Captured Voices `Foreign Peoples in Sound Recordings´ - the Case of German and Austrian Research Projects in POW Camps, 1915 - 1918

During World War I between 1915 and 1918, German and Austrian anthropologists, linguists and musicologists conducted wide-ranging research on prisoners of war. They interviewed and physically measured POWs from Belgium, France, England, Russia and their dependent territories in Eastern Europe, in Asia, Africa and the South Seas. Scholars investigating these prisoners used mainly visual media: drawings, photos and film. Furthermore, they produced vast collections of sound recordings on wax cylinders and wax discs to record in an exemplary way the music, songs and languages of all the "foreign peoples" represented in the camps. Based on existing historical studies on these activities, I will concentrate on the audible sources that so far have been virtually left unexamined. Going beyond the results achieved by the scholarly focus on visual culture, my project will investigate the intertwinements of science and visual materials with the sound files, as well as the files` potentials in the present. The sound recordings today are completely conserved in the Berlin and Vienna sound archives. Although they relied on pre-existing ethnic and "racial" distinctions, these were not yet supported by a special academic discipline. Ethnography and cultural anthropology as institutionalized academic disciplines would not establish themselves until the interwar period. In the proposed research project I want to elaborate how the sound recordings, as produced in the "field sites" of the Central Powers` POW camps, can be positioned in the history of ethnographic sound recording. I want to find out to what degree these projects were affected by existing (extra-)academic ethnographic positions and to what extent they inspired academic ethnography and ethnomusicology. The innovative potential of my project lies in the way it combines a history of science perspective and ethnographic questions with the significance of sound recordings. The proposed research project would contribute - from an external point of view - to the Austrian Academy of Sciences` own account of its history, significant since it was the most important supporter of the Austrian camp studies during World War I. Most important for my project will be to closely analyze the methodological context of the historical sound recordings: the recording devices and the technical procedure of recording and replaying. My work aims to find out how the social recording procedure was standardized in the name of scientific "objectivity". My observations, taking into account selected sound files, have already led me to a key question that sound archives now face: how to cope with the historical sounds and voices of prisoners present in our archives today, especially once they are published on the Internet. The proposed research project wants to reflect on these urgent questions by examining the problems of "genealogy", "ownership" and "reproduction" in the case of sound recordings. I furthermore suggest multiplying the perspectives on the historical material by calling in the work of non-western authors. My project will thus contribute not only to a virtual but to a very concrete cooperation in terms of the history of science of the voices of "foreign peoples".