Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader, Volume II

Jennifer C. Post

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138217874
• eBook ISBN: 9781315439143
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader, Volume II provides an overview of developments in the study of ethnomusicology in the twenty-first century, offering an introduction to contemporary issues relevant to the field. Nineteen essays, written by an international array of scholars, highlight the relationship between current issues in the discipline and ethnomusicologists' engagement with issues such as advocacy, poverty and social participation, maintaining intangible cultural heritages, and ecological concerns. It provides a forum for rethinking the discipline's identity in terms of major themes and issues to which ethnomusicologists have turned their attention since Volume I published in 2005.

The collection of essays is organized into six sections:

• Property and Rights
• Applied Practice
• Knowledge and Agency
• Community and Social Space
• Embodiment and Cognition
• Curating Sound

Volume II serves as a basic introduction to the best writing in the field for students, professors, and music professionals, perfect for both introductory and upper level courses in world music. Together with the first volume, Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader, Volume II provides a comprehensive survey of current research directions.

Part I
Intellectual Property and Cultural Rights

1
Performing Protocol

Indigenous Traditional Knowledge as/and Intellectual Property

Beverley Diamond with Aaron Corn, Frode Fjellheim, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Moana Maniapoto, Allan Marett, Taqralik Partridge, John Carlos Perea, Ulla Pirttijärvi, and Per Niila Stålka¹

“Indigenous knowledge exists; intellectual property is invented or created.”

(Greg Young-Ing)²

Indigenous people have a particularly troubled history where the commoditization of their knowledge is concerned. Mainstream culture has often appropriated and profited from the use of their images (as sports logos, for example), their technologies (the igloo or the canoe) as symbols of nationhood, their environmental knowledge as key to new medical breakthroughs, or even their DNA as essential data in the human genome project. Because of the seriousness and urgency of these matters, there has been stronger pressure to think of culture as commodity in recent decades than ever before. There have been discussions about the misfit and yet, the occasional utility, of the concept of “property” for Indigenous knowledge. Many have pointed to the narrowness of “copyright” that offers no protection to oral traditions,³ invests ownership in individuals, and does not recognize the variety of creative roles played by humans or other beings including spirits. For the most part, nor do IP systems account for collective ownership (an Indigenous nation, clan, family, etc.), the responsibilities for maintaining song knowledge, the rights to speak about or teach song knowledge, and situations/places in which specific songs or genres may or may not be used. Clearly, Frith and Martin’s contention that “there currently seems to be a radical disjuncture between the law and the social practices it supposedly governs” (2004, 213) still pertains.

Nonetheless, progress has been made with regard to recognizing Indigenous traditional knowledge as a human right. A global achievement in this regard is the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), which was ratified by 144 nation states initially.⁴ While other articles in this Declaration address the right to practice, revitalize, and teach cultural traditions, the article that pertains most directly to the control of traditional knowledge as well as contemporary creative expression is:

Article 31—Indigenous people have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, as well as the manifestations of their sciences, technologies and cultures, including human and genetic resources, seeds, medicines, knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora, oral traditions, literatures, designs, sport and traditional games and visual and performing arts. They also have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions.

Since the late 1990s, studies abound that track discussions with elders on the vital importance of traditional knowledge for sustaining human communities as well as ecologies, on matters of appropriation, on colonial removals of ceremonial material, bans on traditional practices or languages, or on digital copying (Bell and Napoleon 2008; Lai 2014). Scholars have written about and “drawn out” Indigenous customary law (Borrows 2010; Corn 2013; Reed forthcoming), sometimes in relation to repatriation projects, or they have documented shifts in international law vis à vis Indigenous law⁵ (e.g., Janke 1998; Anderson 2009; Coombe 1998, 2009; Bell and Paterson 2009). In the wake of the Declaration, many protocols for respecting TIK have been created and published on websites created by arts collectives and/or Aboriginal organizations,⁶ as well as governments and international agencies such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Specific protocols for song are among them.

In other cases, scholars have been taught protocols from local practice: from elders who were kind enough to work and teach alongside. In the northwestern United States, an important figure in this regard has been Upper Skagit Elder Vi Hilbert who has played a significant role in cultural revitalization initiatives in her region. Ethnomusicologist Laurel Sercombe has recently written about an intercultural initiative that Vi Hilbert undertook to commission a symphony based on two traditional Lushootseed songs “as a gesture toward ‘healing a sick world’” (2016, 148). The care with which Vi Hibert chose and shared specific songs that had been gifted to her, and her instructions to the composer Bruce Ruddell indicating that it was his responsibility to feel the spirit of the songs but not “violate” the songs by replicating rhythms or melodies, are instructive and inspiring moments of respectful practice. John Carlos Perea, whose performance is referenced below, noted that Sercombe’s article “also addresses ‘Native copyright’ as opposed to Western ‘legal’ copyright not just in terms of ownership but as those ideas effected the composition process.”⁷

Anthropologist Andie Palmer (Palmer 2007, 55) has also shared lessons learned from Elder Vi Hilbert regarding her presentation of First Nations songs in the classroom, a particularly germane topic for ethnomusicologists and music educators:

She let us know that before she ever played a song for us, she thought over why we might need to hear it.

She always prepared the way and put us in a ready frame of mind to listen. She would tell us that we were going to hear a song and that the song was a gift, a treasure.

