, affect, and public engagement challenge silencing, reshape heritage, and reimagine anthropology’s role.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution reflects on singing-the-archive as a performative method of making marginalised pasts public. Drawing on ethnomusicological research into Yiddish songs of the Jewish urban poor, I explore how singing archival material can function simultaneously as a research practice, public engagement, and ethical intervention. The songs - documenting the lives of thieves, beggars, and especially women subjected to poverty, exploitation, and sex trafficking - were historically marginalised both at the moment of their creation and later through archival silencing and selective heritage-making.

By taking these songs out of the archive and into concerts, workshops, and recordings, I examine how performance becomes a site of collaboration between researcher, historical voices, contemporary audiences and cultural institutions. This process does not aim at historical reconstruction but at relational reactivation: allowing suppressed narratives to circulate anew, embodied through voice, affect, and listening. Singing operates here as a medium that troubles dominant chronologies and sanitized representations of Jewish history, challenging the primacy of elite, male, and heroic pasts in public memory.

The paper situates singing-the-archive at the intersection of applied ethnomusicology, autoethnography, and public anthropology, asking what kinds of knowledge emerge when researchers work across disciplinary boundaries and beyond conventional academic outputs. It also raises questions about restitution and responsibility: what does it mean to “give back” when the original communities are no longer present, and how can collaborations with present-day publics create spaces for ethical remembrance rather than appropriation?