THE BOX THAT GOT THE FLOURISHES: THE CYLINDER PHONOGRAPH IN FOLKLORE FIELDWORK, 1890-1937 (ANTHROPOLOGY, NATIVE AMERICAN (INDIAN), ETHNOLOGY, FOLKSONG, ETHNOMUSICOLOGY).

摘要

The nineteenth century saw an increase in study of non-European and peasant groups by means of direct observation and recording of expressive manifestations of culture such as song, narrative, and ritual. A developing perception of these texts as scientific data evolved into the ideal of an objective, inference-free verbatim text which would represent a unit of analysis in the study of culture similar to the specimen in biology and the artifact in archaeology.;Although most collectors gave little thought to the motives underlying the cooperation of informants, these individuals were prompted to participate in fieldwork by a number of incentives including a native tradition of courtesy, material reward, influence in the world of the collector, and the desire to preserve traditional material in the face of change brought about by contact with the collector's culture. The use of the phonograph often represented a positive inducement to informant cooperation, offering a convenient, novel means of documenting a sound event that produced a record from which an informant could verify the quality of a performance.;Field cylinder recordings are the product of a complex human encounter in which the fieldworker and informant cooperated in order to fulfill their own agendas. Their efforts are vindicated: archival collections of such cyclinders now represent a valuable resource for scholarly research and cultural enrichment.;The invention of the phonograph provided fieldworkers with a tool making possible the recording of verbal and musical expressions by capturing the impressions of the voice itself. Despite difficulties posed by inherent technical limitations and concern over negative response to the machine on the part of informants, many collectors did choose to record data using the phonograph. It was especially valuable to those caught between the urgency of collecting as large as possible an accumulation of cultural data and the accuracy in such recording demanded by the emerging ethnological disciplines.