Sound Recordings and Cultural Heritage: the Fonck Museum, the Felbermayer Collection, and Its Relevance to Contemporary Easter Island Culture

International Journal of Heritage Studies

ISSN: 1352-7258 (Print) 1470-3610 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjhs20

Sound recordings and cultural heritage: the Fonck Museum, the Felbermayer collection, and its relevance to contemporary Easter Island culture

Dan Bendrups

To cite this article: Dan Bendrups (2015) Sound recordings and cultural heritage: the Fonck Museum, the Felbermayer collection, and its relevance to contemporary Easter Island culture, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 21:2, 166-176, DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2013.838983 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2013.838983

Published online: 11 Oct 2013.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 321

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Citing articles: 1 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjhs20 International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2015 Vol. 21, No. 2, 166–176, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2013.838983

Sound recordings and cultural heritage: the Fonck Museum, the Felbermayer collection, and its relevance to contemporary Easter Island culture Dan Bendrups*

Queensland Conservatorium, Grifﬁth University, Brisbane, Australia (Received 18 June 2013; ﬁnal version received 23 August 2013)

Sound recording plays a prominent role in cultural heritage work in the Pacific region, supported by sound archives and institutional collections that serve to preserve this intangible cultural heritage. While it has long been a standard practice for field recordings to be lodged in institutions of learning, recent develop- ments in Pacific research have emphasised the ethical and social benefits that can result from the repatriation of sound recordings to their communities of origin, and from the development of field recording practices in which cultural stakeholders are more directly involved. Meanwhile, the digitisation of historical sound recordings and the use of digital domains for dissemination have become matters of theoretical and methodological inquiry in their own right. This article seeks to contribute to the discourse surrounding the repatriation of historical field recordings through the presentation of findings from a recent Chilean government-funded digitisation and repatriation project involving previously undocu- mented recordings of Easter Island (Rapanui) music from the Fonck Museum, Viña del Mar. It will explain the circumstances under which the project developed, the strategies pursued in bringing it to fruition, and the reception of the project by the Rapanui community. Keywords: intangible cultural heritage; sound recording; repatriation; ethnomusicology; Easter Island

Introduction The recording of stories, songs and chants (and later, video footage of ceremonial practices, dances, and rituals) for ethnological research purposes commenced in the Pacific in the 1890s and continued well into the twentieth century, providing many of the resources that now populate the vaults and in some cases digital repositories of ethnographic museum collections worldwide. While these collections were originally intended for preservation and comparative research, cultural renaissances in the Pacific that were ushered in by post-colonial politics from the 1970s onwards have encouraged Pacific Island communities to reinvest such artefacts of culture with the resonances of heritage. Many contemporary recordings of music from the Pacific are now being produced by Islander musicians and cultural authorities themselves for local and international distribution, and in some cases, archival collections have been packaged within new productions, creating a sense of a continuum

