Chapter 10 - Abstract and author bios

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10. The Archive of the Archive: The Secret History of the Laura Boulton Collection

Aaron Fox

This chapter examines the history of the creation, consolidation, sale, and transfer of the Laura Boulton Archive of Liturgical and Traditional Music (now shared among Columbia University, Indiana University, and the Library of Congress). It examines primary legal documents and correspondence of principals involved in these processes in order to show how the traditional and contemporary cultural and individual rights of Indigenous communities whose music was recorded by Boulton between the 1930s and 1960s were systematically excised from considerations of the archive’s ownership and value.

Aaron A. Fox is Associate Professor of Music, and Director of the Center for Ethnomusicology, Columbia University. He is the author of Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (Duke University Press, 2004). He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin.