Recovering the Museum Outcast: Sound

The contributions of this special issue in the journal Museum Worlds deal with verbal arts, music, and dance as practiced in ritual and politics—a pivotal dimension of Amazonian Indigenous and Afro-Latin American knowledges. Accordingly, these auditory expressions have been intensively recorded, collected, and stored for research in the fields of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and linguistics. But on the other hand, historical sound recordings and material culture were fragmented by former archival and museum arrangements. How can they be collaboratively returned to the originator communities, transmitted to future generations, and exhibited today? The following articles consider issues such as decolonization, community control, digitization and new technologies for incorporating sound in archives and exhibitions.