*Email: d.bendrups@grifﬁth.edu.au

© 2013 Taylor & Francis International Journal of Heritage Studies 167 between the old and the new. It is in this environment that historical field recordings have become reconceptualised as valuable intangible cultural heritage. This process of reconceptualisation has been particularly pronounced on Rapanui, the world’s most remote inhabited island and the Eastern-most known site of ancient Polynesian settlement. Rapanui culture and society were decimated by contact with the outside world in the 1860s, leading to a situation in which barely 100 islanders remained in the 1870s. Their descendants comprise the island’s contemporary Indigenous population. Understandably, with such scarce human resources, the heritage value of any item or artefact of historical significance is strongly accentuated, and international collections of Rapanui objects are therefore part of a local political discourse concerning culture, preservation and heritage. It should come as no surprise then that the discovery of a long forgotten reel tape in the bookshelves of a small independent museum in Chile should elicit a great deal of curiosity on Rapanui. The tape was part of a collection donated by Fritz ‘Fran- cisco’ Felbermayer, a philanthropist and amateur ethnologist who became deeply engaged with Rapanui in the 1940s. Given that the earliest archived field recording of music from Rapanui is from 1958 (cf. Bendrups 2007, 36), the discovery of this recording, alongside two large albums of seemingly contemporaneous photographs, was of potentially great significance, and therefore attractive as the basis for a cultural heritage project. The significance of the project was subsequently recognised and confirmed through the award of contestable funding from FONDART, the Chilean Government Ministry of Culture’s main arts funding scheme (FONDART regional project No. 2845 Recuperación y difusión del patrimonio musical rapanui, a través del legado de Fritz Felbermayer [Recuperation and diffusion of Rapanui musical hertiage from the Fritz Felbermayer bequest]). This article presents the research project and discusses its significance for cultural heritage. This discussion is significant in that the project’s outcomes were not as straightforward or predictable as originally expected. While relatively small, the project developed a life of its own in Chilean media, and while this public profile was welcomed, the lines of questioning it generated gave the research team cause to question many assumptions that they had made about heritage and value in relation to the Felbermayer recording. As has been remarked upon by heritage studies scholars, the question of what constitutes heritage, particularly in marginal or margina- lised communities, needs to be considered critically (Winter 2013a) and from interdisciplinary perspectives (Winter 2013b), and attention must also be paid to the potential for heritage items to influence communities’ self-perception, as well as the perceptions of those seeking to enact preservation (Waterton and Smith 2010, 12–13). To this end, the discussion in this article reveals a rich interplay between the community and the items of cultural heritage under investigation. As a member of the Fonck Museum’s research team for this project, I write with the benefitofan insider’s gaze, though my role as just one of the five project team members was somewhat specialised. As a Rapanui music researcher, I had the dual role of analysing the musical content for signs of significance, and connecting the research team to culture bearers and music authorities on Rapanui itself. As an international team member, I was also somewhat distanced from the media interest in the project and the experiences of the other team members in managing the promotion of the project. This article begins with a discussion of sound recording in relation to discourses of cultural heritage as a background to the context of the project. It describes the 168 D. Bendrups project design and process, explains the musical content of the recording and then relates this to the question of how heritage value is perceived and by whom. It fin- ishes by articulating the various ways in which this project has been beneficial to Rapanui cultural heritage, serving as an example and a case study for the consideration of heritage value from an end-user perspective.

Sound recordings as heritage in the Pacific context Generally speaking, the notion of cultural heritage is taken to refer to the representations of custom or tradition that are connected to people and place, and which are manifested within the collective memory of particular social, cultural, national and regional contexts in ways that allow people to generate a sense of collective identity (cf. Hobsbawm and Ranger 1992; McDowell 2008). While fragile because of their intangibility as objects, audio recordings are powerful forces for heritage, as they simultaneously convey tangible and intangible signifiers of identity, from language, instrumentation and known melodic forms through to subtleties of interpretation and style. Field recordings of traditional music have played a central role in ethnomusicology, and in the development of theory and method within this field, since its inception (Merriam 1977; Myers 1992). With the emergence of current digital technologies in the twenty-first century, many ethnomusicologists have embraced opportunities to engage in cultural heritage preservation and renewal by returning historical field recordings to their communities of origin in digital form. This practice has become a methodological imperative for much applied ethnomusicological fieldwork, with greater attention being paid to the role of historical music collections in the actualisa- tion of culture through community access. It has also led to the creation of collabora- tive recording projects in which community culture bearers and stakeholders are directly involved (cf. Hayward 2010; Neuenfeldt 2007; Pigliasco 2009). The turn towards digital dissemination of historical field recordings has been actively pursued in Oceania, reflected in the efforts of the Australian National Recording Project to establish small digital archives in remote Aboriginal communities (Marett et al. 2006), and to empower Aboriginal culture bearers to manage their own recording preservation projects (Corn and Gumbula 2007). Other examples revolve around the commercial production of CDs containing contemporary field recordings alongside historical recordings from archives. Meanwhile, the digitisation of historical sound recordings and the use of digital domains for dissemination have become matters of theoretical and methodological inquiry in their own right (Barwick et al. 2005; Barwick and Thieberger 2006; Seeger 2005). There is also an increasing awareness of the value of online technologies in the preservation and promotion of aspects of popular music heritage as these relate, for example, to specific scenes or the legacy of particular artists (Bennett 2002; Kibby 2000). Ultimately, the notion of heritage has become more complex, encompassing multiple and varied pathways for individuals to form connections to their collective pasts (Atkinson 2008, 381). It is this theoretical context that informs projects such as the Felberma- yer project.

