For example, if you publish a book, I don't need your descendants or the descendants of a parallel bloodline to approve me reading it.

That said, I only skimmed the article, so maybe there's something particularly sensitive about the circumstances of the recording? Forgive me if I've overlooked something. Beyond all that, it is also ultimately the researchers' discretion as to who they want to check with before publishing the works more widely, so whatever. Far be it from me to say that I have a right to something that I did not put in the effort to create.

I regard that as a caution that just because I think something is reasonable, it doesn't mean that others will think the same. My sense of reasonableness is based on many things, including being part of a culture where it's cheap to record, store, and redistribute sound, and which regards anything old as being part of the public domain and therefore unrestricted.

Modern informed consent has a much higher standard than the consent of 100 years ago. For one, it's not just consent about the process of making a recording but informed consent about the larger consequences of doing so.

The people who were recorded likely knew their speech was being recorded for future scientific research. However, consider the technology of the time. The recording was onto wax cylinder, so it could only be played a few hundred times before being worn out. This limited the total number of people who could use it, and mostly to anthropologists. It was also hard to duplicate a wax cylinder recording with any fidelity.

There is no way that the people of 100 years ago could give informed consent of the possibility that their recording would be open to the world a century later.

While you, if you published a book, would have grown up as part of a culture which has had centuries of book publishing experience, and would be able to provide informed consent.

Of course, those people are dead, so why does it care?

Anthropologists also want to get a more complete view of people's lives. To do that, they may need to make assurances about how any notes or recordings will be used. If the standard is "after 100 years everything will be public" then anthropologists are less likely to get the information they want.

You are not a mod, you have no authority save what you feign, and this comment precludes you from deleting yours.

Of course, quite a few don't. I despise binding arbitrary clauses in consumer contracts.

While I know the early wax recordings required "leather lungs", said one description of a singer who had to repeat the same song for each cylinder, my limited research suggests that later models only required speaking more loudly.

The article says they were recorded between 1900 and 1938. The image of a recording is from 1916. I know Edison sold memo recording systems for businesses at around this time, and I don't think they required shouting.

> if you publish a book, I don't need your descendants or the descendants of a parallel bloodline to approve me reading it.

This is a fairly terrible example given the number of book and other intellectual properties whose publishing is being controlled by their estates.

Even by Mickey Mouse standards of copyright, which don't even extend to works this old, these phonographs have been in the public domain for 15 or more years.

Not that this is the point I intended to argue.

> The special context for this is the previous mistreatment of indigenous people and their artefacts; therefore researchers these days tend to go to great lengths to include indigenous people and seek their approval, as a courtesy.

As for the previous (and ongoing!) mistreatment of indigenous people and their artifacts; I don't think that has anything at all to do with the ethics or rights regarding the publication of these recordings. To my knowledge, these recordings were never intended to be private to the band in the first place.

If people who lived near or with your great grandfather killed my great grandfather's people or ran them out of town, and my grandfather had on a separate occasion recorded a phonograph, knowing that it would be available to the recording party and all of their associates, in a language you're studying in present day, the crimes against my great grandfather's people would have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you should publish a recording he made available in the same timeframe (or in this case, after the brunt of the damage had already been done).

I argue the answer is no, because there's at least a high likelihood that consent wasn't freely given.

So if your intent was to understand the culture and tradition of these peoples, or their artifacts, it makes a lot of sense to respect their traditions and cultural practices. As you know though things never quite happened this way -- there was a genocide -- extermination of their culture and people. So given the complete lack of respect or willingness to follow this principle historically, along with a genocide, researchers are especially careful to respect the wishes of the peoples whose stories, artifacts, traditions they are dealing with.

To your knowledge, did the people being recorded give informed consent to having those recordings heard by more than a few hundred people doing anthropological research?

Congratulations on having an opinion.

To be clear, I would hope the descendants will share these things with the world, and I expect they will. Many tribes have been working on language preservation and recovery of old traditions and oral histories and such for the past few decades. This obviously enables that effort.

But, I don't think tribes should be obligated to do so, nor do I think it'd be ethical to give away these recordings without some input from the tribes. They would have more than mere memories of their language and culture today were it not for an attempted and nearly successful genocide by European settlers, and many feel (rightly, IMHO) as though their communities have had nearly everything stolen from them. It's not an old scar for many; it is a fresh wound.

Racism won't ever cease to be a problem if we continue to say "your ancestors did this, so you can't do that" rather than just treating people as people.

Well, we could maybe start thinking that way if it were true. The US government is still actively in violation of treaties, stealing land and resources on behalf of oil companies and other business interests. Indigenous people in the US face more discrimination, both systemic and cultural, than nearly anyone.

The notion that settler mistreatment of indigenous peoples is a distant memory, hundreds of years in the past, is just plain wrong.

Racism won't ever cease to be a problem if we continue to say "your ancestors did this, so you can't do that" rather than just treating people as people.

Stolen artifacts are sometimes returned to their country of origin. Is that wrong, just because a theft happened a long time ago? Archaeologists and anthropologists today will work with the governments and communities their work is about to ensure it is a respectful dialog rather than a theft of cultural resources. Are you saying that's not a good thing?

It is an incredible feat of mental acrobatics to call it "racism" to extend the same courtesy to indigenous peoples that is extended by anthropologists and archaeologists working anywhere else in the world to the peoples they study.

The whole concept of calling people wrong for cultural appropriation, for example, it's just racism. If you want to keep racism, then keep doing that.

Same here: "you don't have the right ancestry so you can't do this". It's racism. We can keep it; I'd rather not.

Perhaps we could call it "anthropology", from "anthropo-" for "man, people, humanity" and "-logy" for "the study of".

Then we could let anthropology researchers figure out the best way to handle these sorts of issues.

Retract your comment or prove you're wrong by maintaining it.

---

Also, are you saying anthropologists would never intefere or contradict a distinct cultures wishes? I know that's not true.

We should let the rich decide who pays taxes too, as they have most experience of it, no.

They might get a bit smug if we teach them a couple of Greek words.

They might start to think that their faeces are aosmic (ά- without, -οσμο odor).

Being sat in front of a recording device and told to speak doesn’t imply the speaker actually wanted to record his or her voice. Many folks were forced to take pictures also.