A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography

3. Collectors and the Phonograph: "Save, Save the Lore!"

3 Collectors and the Phonograph "Save, Save the Lore!" Give not, give not the yawning grave its plunder, Save, save the lore for future ages' joy: The stories full of beauty and of wonder The songs more pristine than the songs of Troy, The ancient speech forever to be banished— Lore that tomorrow to the grave goes down! All other thought from our horizon banish, Let any sacrifice our labor crown. John Peabody Harrington1 Academics get short shrift in the popular imagination, seldom glamorized, often ridiculed. In this regard, ethnographers can boast an image better than most. At a party, or in casual chat with an airplane seat partner, confessing "anthropology" or "folklore" asone's profession at least elicits the murmur, "How interesting—just like Margaret Mead," and we can boast at least one bona fide pop-culture hero, however spurious, in the person of archaeologist/anthropologist Indiana Jones. And if a cartoonist were to sketch the popular image of what we do, it would probably depict three emblematic elements: the fieldworker (earnest, intrepid but self-effacing, eager to "save the lore"), the subject (earnest, reflective, lore-laden), and a mechanical device mediating the encounter, the conduit for the exchange. The recorder as prop in this alluring mythic tableau is as much an acknowledged attribute of the stereotypical professional ethnographer as the doctor's stethoscope or the detective's magnifying glass. It is ironic, then, that historically it has been amateur collectors who have relied 52 most enthusiastically on mechanical recording devices. From the time of its invention, though many professional anthropologists and folklorists used it, they most often disparaged its usefulness, understated their reliance on it, and often managed to avoid referenceto its usein their formal work, although references abound in their notes, correspondences , and memoirs. In the official tableau favored by ethnographers during the phonograph era, its presence in the fieldwork encounter is airbrushed out of the picture—the ghost at the banquet. Only the surviving cylindersattest to the fact that phonograph recordings provided documentation for much of the most significant anthropological and folkloristic research from the time of its invention through the second decade of the century, continuing to prove their value even today. It is unfortunate but perhapsappropriate that the individual credited with the first useof a recording machine should have been a poor candidate for a heroic professional tableau, with or without amechanical prop. Emphatically not a swashbuckler, Jesse Walter Fewkes (1850-1930) was a proper Bostonian incapable of holding his seat on a horse, whose academic reputation rests on a series of monographs on Hopi ritual that his most sympathetic supporter dubbed "meticulously thorough, but soporific" (Lowie [1956] 1972:87). Fewkes began his career as a zoologist, trained at Harvard and Leipzig, and affiliated himself with the renowned father-and-son naturalist team of Louis and Alexander Agassiz. His 1877 research project on marine invertebrates in California was supported by his wealthy Harvard classmate Augustus Hemenway, whose mother, Mary Hemenway, was a formidable philanthropic force in her own right. The previous year she had established the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition under the direction of Frank Hamilton Gushing; with her encouragement Fewkes paid a visit to Zuni in the summer of 1890 (Swanton and Roberts 1931:609-16). According to hislater account, it wasin the course of this trip that the idea of using the phonograph asan ethnographic tool first took hold: "It occurred to me that I might employ the phonograph or graphophone asa means of recording the Zuni music. I had heard the same 53 Collectors and the Phonograph Figure 3.1. Jesse Walter Fewkes. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. plan suggested by others, and have lately been informed that the idea of preserving Indian languages by the use of the phonograph had been in the minds of many ethnologists, but that they looked on this instrument, in its present condition, as too imperfect to be of value" (Fewkes 1891:55).2 Fired with the possibilities presented by the machine, Fewkes first traveled to Calais, Maine, in March 1890 to experiment with its usein a genuine field encounter. The Passamaquoddy recordings made by 54 A Spiral Way Fewkes that represent our first ethnographic cylinder recordings were little more than a trial of the machine using a tribe located in relatively convenient proximity to Fewkes's Boston home. The result of his trip was a small but impressivecollection of approximately thirty cylinders...