The Felbermayer project In early 2012, the Chilean national media descended on the Fonck Museum – a small private museum located in an ageing, stately former private residence in the International Journal of Heritage Studies 169

Pacific coast city of Viña del Mar that is well known in Chile as the locus of important collections of Indigenous art and artefacts. The object of the media attention pertained to the museum’s Easter Island (or Rapanui) collection, containing rare carvings and other pieces that are otherwise not accessible in mainland Chile. How- ever, the artefact in question was somewhat less tangible: it was a single open reel tape, the only one of its kind in the entire museum collection, devoid of metadata or notes of any kind, other than the German name for Easter Island, Osterinsel, scrawled across the centre label. The uniqueness of the find and the strangeness of the preservation medium (open reel tape being ancient and obscure technology for the vast majority of contemporary Chileans) led to much speculation about the tape’s provenance. Who had recorded it, and when? Why was it here? What unknown knowledge might it contain? Press coverage of the project described the tape as a ‘Rapanui treasure’ (Carojal 2012) containing ‘lost voices of Rapanui’ (Gómez 2012). Many reporters focused on the narrative surrounding the tape’s discovery. They related the story that one of the museum’s staff had stumbled across the tape when attempting to catalogue the contents of an attic cupboard, sealed from public access by a hidden door, that was otherwise full of books and papers, and which had been left undisturbed for many years, perhaps decades. She brought the tape to the attention of the museum’s Rapanui library director, herself an Indigenous Rapanui woman, who sud- denly recalled having once seen a tape recording device somewhere in the Museum’s basement. Hours of searching produced the device, which, as luck would have it, still functioned. The tape was playable, and the first things heard on the recording were the bells of the island’s old Catholic church and the soaring voices of the Rapanui church choir. This was treasure indeed to the ears of devoutly Catho- lic mainstream Chile. The excitement surrounding the find gave way to speculation. Though he left no notes to the effect, reporters speculated that Felbermayer might have obtained field recordings on one of his many Rapanui trips. If this were true, it would have to be amongst the earliest field recordings ever taken from Rapanui. The German language label appeared to confirm this assumption, as did the lack of any evidence to the contrary. This small object, lacking in metadata and accession details, was thusly presented as an icon of cultural heritage, a treasure of national significance. Despite the somewhat hyperbolic excitement of the media, and the resultant speculation – much of it was incorrect – about the tape’s origin, the reports were fundamentally correct in their positioning of the Felbermayer recording as important cultural heritage on two fronts. Firstly, for Chile, this find symbolised the inherent value of the museum as a heritage institution serving the public interest, which in turn validated the financial support that the project received from Chilean national arts funding body FONDART. Secondly, for Rapanui itself, the tape represented the music of a long-gone era, and contained the voices of prominent and important cultural leaders whose influence lives on in the genealogical knowledge of their contemporary descendants. These elders lived through the 1950s and 1960s, when material and technological possessions were somewhat scarce on Rapanui, and their voices therefore have a kind of affirmational power because they provide audible representations of ancestors who are otherwise remembered in name only, substitut- ing for written documents, photographs, and other types of memorabilia that would otherwise accompany similarly significant historical figures in continental Chile. 170 D. Bendrups

