Abstract

This article examines two different ways of working with sound recordings. On the one hand, the institutional sound archives of the Qom people from the ‘Carlos Vega’ National Institute of Musicology, between 1964 and 1996; and on the other hand, the sound recordings made in collaboration with the same Indigenous people in Chaco between 2008 and 2010, part of my own fieldwork. First, I provide an overview of the origin and context of these recordings, considering that they emerge from different initiatives: institutional and collaborative. Then, I problematize the categories and forms of representation through which the musical expressions of Indigenous peoples were recorded, documented and classified in the institutional archive. Finally, drawing on the collaborative sound recordings, I analyze the ways in which the Qom people reconstruct the ‘ancient music’, incorporate contemporary music, and articulate memories with historical experiences of the monte. This allows the logics, languages, silences and regimes of power-knowledge that constituted both archives to be recovered and brought into dialogue.

Methodologically, the work combines the ethnography of the institutional archive with collaborative ethnography and the analysis of written documents from the institutional sound records and musical memories in the collaborative fieldwork. The article seeks to contribute to debates on memory and sound archiving in Indigenous contexts.

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