Gospel Archiving in Los Angeles: A Case of Proactive Archiving and Empowering Collaborations

Abstract

Often the issue of archives and repatriation is discussed in terms of dichotomous and unequal exchanges between members of a ‘collecting culture’ and ‘collected culture’. As archiving approaches expand, however, a collected culture or, more specifically, groups from within a ‘cultural heritage community’ can themselves be considered community archivists. While not afforded access to modern audiovisual archiving facilities, there are some groups whose responsibility to a community's music culture extends beyond performance and includes various forms of preservation (e.g., collecting audio and visual recordings and storing sheet music). After decades of functioning as ad hoc community archives, privately held collections of amassed recordings and ephemeral materials run the risk of being lost to poor storage and environmental conditions. Founded in 1981 by composer and educator Dr Margaret Pleasant Douroux, the Heritage Music Foundation (HMF) is an example of a performance and outreach organisation within a heritage community that engages in the preservation of audiovisual materials but does not have access to long-term archival facilities. In an effort to promote proactive and communal archiving, the University of California Los Angeles Ethnomusicology Archive acquired a UCLA Community Partnership grant in 2004 for a year-long collaboration with the HMF in a joint archiving and ethnographic video documentation project called Gospel Archiving in Los Angeles (GALA). While serving as the fieldwork project manager for GALA, I experienced the archiving process from several perspectives including as a member of the heritage community. This paper will describe how institutionally supported community archiving programmes can empower cultural heritage communities by assisting their preservation activities as well as increase community awareness and use of institutional archives by the heritage communities themselves.

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