Representations of Indigenous Cultural Property in Collaborative Publishing Projects: The Warlpiri Women'sYawulyuSongbooks

“That is Why I am Telling this Story”: Musical Analysis as Insight into the Transmission of Knowledge and Performance Practice of a Wapurtarli Song by Warlpiri Women from Yuendumu, Central Australia

“…Skilled Warlpiri linguists, including Egan, and senior singers worked together to identify words, meanings, and associated stories. The process of working on songs in this analytic way has proven to be a new mode for engagement with song traditions, one vital to the current context of endangerment (Curran, Carew, and Martin 2019). The recording and some documentary aspects of this research were conducted as part of a formal project through Australian National University (2005)(2006)(2007)(2008).…”

Central Australian Aboriginal Songs and Biocultural Knowledge: Evidence from Women's Ceremonies Relating to Edible Seeds

“…We take a collaborative approach to research between Aboriginal knowledge holders and researchers and have facilitated the production of co-authored song books and audio-visual resources to assist communities in sustaining their endangered singing traditions (e.g., Curran 2017; Gallagher et al 2014; Laughren et al 2011). These song publications assert on their imprint page the legal and moral rights of the relevant song-owning groups and authors have reflected on the issues of representing Aboriginal cultural knowledge in these published texts (Curran et al 2019). The current senior owners of these groups have given permission to publish the verses and associated cultural knowledge in this article.…”

The Value of Ethnographic Research on Music: An Introduction

“…achieving Indigenous self-determination and equitable representation of Indigenous perspectives in ethnomusicological research is complicated by factors ranging from difference between performers' and Western ethnomusicologists' ways of analysing music, to inequities in access to education and resources, and is compounded by a lack of literature on the challenges and processes of intercultural research collaboration in Australia. (Treloyn 2016, 33) Recognising the importance of music-makers' ownership, rights and perspectives in relation to the representation of musical traditions (Curran, Martin, and Carew 2019), many researchers have a commitment to co-authorship with musicians, knowledge custodians and performers, as illustrated by Curran and Sims's article in this issue (see, also, Ó Laoire and Mac Ruairí 2005 4 ). Highlighting the complex positions that researchers of varying backgrounds bring to ethnomusicological research, Ng's paper 'Engaging With A Genre in Decline?…”

“…The formal aspects of music make it ripe for reification, and this is quite strongly demonstrated in the very act of documentation and archiving that capture 'essences', that is, particular performances in time which then become reified and 'referred to' cultural products. Documentation of music is hence a kind of representation; photos, videos and audio recordings capture distilled reified representations of the full human experience of musical performance within its cultural context, at best indexing the experiences and providing a tangible and accessible way for intangible heritage to be understood by outsiders and future generations descendant from contemporary musicians, but which may be 'at odds to the oral forms through which knowledge is transferred through songs' (Curran, Martin, and Carew 2019). The current high levels of engagement of many communities across the world have again recently altered the nature of this conundrum with widespread use of social media, meaning many musicians frequently share their music in the moment, and music-making is less subject to the reified versions of one-off recordings (this is evident in the videos analysed in Dowsett's article, this issue).…”