Songs from Tierra del Fuego: A scientific invention

MIGUEL A. GARCÍA

Berlin

Conferencia; 4.Netzwerktreffen der Thyssen-Humboldt-Kurzzeitstipendiaten/-innen aus Lateinamerika; 2011

Alexander fon Humboltd Foudantion

Missionaries and anthropologists Martin Gusinde and Wilhem Koppers and explorer Charles Wellington Furlong recorded various kinds of Alakaluf, Selk´nam, and Yagan (also known as “Yamana”) songs together with a few speeches in Tierra del Fuego from 1907 to 1923. In all, they made 78 recordings with a phonograph and wax cylinders, which were sent to the Phonogramm-Archiv at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin for preservation and study. The importance of these recordings is twofold. Not only are they the earliest recordings made in Tierra del Fuego but also they reveal the epistemological perspective adopted by the collectors as well as the researchers who later analyzed the cylinders. The purpose of this paper is to present some results of my research on the recordings and a wide range of documents I compiled during the first period of my fellowship. Accurately, I will show how the researchers who studied the wax cylinders – German musicologist Erich von Hormbostel, American folklorist Alan Lomax and Argentine ethnomusicologist Jorge Novati –, created their objects of research using technical discourse and particular methodological procedures. Following Michel Foucault and other post-modernist thinkers, I assume that scientific discourse is not a surface upon which preexisting objects – songs in this case – are described, but rather a locus where objects are recreated – or even invented. From this point of view, we could say that the songs from Tierra del Fuego were created twice, first by Fuegians and then by scientific discourse.