Project background Austrian-born Chilean resident Fritz ‘Federico’ Felbermayer (1907–1979) was an engineer and economist with an undergraduate training in archaeology from his home city, Vienna. A keen amateur photographer and ethnologist, he was especially interested in Indigenous cultures, and particularly in Chile’s Polynesian island possession. He was a founding member of the Society of Friends of Easter Island (founded on 9 May 1947), and began to travel there in the 1940s at the invitation of the Chilean navy. These voyages, which took place aboard Chilean naval supply vessels, resulted in an important collection of objects and photographs which he later donated to the Fonck Museum in 1980 (Gallaher n.d.). Like most museums, the Fonck Museum’s primary role as a repository of artefacts led, understandably, to the curatorial prioritisation of art and ceremonial objects, and so many of the 589 items donated by Felbermayer remained in storage. Felbermayer’s documents were not, however, forgotten. In the somewhat close- knit community of museum supporters, Felbermayer was a known personality, and personally familiar with the museum directors. Successive museum directors were familiar with his photography, and aware that they held potentially unique items in their safekeeping. The (current) director of the University of Valparaiso’s Centre of Rapanui Studies, José Miguel Ramirez, had previously come across the tape in the 1980s when working at the Fonck Museum. While not equipped with the specialist knowledge or facilities required to undertake to preserve it, he was nevertheless aware of the interest it would generate if its existence were known back on Rapanui, and so he made a cassette tape dub of the recording which he subsequently took to Rapanui for the purposes of dissemination via local radio. The tape thusly ended up on broadcast rotation for some time. While it had no formal attribution, this was not necessarily a problem, from a Rapanui perspective, as the voices of the performers were easily recognisable, and the source of the recording could be traced back to a person who was known to the community. Therefore, it was not treated any differ- ently to the other recordings on rotation, and simply remained in the radio collection until becoming lost or unplayable. The impetus for the Felbermayer project revolved around these antecedents, as it had long been an objective of the directorate to do something with the photographic and musical material they held. The execution of the project was, however, a matter entirely dependent on external resources, which were finally obtained in 2012 under the auspices of a Chilean Government FONDART grant. Amongst their various categories of grants, FONDART include a section dedicated for the preservation of Indigenous arts, and the museum directorate chose to target this scheme for this project. Thanks to a long association with the US-based Easter Island Foundation (EIF), the Fonck Museum houses the EIF-funded library of Rapanui-related books, and this funding provides for the salary of a librarian, Ms. Betty Haoa Rapahango, who is an Indigenous Rapanui islander, and therefore eligible to apply for FONDART grants targeted at Indigenous applicants. With obvious awareness of the uniqueness of Fel- bermayer’s photographs and recordings, Betty Rapahango became the enthusiastic lead investigator on the project, supported in her work by a museum directorate member, myself, and two investigative journalists with prior experience on Rapanui, one with specific knowledge of Rapanui performing arts. The objective of the project was threefold: to preserve the sound and images through digitisation, to repatriate the preserved materials (in digital form) to their International Journal of Heritage Studies 171 community of origin and to disseminate the material via a dedicated, interactive museum display. The project methodology followed these three objectives. Firstly, digitisation was to be contracted to a local IT specialist who had worked with the museum on other projects. Secondly, a period of fieldwork on Rapanui was neces- sary in order to obtain metadata on the photographs and recordings, as this information was not otherwise available. Finally, the research team would condense these data into a form that would be suitable for museum display, including translations of song texts (into various languages), coherent grouping and organisation of materials, and their recontextualisation in a touch-screen display that offered sequences of photographs and text, and selections of sound recordings for museum patrons to explore at will. The fieldwork component of the research was the most important and most difficult stage of the project. It required setting up group and individual consultations with Rapanui elders, community forums and meetings with musicians, all of which relied heavily on the interpersonal networks of the research team members, especially Rapahango and myself. One objective of this broad consultation was to try to obtain as much information as possible, given that we had only assumptions to work from initially. Another objective was to achieve a real-time act of reciprocity – of making a direct, interactive contribution to local culture through the sharing of the research materials at this formative stage of the project’s development (as opposed to simply turning up on the island at the end of the project with a finished product to distribute). This dialogical, consultative approach made it possible to dispel possible notions of museum self-interest in the materials, while also enabling debate and discussion on the identities of people appearing in photographs and those heard in song. This discussion invariably led to other reflections and anecdotal references that helped the research team to cross check the metadata we were accumulating for the digitised material. The project was completed in early 2013 with the installation of the interactive collection display in the Fonck Museum, and the construction of a second, identical display to be shared on an itinerant basis with other museums, and ultimately sent to Rapanui for display in the Rapanui municipal library. The project team also produced a set of CDs containing the display material in several languages for preservation and replication purposes. The installation juxtaposed new photographs (taken during the 2012 fieldwork) against the ones from felbermayer’s collection, including current pictures of people still living who were captured by Felbermayer’s lens in the 1940s. This in itself was a welcome outcome from the museum’s perspective, as the display added a new dimension to the collection and succeeded in digitally pre- serving their audio and photograph records. However, the significance of the project did not end there, as the outcome of repatriating the recorded materials remained to be explored.

The recordings The single quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape recovered from Felbermayer’s collection contained 45 different sung, chanted or spoken items, including many songs that contemporary Rapanui musicians regard as traditional. The recordings ranged across a broad scope of Rapanui oral and aural culture, specifically: extracts from the Catholic Mass; himene pure,or‘Church’ songs; himene,or‘popular songs’, sometimes known as himene Tahiti, after their likely place of origin; songs based on 172 D. Bendrups string-figure kaikai texts; non-melodic chants of these texts, called patautau; and two a’amu tuai,or‘ancient’ stories. Interestingly, these songs were clearly recorded in a range of different settings as the ambient and background noise is different in different sections of the tape. Furthermore, between some of the different sections, there was an audible click in the tape recording that suggested the insertion of an analogue audio source, raising the possibility that this very diverse tape might be a composite of recordings dubbed from another or various other sources. I will expand on this further below. Each of the song and chant styles presented on the recording reveals particular aspects of Rapanui cultural heritage. The himene pure, for example, contains Tahi- tian words and phrases that reveal the Tahitian origins of many of these songs. These were introduced to Rapanui as early as the 1870s, under the influence of Capuchin missionaries, and were reinforced in the early twentieth century through the religious leadership of Ure Potahi, patriarch of the Pakaratki family, who had trained as a catechist in the Papeete diocese. By 1950, many of these song texts had adopted Rapanui words, and conversely, a number of the original Tahitian words had been absorbed into Rapanui language, and yet the song structures had remained the same, sung unaccompanied in Church celebration contexts and weekly Mass. The popular songs, or himene Tahiti on the tape were, contrastingly, performed with guitar accompaniment and often sung by a single voice, probably that of Ruben Hito or Santiago Pakarati – the two most important guitarists of the era. Not only do they reveal further Tahitian influence in lyrics and subject matter, they also reveal the fact that guitar was commonly used in popular music at this time. While much of the guitar strumming was rudimentary and rhythmical, with few chord changes, some of the tracks demonstrated a slightly more complicated finger picking style called rima pu, in which two players collaborate to produce the sound. The kaikai and patautau songs and chants reflect the influence of culture bearer Kiko Pate, and are probably recordings of his ensemble. These items are performed here in a manner that is consistent with ancient practice, and in a manner identical to dozens of other recordings of this repertoire, stretching from the 1970s to the 2010s. These songs were a major part of Ramón Campbell’sinfluential work (Campbell 1971), positioned in his taxonomy of Rapanui music as examples of ‘ancient music’, with a chronological range from ‘ancient times’ to 1917. Collectively, these recordings position the tape as originating in the 1950s or 1960s, with the earliest possible date being around 1955, and the latest probably around 1970. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, the recordings feature the distinctive voices of known individuals who died in the late 1960s or early 1970s, including the charismatic, long-standing resident pastor, Father Sebastian Englert who died in 1969. Secondly, certain songs make reference to events of contemporary significance, such as the arrival in 1955 of Thor Heyerdahl’s archaeologi- cal expedition, so the songs could not have originated from before this time. While the chants and recitations of kaikai and patautau on the recording could have originated from any era (up to and including the present day, as their musical form and performance style have been maintained), the himene Tahiti could not, as Rapanui engagement with Tahitian commercial popular music happened in a very specific way at a particular point in time. In 1960, the naval vessel