ABSTRACT
Professional archivists of ethnographic collections1 assume ethical responsibility for the management of "records", both in the objectified sense of documents, sound recordings, images, digital files, or artifacts, and in the ideational sense of the contents, meanings, and creative intentions those records may encode. This chapter discusses an analysis of a series of documents in which the "ownership" of a collection of field recordings made by a single collector over a 30-year period in the mid-twentieth century, was asserted, defined, specified, claimed, transferred, sold, resold, divided up, and dispersed: the archive of the archive. The focus is on a series of transactions and representations that came well after the sounds of Indigenous performers that are now "owned" by Columbia University were first inscribed on acetate or aluminum discs or ferrous-oxide coated reel-to-reel tapes, or more recently on CDs and hard drives and cloud-storage backup servers.