She would describe her familial relationship to the singer and tell us a little about what she appreciated about the person.

She would then describe the purposive action of the person who had recorded the song—who it was recorded with, who the person stated he or she had recorded it for, what the stated purpose of the song was.

She would tell us how thankful she was that someone had thought it important to record the song.

She would express gratitude that this person had recorded the song so that we could hear it.

She would discuss restrictions that might have been placed on the recording or auditing of the song and explain why we were currently able to hear the song and the decision that had to be carefully made by the singer to record it.

She would introduce the singer as someone present, including, where warranted, directly addressing him or her as a relation.

When she turned the tape recorder on, she would listen, standing quietly and attentively.

When the song was over, she would turn the tape recorder off, pause, and thank the person whose voice we had listened to.

In ethnomusicology, as in many other fields, issues relating to access, ownership, intellectual property, control of knowledge, control of commodification, fair compensation, and damaging appropriation now have a prominent place. To some extent, academic studies have pointed up the many misfits between Indigenous concepts of song authorship, ownership, and legal regulations (Mills 1996; Seeger 1996). While local concepts and protocols vary, the importance of collective ownership (by clan, family, or nation) is perhaps the most widely shared of these differences relative to the Western world’s concept of intellectual property. Authorship by non-humans—animals or spirits—is another. Less widely discussed are distinctions between the author and owner, as construed for instance by the Saami of Scandinavia who recognize authorship of their traditional joiks but regard the person (or thing) that is joiked to be the owner, recognizing that the person represented should have control over the uses of that representation. Other studies demonstrate the mistrust that Indigenous singers and song makers have for Settler regulations. Mistrust may be voiced in attitudes toward contracts (Scales 2012, 174–180) or evident in practices such as piracy by Indigenous entrepreneurs (Stobart 2010). Many studies of Indigenous song practices to date have focused on issues of appropriation and strategies for acquiring legal protection. Anthony Seeger has drawn attention to the fact that “inequality, and the relationship between ‘knowledge providers’ and ‘intellectual property rights owners’ often resembles that found in earlier relations between developed countries and colonies” (1996, 87). In work by Steven Feld (1996, 2000), Nancy Guy (2002), and Thomas Hilder (2015), as well as the widely reported case of Solomon Linda, composer of “Mbube” (see e.g., Bachner 2005), we have become aware of lucrative rip-offs of archival recordings, become savvy about the dangers of residual contracts, and vigilant of definitions of spaces akin to “commons” or concepts such as the “public domain.” Archival recordings have often been the focus of attention, since there was no legal protection for recordings until 1972 in the United States.⁸ The practices of collectors and the motivations that Indigenous people have had for working with them have been the focus of some “restudies” (Coleman and Coombe with MacArailt 2009). Trevor Reed’s studies of Hopi legal cases have unfolded the limitations of copyright law, customary law (variously defined in different national contexts), and Indigenous law (Reed 2015) in protecting ownership of the “ancestors’ voices.”⁹ Hilder (2015) has documented Saami responses to appropriation in public meetings, print materials, and performance. The vital work of studying case law and uncovering cases of appropriation must continue. In most of these cases, however, the terminology and framework for thinking about creativity, authorship, and ownership still reflect legal language and definitions.

The current article, on the other hand, is more concerned about documenting how Indigenous-defined protocol actually plays out in contemporary recording and performance contexts. I do ethnography at the very points of disjuncture to which Frith pointed. I aim to fuel conversation among Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, promoters, students, and scholars. I argue that protocol as reflected in both the business of making a record and the crafting of a staged performance provides frameworks for thinking and performing the responsibilities of creativity, authorship and intellectual property, not just intraculturally but cross-culturally as well. These frameworks which Jeff Corntassel has called “everyday practices of renewal and responsibility within native communities today” (2012, 86) avoid or redefine the language of property, ownership, and copyright that delimit IP regimes, language that may contribute to a “politics of distraction” (Ibid.). I attempt not just to assert, but to think through a broader spectrum of creative roles, responsibilities, and relationships implicated in the making of song and other forms of expressive culture. While my focus certainly should not preclude attention to legal recourse for appropriation, it should perhaps precede or at least accompany such attention.¹⁰ At a point where Indigenous law is beginning to have an impact in international forums¹¹ such as WIPO where sui generis rulings¹² are gaining support and at various levels of policy making, ethnomusicologists’ studies of performing protocol may be useful beyond the academy. At the very least, a shiftin the frameworks for our conversations will better align with Indigenous scholars who are working to find the best strategies for cultural resurgence.

Performing Protocol in the Making of a Recording

With regard to Aboriginal music, commodification can have both positive and negative results for Indigenous communities seeking ownership of expressive property. A recording can document ownership more legibly than oral transmission and thus provide a basis for challenging inappropriate uses. Some groups have extended this logic further by working to create large digital databases¹³ as a means of protecting traditional knowledge. Such projects as the Joik Archive Project (Hilder 2015) or the National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia (Corn 2012) have not only claimed archival materials for Indigenous people but, by recirculating the digital files, have led to revitalization, improved documentation, and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Redesigning and Redefining Ethnomusicology
• Part I Intellectual Property and Cultural Rights
• Part II Applied Practice
• Part III Knowledge and Agency
• Part IV Community and Social Space
• Part V Embodiment and Cognition
• Part VI Curating Sound
• Contributors
• Index