Paper short abstract:

Taking the ethnographic sound collection at the National Museum of Denmark as my point of departure, I will reflect upon the possible challenges to classificatory ethnographic knowledge projects informed by natural history that the unruly voices on the recordings in the collection can pose.

Paper long abstract:

Collection and exhibition practices in ethnographic museums in the 19th and 20th centuries owe to a large extent their classificatory, ordering and hierarchizing efforts to natural history. The large anthropometric endeavours in the late 19th and early 20th century aimed at describing and classifying the peoples of the world were an integral part of this practice, and systematic measurements and descriptions of cranial form, skin tone, eye colour and body shape (etc.) were carried out in a grandiose aim at mapping the world’s population. Eventually and as technology allowed, also photographs and sound recordings became part of the project.

In this paper I will reflect upon the role and position of sound recordings in ethnographic knowledge projects informed by the belief that scientific value to a large extent rested on neat and pure ethnic-racial division and classification of human beings. How – if at all – was it possible to include the individual voices of the recorded people in the efforts to map out the typical? Can the potentially unruly voices featured in the recordings escape or challenge the neatness of the classificatory systems they were collected within?

Taking the ethnographic sound collection at the National Museum of Denmark as my point of departure, I will address which uncertainties in an anthropometric knowledge project that is informed by the logics of natural history the ethnographic sound archive possibly can make visible – or perhaps indeed audible.