Esmerelda sailed past Ra- panui on a training mission, heading for Tahiti. Archaeologist Gonzalo Figueroa boarded at Rapanui in order to collect a consignment of coconut palms from Tahiti, and life-long Rapanui resident Edmundo Edwards took advantage of the opportunity International Journal of Heritage Studies 173 to ask him to bring back some LPs of Tahitian music. The Pakarati family had a working record player, and within weeks of the return voyage, around 45 Tahitian songs had been learned and absorbed into the local repertoire. The two a’amu tuai at the end of the tape are more difficult to place, as the identity of the orator remains unknown. It is possible that these were recorded at a different time to the other tracks, perhaps even in mainland Chile, at a much later date. While these details help to locate the recordings in time, the provenance of the tape remains a mystery, complicated by two further factors. Firstly, the first commercial recordings of Rapanui music were produced in the 1960s, which means that ethnographic field recordings were not the sole source of audio material pertaining to the island at that time. Secondly, the highly influential fieldwork of musicologist Ramón Campbell commenced in 1965, and revolved around the collection of field recordings. Campbell is rumoured to have collected up to 80 open reel tapes of audio in his extensive fieldwork, and while much of this has been subsequently broadcast, published or donated to archives, there is no full catalogue of his collection in the public domain, and therefore it is possible for otherwise unknown recordings from the 1960s to belong to his collection. It is entirely plausible that the Felbermayer tape contains re-recorded items from commercially available records and/or items provided directly to him by Campbell. The performers who appear on the Felbermayer tape were known to have recorded commercially and to have assisted Campbell in his fieldwork. However, the Felbermayer tape contains some songs that do not appear in any commercial record song list, and the sequence of songs on the Felbermayer tape does not resemble any extant recording. Further to this, an ensemble (largely comprising Pakarati family members) from this era is known to have toured to Europe, sponsored by a German researcher Thomas Barthel, and possibly to have recorded en route. The single word written in German on the tape’s label does little to resolve the mystery, as this could be in Barthel, Englert or Felbermayer’s own hand. Ultimately, there is insufficient information available at this stage to ascertain the exact source of the recordings, other than to clearly rule out Felbermayer as the originator of the entire collection, as many of them could not have been recorded in the 1940s, the time of his last visit to the island. It is, however, possible that Felbermayer recorded Rapanui performers visiting him in Viña del Mar in the 1960s. Given that the pool of known musicians was rather small, these same voices also feature in commercial recordings of the era, so there may be no way of know- ing. Furthermore it is quite likely that the final two items on the tape were directly recorded by Felbermayer whilst in Viña del Mar, as these stories fall outside of the scope of Campbell’s musical work, and are not of any commercial significance. This then means that the tape is, at best, a compilation of distinct sources, compiled so as to provide an overview of Rapanui musical practice in the mid-twentieth century, and probably intended only for Felbermayer’s own personal interest. Part or all of the tape might represent a gift from Campbell (who often sought to ingratiate him- self with other prominent Easter Island researchers through gifts of copies of field recordings), recordings of Barthel’s touring ensemble, extracts from radio broad- casts, or even rough takes or rehearsals from the Pakarati brothers’ ground breaking recording projects in the early 1960s. They are generally too devoid of extraneous sound to be field recordings, and the tape itself is clearly edited, as there is no extraneous sound between the tracks, which are themselves neatly arranged and ordered. 174 D. Bendrups

