Project Lead
Sara Valentina Hauser
Abstract
From summer 1938 to summer 1939, Swiss radio journalist Jean Gabus (1908-1992) conducted the one-man “Mission ethnographique Suisse é la Baie d’Hudson“ at the Inuit community of Eskimo Point, today, Arviat, in the Canadian Arctic. With his mission, Gabus intended to document the ‘traditional’ Inuit culture before it vanished due to imperial and colonial activities in the Arctic. However, in his book Iglu, where he wrote about his experience for a public audience, he further stated that “more strongly than the scientific attraction during an expedition, lurs the adventure, the magic of a virgin white dot on the map” (1942:9).Therefore, Gabus mission among the Inuit community of Arviat can be situated in the contexts of ‘salvage ethnography’ (Green 2021) and masculinist rhetoric of the Arctic as a cold, empty and dangerous region where “a few exceptional men [battle] against the forces of nature” (Hansson/Ryall 2017:4). From his stay, Jean Gabus brought several objects, photographs, film rolls, recordings and four sled dogs back to Switzerland. As Gabus was from 1945 to 1978 director and curator of the Musée d’Ethnographie de Neuchâtel (MEN), all these objects are now part of the museum’s permanent collection. My dissertation focuses on the ‘Archives Sonores Inuit’ at the MEN, which consists of Jean Gabus recordings of Inuit songs, vocal games, conversations and sled dog commands. Specifically, I explore the following questions:
- How have Inuit songs, sounds and voices been and still are being collected, stored and handled in Swiss museums, particularly in terms of categorizing, describing, analysing and mediating?
- How does ‘one’ (mostly non-Inuit curators, researchers or audiences) approach, listen to and make sense of the ‘Archives Sonores Inuit’? Especially in terms of how race (and gender?) are registered in and through diverse recording and listening practices.
- Maybe: Are colonial logics, forms of knowledge-making and (sonic) imaginations of Inuit and the Arctic still shaping ways of preservation, curation and/or mediation of Inuit songs, sounds and voices in Switzerland? If yes, how?
Sound studies are increasingly emphasizing that European’s imperialistic and colonial logics, forms of knowledge-making and imaginations of ‘primitive, exotic others’ are informing the auditory, namely sound, sound recording techniques and modes of listening (Khesthi 2015; Robinson 2020; Rosati 2021; Stoever-Ackerman 2016; Sun Eidsheim 2019). Nevertheless, there is still a lack of studies focusing on race, gender and/or difference in sound (Stadler 2015). Particularly important for my work is geographer and sound artist A.M. Kanngieser’s concept of ‘Sonic Colonialities’, which they understand as “encultured ways of listening to, apprehending, and documenting environments that are derived from the Eurocentric fetish for pre-colonial natures, which are imagined as discrete, unmediated, and possessable” (2023:690). I argue that this Eurocentric fetish also extends to (sonic?) fantasies about ‘primitive, traditional and therefore authentic Inuit music’. Therefore, using the ‘Archives Sonores Inuit’ as an example, I intend to explore the hypothesis that interactions between Indigenous song or sound archives, museums and academia have contributed to the development of ‘Sonic Colonialities’, which are still shaping western and Swiss listening positionalities.
To explore my research question, I intend to work with a sound-based approach while also applying a postcolonial (feminist?) perspective. To contextualize the archive, I further work with methods from historical ethnomusicology and if possible, conduct individual interviews to gather additional information. To explore the question of listening positionalities, which according to Stó:lō musicologist Dylan Robinson involves “a self-reflexive questioning of how race, class, gender, sexuality, ability and cultural background intersect and influence the way we are able to hear sound, music and the world around us” (2020:10), I am thinking about developing a concept for a listening session based on the recordings of the ‘Archives Sonores Inuit’.
Supervision
Prof. Dr. Britta Sweers, University of Bern and Prof. Lisa Katrin Losleben, Arctic University of Norway (Tromsø)
Discipline
Cultural Anthropology of Music
