Listening through the Colonial Noise: Things, Sound Objects, and Legacy at the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv’s Konrad T. Preuss Collection

Abstract Archives and the information they contain are designed, structured, and organized according to narratives that shape the type of knowledge their users are expected to obtain from them. Thus, the objects and documents in an archive usually tell and retell stories that performatively reproduce the larger ideological frameworks informing ongoing dynamics among its objects, documents, representations, and users. The central concern in this article is whether it is possible (and how) for archives to tell stories different from the ones they are designed to tell us. In order to find an answer, I study the collections of Náayeri and Wixárika chants recorded for the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin by Prussian ethnologist Konrad Theodor Preuss between 1905 and 1907. I propose that the way in which the sound objects in this collection were created resonates with the extractivist practices of the Kaiserreich and responds more to what Preuss expected to get out of these Indigenous communities than to how these communities actually conceptualized their music and ritual practices. The article closes with an exploration of how Mexican anthropologist Margarita Valdovinos has engaged this archive since the 2000s and in the process negotiated changing legislation about national patrimony and heritage in Germany and the European Union. I propose that Valdovinos’s interrogation of the archive’s constituent materials, with the end of repatriating its recordings to Náayeri and Wixárika communities in Mexico, is a model for asking questions that force archives to tell stories different from those embedded in their formal design and structure.