Finding and defining heritage value The characteristics and content of the Felbermayer tape place it in a contestable space for the consideration of its cultural heritage. Generally speaking, the highest priority in audio archiving projects in the Pacific (and, indeed, elsewhere) is, logically, afforded to older, unedited recordings, which are usually field recordings procured by research specialists. Commercially produced recordings are also important to Pacific audio heritage, and their perceived value similarly exists in direct relation to their age and availability, with the oldest and rarest recordings being widely acknowledged as the most in need of preservation. Being neither a field recording, nor an exact copy of a known commercial product, the Felbermayer tape sits outside both categories. The medium of open reel tape initially incited assumptions about the tape’s antiquity that suggested a point of origin in the 1940s or 1950s, but the musical content contradicts this. While it does contain music from an era long past, the tape’s content is not particularly rare, as it contains songs that were, to all intents and purposes, the most popular in Rapanui social life at the time, with very accessible musical forms and lyrics, including a range of foreign influences from Tahitian and Western popular music that accentuate processes of contact and exchange, rather than stasis and tradition. These observations coalesced gradually for the research team as the project developed, and became a source of some consternation, both in terms of the indeter- minacy of the tape’s origins and the questionability of its provenance. However, a new set of observations arose as a result of the fieldwork process that was integral to this project, which consolidated our feelings about the tape’s heritage value. A significant aspect of the fieldwork involved meeting with older members of the community, including some who could remember the period of the songs in question, and their collective reactions to the music proved instructive. For starters, the himene pure recordings elicited a nostalgic response, especially from those who were or had been regular churchgoers in their younger days. Many commented that these hymns simply were not sung anymore, or if they were, the tone was different, not as stri- dent. These recordings gave the elderly community members an immediate sense of how this aspect of their culture had changed over time, and drew commentaries on the topic of how to revive the old style, the old passion. One listener observed that, while the contemporary Mass is accompanied by numerous instruments, the Mass on the recording contained only voices, and he posited that this might be worth returning to. Whether this will eventuate or not is beyond the scope of this article to say, but this example does at least provide one indication of how a recording like this can help to enliven cultural heritage by raising awareness and inspiring cultural activism. The himene Tahiti recordings elicited quite a different response. These songs sounded exactly as the elderly community members remembered them, though in most cases they had not heard them for many years. Some listeners commented on the frequent use of Tahitian words in the songs, while others remarked at the rich sonorities of the musicians’ voices. As items of popular music, rather than ancient or traditional music, these songs were not of high priority to Campbell or any of the subsequent scholars to investigate Rapanui music, and were instead mentioned in passing and derided as inauthentic musical products by most. However, when viewed in the sociopolitical context of their day, these songs are quite significant. They drew from a Polynesian cultural context that is highly distinguishable from the International Journal of Heritage Studies 175 dominant Latin American influences of the Chilean music that had arrived on Rapa- nui up until this time, and thereby constituted an early form of reconnection with Polynesia at a time when the Rapanui themselves were yet to be recognised as Chilean citizens. This underlying political discourse is not reflected in the songs’ lyrics, but may be perceived in their widespread popularity. Where younger audiences were concerned, particular elements of the recordings drew noteworthy responses. One example of this concerns the aforementioned guitar style, rima pu, and it transpired that the greatest exponent of rima pu, an elder known as Kokomo, had only recently passed away. Though he produced one recording before he died, listening to these earlier recordings both reinforced the notion of rima pu as a musical behaviour of some historical value and accentuated the musicians’ awareness that, because of Kokomo’s death, there were now no living expo- nents of the style. Five or six young guitarists immediately pledged to introduce it into their performances somehow.

