Reconstructing, Reinterpreting, and Repatriating Musical Instrument Data in Ethnomusicological Archives

In-depth ethnomusicological research on musical instrument production and use is surprisingly scant. At the same time, field data compiled by ethnomusicologists since the mid-twentieth century, now housed in archives and personal collections around the world, demonstrate that ethnographers amassed considerable information on musical instrument production and use. The John Blacking collection, housed at the University of Western Australia and at Queen’s University in Belfast, holds audio, visual, and manuscript field data on music collected by Blacking in South Africa, Zambia, and Uganda in the 1950s and 1960s. Among the instrument data are drawings and diagrams, information on woods and other building materials, makers’ names, and descriptions and demonstrations of performance practices and social beliefs related to specific instruments. This data can be used to engage more fully with contemporary ethnomusicological, museum, and archival work as we consider the value of cultural and social information, and the materials themselves, to communities in which the documented musical instruments were produced and played. In this study I use selected John Blacking archival data to discuss how fieldwork documents can be used effectively in the repatriation process to offer musical, social, and ecological knowledge to communities. New interest in organology encourages scholars to reach beyond descriptive, historical, and object-centered views to embrace greater engagement with the social life of musical instruments. Applied to repatriation, the practical and interpretive information offers knowledge to the communities from which instruments and instrument information have been drawn, and it provides opportunities for data sharing among all communities impacted by cultural and material loss