IASA 2022 Annual Conference

Between 1915-19, the British administrator and anthropologist John Henry Hutton (1885-1968) made fourteen cylinder recordings in the Naga Hills district of the Assam province, now part of Nagaland in India. Hutton documented most of the cylinders sparsely, and what he wrote on the boxes and inlays reflects the colonial context of his fieldwork. His publications include transcriptions and translations of some songs, allowing conclusions about performance contexts and, in some cases, about the identity of the performers. Yet, much remains unclear about the recording circumstances. Nevertheless, these sonic artefacts mark the creativity and talents of a generation of indigenous performers whose recorded renditions are invaluable today as they represent historical documentation of the intangible cultural heritage of Nagaland. This paper derives from the outcomes of a research project funded by the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives between January and March 2022. The project aim was to learn about the views of contemporary Naga communities on Hutton’s recordings and integrate their feedback into the documentation, giving their voices space in the archive. Project partners included the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford), the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology (Gurgaon), and the Highland Institute (Kohima), where the project concluded with an exhibition featuring Hutton’s recordings and other historical sound recordings from Nagaland.