Conclusion Ultimately, the act of returning an item of cultural heritage to its community of origin is itself important as it symbolises respect and valorises culture. While symbolic, such processes may have ramifications for how people within society chose to valo- rise their heritage and traditions, and it is therefore not insignificant. This said, the experiences of the research team in returning this recording to the community, reflected in the examples of interactions above, reveal that the act of repatriation can also be a catalyst for reflection, action, renovation or change. In this case, such actions lay outside the theoretical scope of the project, but were a welcome coinci- dence. It is also significant that the reactions of the community to the recording were based on only the first hearing, captured during a two-week field trip. Further listen- ings may elicit other reactions, and further research would be required to capture these.

Acknowledgment The research for this article was completed with the support of FONDART funding from the Chilean Government Ministry of Culture (project No. 2845, 2012).

Notes on contributors Dan Bendrups is a deputy director (Research) of the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. He has written extensively on the music and culture of Easter Island, where he has conducted ethnographic field research since 2002, as well as other research in Australasia, Latin America and the Pacific.

References Atkinson, D. 2008. “The Heritage of Mundane Places.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity, edited by B. Graham and P. Howard, 381–396. Aldershot: Ashgate. Barwick, L., A. Marett, M. Walsh, N. Reid, and L. Ford. 2005. “Communities of Interest: Issues in Establishing a Digital Resource on Murrinh-patha Song at Wadeye (Port Keats), NT.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 20 (4): 383–397. 176 D. Bendrups

Barwick, L., and N. Thieberger. 2006. “Cybraries in Paradise: New Technologies and Ethnographic Repositories.” In Libr@ries: Changing Information Space and Practice, edited by C. Kapitzke and B. C. Bruce, 133–149. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Bendrups, D. 2007. “Oceanic Encounters on Record: The Social History and Significance of the Rapanui Song Sausau.” In Oceanic Music Encounters: Essays in Honour of Mervyn McLean, edited by R. Moyle, 35–45. Auckland: RAL. Bennett, A. 2002. “Music, Media and Urban Mythscapes: A Study of the Canterbury Sound.” Media, Culture and Society 24 (1): 107–120. Campbell, R. 1971. La Herencia Musical de Rapanui: Etnomusicología de la Isla de Pascua [The Musical Heritage of Rapanui: Ethnomusicology of Easter Island]. Andrés Bello: Santiago. Carojal, C. 2012. “Haciendo orden dieron con un Tesoro Rapa Nui [When Tidying Up, a Rapanui Treasure was Found].” La Estrella, June 6. Corn, A., and N. Gumbula. 2007. “Budutthun Ratja Wiyinymirri: Formal Flexibility in the Yolŋu Manikay Tradition and the Challenge of Recording a Complete Repertoire.” Australian Aboriginal Studies 2007 (2): 116–127. Gallaher, B. n.d. “La historia de un filántropo que se enamoró de Rapa Nui [The History of a Phi- lanthropist who Fell in Love with Rapanui].” Arqueoturismo. http://www.arqueoturismo. cl/?p=98. Gómez, F. 2012. “Encuentran voces perdidas de Rapa Nui [Lost Voices of Rapanui Found].” Las Últimas Noticias, June 6. Hayward, P. 2010. “Interactive Environments and the Context of Heritage: Culturally Engaged Research and Facilitation in Small-Island Societies.” In Cultural Transforma- tions: Perspectives on Translocation in a Global Age, edited by C. Prentice, V. Devidas, and H. Johnson, 159–178. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hobsbawm, E., and T. Ranger, eds. 1992. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kibby, M. 2000. “Home on the Page: A Virtual Place of Music Community.” Popular Music 19 (1): 91–100. Marett, A., M. Yunupingu, M. Langton, N. Gumbula, L. Barwick and A. Corn. 2006. “The National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia: Year One in Review.” In Backing Our Creativity: Proceedings of the National Education and the Arts Symposium, edited by N. Jeanneret and G. Gardiner, 84–90. Surry Hills: Australia Council for the Arts. McDowell, S. 2008. “Heritage, Memory and Identity.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity, edited by B. Graham and P. Howard, 37–53. Ashgate: Aldershot. Merriam, A. 1977. “Definitions of ‘Comparative Musicology’ and ‘Ethnomusicology’:An Historical-Theoretical Perspective.” Ethnomusicology 21 (2): 189–204. Myers, H. 1992. “Ethnomusicology.” In Ethnomusicology: An Introduction, edited by H. Myers, 3–18. London: Macmillan. Neuenfeldt, K., ed. 2007. “Indigenous Peoples, Recording Techniques and Recording Indus- try.” The World of Music 49 (1). Pigliasco, G. 2009. “Intangible Cultural Property, Tangible Databases, Visible Debates: The Sawau Project.” International Journal of Cultural Property 16: 255–272. Seeger, A., 2005. “New Technology Requires New Collaborations: Changing Ourselves to Better Shape the Future.” Musicology Australia 27: 94–111. Waterton, E., and L. Smith. 2010. “The Recognition and Misrecognition of Community Heritage.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 16 (1–2): 4–15. Winter, T. 2013a. “Clarifying the Critical in Critical Heritage Studies.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 19 (6): 532–545. doi:10.1080/13527258.2012.720997. Winter, T. 2013b. “Going Places: Challenging Direction for the Future of Heritage Studies.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 19 (4): 395–398.