> due to “the culturally sensitive material of the content on these cylinders, and out of respect for the contemporary descendants of many of the performers on the recordings, access to the majority of the audio being digitized is currently restricted.”
I don't really understand this. Why would the performers record their speech for posterity if they wanted it hidden away?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Genocide
"When the restoration project is complete, the recordings will be sent to tribal descendants, who will determine which parts of the collection can be released to the public."
For example, if you publish a book, I don't need your descendants or the descendants of a parallel bloodline to approve me reading it.
That said, I only skimmed the article, so maybe there's something particularly sensitive about the circumstances of the recording? Forgive me if I've overlooked something. Beyond all that, it is also ultimately the researchers' discretion as to who they want to check with before publishing the works more widely, so whatever. Far be it from me to say that I have a right to something that I did not put in the effort to create.
Being sat in front of a recording device and told to speak doesn’t imply the speaker actually wanted to record his or her voice. Many folks were forced to take pictures also.
> if you publish a book, I don't need your descendants or the descendants of a parallel bloodline to approve me reading it.
This is a fairly terrible example given the number of book and other intellectual properties whose publishing is being controlled by their estates.
Even by Mickey Mouse standards of copyright, which don't even extend to works this old, these phonographs have been in the public domain for 15 or more years.
Not that this is the point I intended to argue.
> The special context for this is the previous mistreatment of indigenous people and their artefacts; therefore researchers these days tend to go to great lengths to include indigenous people and seek their approval, as a courtesy.
As for the previous (and ongoing!) mistreatment of indigenous people and their artifacts; I don't think that has anything at all to do with the ethics or rights regarding the publication of these recordings. To my knowledge, these recordings were never intended to be private to the band in the first place.
If people who lived near or with your great grandfather killed my great grandfather's people or ran them out of town, and my grandfather had on a separate occasion recorded a phonograph, knowing that it would be available to the recording party and all of their associates, in a language you're studying in present day, the crimes against my great grandfather's people would have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you should publish a recording he made available in the same timeframe (or in this case, after the brunt of the damage had already been done).
To your knowledge, did the people being recorded give informed consent to having those recordings heard by more than a few hundred people doing anthropological research?
I argue the answer is no, because there's at least a high likelihood that consent wasn't freely given.
So if your intent was to understand the culture and tradition of these peoples, or their artifacts, it makes a lot of sense to respect their traditions and cultural practices. As you know though things never quite happened this way -- there was a genocide -- extermination of their culture and people. So given the complete lack of respect or willingness to follow this principle historically, along with a genocide, researchers are especially careful to respect the wishes of the peoples whose stories, artifacts, traditions they are dealing with.
Congratulations on having an opinion.
To be clear, I would hope the descendants will share these things with the world, and I expect they will. Many tribes have been working on language preservation and recovery of old traditions and oral histories and such for the past few decades. This obviously enables that effort.
But, I don't think tribes should be obligated to do so, nor do I think it'd be ethical to give away these recordings without some input from the tribes. They would have more than mere memories of their language and culture today were it not for an attempted and nearly successful genocide by European settlers, and many feel (rightly, IMHO) as though their communities have had nearly everything stolen from them. It's not an old scar for many; it is a fresh wound.
Racism won't ever cease to be a problem if we continue to say "your ancestors did this, so you can't do that" rather than just treating people as people.
Perhaps we could call it "anthropology", from "anthropo-" for "man, people, humanity" and "-logy" for "the study of".
Then we could let anthropology researchers figure out the best way to handle these sorts of issues.
They might get a bit smug if we teach them a couple of Greek words.
They might start to think that their faeces are aosmic (ά- without, -οσμο odor).
Retract your comment or prove you're wrong by maintaining it.
---
Also, are you saying anthropologists would never intefere or contradict a distinct cultures wishes? I know that's not true.
We should let the rich decide who pays taxes too, as they have most experience of it, no.
The whole concept of calling people wrong for cultural appropriation, for example, it's just racism. If you want to keep racism, then keep doing that.
Same here: "you don't have the right ancestry so you can't do this". It's racism. We can keep it; I'd rather not.
Well, we could maybe start thinking that way if it were true. The US government is still actively in violation of treaties, stealing land and resources on behalf of oil companies and other business interests. Indigenous people in the US face more discrimination, both systemic and cultural, than nearly anyone.
The notion that settler mistreatment of indigenous peoples is a distant memory, hundreds of years in the past, is just plain wrong.
Racism won't ever cease to be a problem if we continue to say "your ancestors did this, so you can't do that" rather than just treating people as people.
Stolen artifacts are sometimes returned to their country of origin. Is that wrong, just because a theft happened a long time ago? Archaeologists and anthropologists today will work with the governments and communities their work is about to ensure it is a respectful dialog rather than a theft of cultural resources. Are you saying that's not a good thing?
It is an incredible feat of mental acrobatics to call it "racism" to extend the same courtesy to indigenous peoples that is extended by anthropologists and archaeologists working anywhere else in the world to the peoples they study.
I regard that as a caution that just because I think something is reasonable, it doesn't mean that others will think the same. My sense of reasonableness is based on many things, including being part of a culture where it's cheap to record, store, and redistribute sound, and which regards anything old as being part of the public domain and therefore unrestricted.
Modern informed consent has a much higher standard than the consent of 100 years ago. For one, it's not just consent about the process of making a recording but informed consent about the larger consequences of doing so.
The people who were recorded likely knew their speech was being recorded for future scientific research. However, consider the technology of the time. The recording was onto wax cylinder, so it could only be played a few hundred times before being worn out. This limited the total number of people who could use it, and mostly to anthropologists. It was also hard to duplicate a wax cylinder recording with any fidelity.
There is no way that the people of 100 years ago could give informed consent of the possibility that their recording would be open to the world a century later.
While you, if you published a book, would have grown up as part of a culture which has had centuries of book publishing experience, and would be able to provide informed consent.
Of course, those people are dead, so why does it care?
Anthropologists also want to get a more complete view of people's lives. To do that, they may need to make assurances about how any notes or recordings will be used. If the standard is "after 100 years everything will be public" then anthropologists are less likely to get the information they want.
You are not a mod, you have no authority save what you feign, and this comment precludes you from deleting yours.
Of course, quite a few don't. I despise binding arbitrary clauses in consumer contracts.
While I know the early wax recordings required "leather lungs", said one description of a singer who had to repeat the same song for each cylinder, my limited research suggests that later models only required speaking more loudly.
The article says they were recorded between 1900 and 1938. The image of a recording is from 1916. I know Edison sold memo recording systems for businesses at around this time, and I don't think they required shouting.
In the 1920s Harvard took naked pictures of all their students for research purposes - again things that should never be public. (this was an branch reading someone's personality/fortune from the bumps on their skull - at the time the idea was taken seriously) The pictures are available to serious researchers, but you have to go through great hoops to prove you are serious.
We do not know what is on those recordings. There might be some things where it is as obvious as the above why those who did the recording may not want anyone to know they did it.
Another thing that is a factor for certain communities is that some stories or songs are the cultural property of particular families. In that case, older members of the family may make recordings to be held for when the descendents are ready for them--- when they're old enough, or perhaps when the language has been revitalized so that people can understand them again.
Or instead be "nasty" to the dead people and nice to all the living people by sharing freely with them. To me it doesn't look like a question of niceness, it's far more nuanced surely?
There is often very private, very personal information in language documentation: even though it seems like the fact that the speaker should have been aware that making a recording was equivalent in some way to publication.
Plus, it's important to remember that before modern standards of informed consent were created, many linguists didn't have the speakers' best interests at heart, and were unscrupulous about recordings.
The ethics of legacy field recordings is a very messy business, with consequences ranging from legal measures to the unceremonious end of otherwise productive relationships between speech communities and researchers. I've seen cases where individual children of a single speaker have had differing opinions on what should happen to recordings.
> I've seen cases where individual children of a single speaker have had differing opinions on what should happen to recordings.//
Which is natural as relatives make an emotional response, rather than a response that looks to the greatest/greater good. Which is exactly the reason why a broader view should be taken.
Legally speaking I imagine the recorder [of the speech, or lead researcher] owns the copyright or its in the public domain -- there really doesn't seem a strong reason to try and add additional restrictions based on racial discrimination and supposed moral outrage.
Do you want to create a right of people to hold censor over all media their ancestors produced or is it only native North Americans you want to pussyfoot around?
There were massive genocides in not too distant past; I fail to see how adding modern racial inequity fixes that in any way.
Can someone help me understand what I’m missing?