Archive of the Archive

The Archive of the Archive

The Ethics of Ownership and Repatriation of Indigenous Field Recordings

Aaron Fox will untangle the complex history of the Laura Boulton Collection of Traditional and Liturgical Music, a collection of 1,500 hours of music collected on five continents that was acquired by Columbia University beginning in 1962. Professor Fox explores a “trail of legal agreements, memoranda, correspondence, and contracts that mark the history of the `Laura Boulton Collection’s’ acquisition by Columbia University as intellectual and physical property and the subsequent distribution and management of the associated rights by Columbia, Indiana University, and the Library of Congress.”  Professor Fox will talk about the extraction of the musical heritage of indigenous people and his work to repatriate this music to its ancestral homes.

Free and open to the public. Light lunch served. Aaron Fox’s visit has been arranged in conjunction with the NC Jukebox project, which explores the Frank Clyde Brown collection of musical field recordings from the 1920s and 30s in Western NC. An interdisciplinary team from Duke, UNC, and the Orchards at Alta Pass is exploring the recordings, researching the singers and songs, and representing them to the public through exhibitions at Rubenstein Library, in Western NC, and online. NC Jukebox is a Bass Connections: Information, Society & Culture project led by Trudi Abel, Duke Libraries, and Victoria Szabo, Art, Art History & Visual Studies, and is co-sponsored by the Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Franklin Humanities Institute and Information Science + Studies.