Sharing John Blacking

Abstract

As ethnomusicological collections become accessible to individuals, communities, and institutions beyond the scope of the original collector, their contents are often repurposed, reimagined, and reinformed. With the growing engagement with repatriation by archives, individuals, and institutions, field recordings, fieldnotes, images, and other supporting materials offer tangible and intangible records of musical performance, context, and historical data to scholars and the communities that first offered their music for scholarly research. Drawing from the Vhavenda materials in the John Blacking collection housed at the University of Western Australia, this chapter uses two case studies, on children’s music and musical instruments, to explore some of the myriad issues surrounding the repatriation of a historical ethnomusicological collection. The goal is to help shape how future archivists, scholars, and communities engage with archiving and repatriating ethnomusicological collections.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 29 citations exist upstream.