"Songs from the House of the Dead: Sound, Shamans and Collecting in the North Pacific (1900-2000)" by Thomas Ross Miller

Thomas Ross Miller

Deposited 2005

Abstract
This dissertation is an ethnohistorical study of sound, shamans, and collecting. Circa 1900, anthropologists from the American Museum of Natural History's Jesup North Pacific Expedition, led by Franz Boas, produced the first sound recordings from Siberia and northwestern North America, including performances of shamanic singing and drumming. These sounding object form the baseline for an exploration of cultural change and continuity circa 2000. Through museological collections and archival documents, I trace the parallel rise of museums, professional anthropology, folklore, comparative musicology, and the phonograph in the history of science. The impact of these developments on the construction of anthropological knowledge, and their reception by informants and the public, are revealed through a dialogue between the past and the present. While the dissertation focuses on the sonic practices and mediated representations of shamans among the Yukagir and Sakha (Yakut) people of Siberia, the full range of native cultures found in the collection reaching from northern Asia to northwestern America, including Nlaka'pamux in interior British Columbia and Attuans in Alaska, is considered.

The dissertation is also an essay in the anthropology of sound. Drawing on field work and theory, I analyze the culture, nature, and supernature of shamanic sound and its mediated representations. This data is compared with psychophysical models for the apperception of musical and linguistic vocal sounds as formulated by Boas and the early experimental psychologists, with historical reports of outbreaks of involuntary singing diseases in the north. A new theory of shamanic sound, grounded empirically and phenomenologically, is proposed. An understanding of the shaman as musician and of spirits as environmental symbols and realms of consciousness emerges from the analysis of the products of these anthropological encounters.

Much of the indigenous knowledge collected circa 1900 subsequently underwent decades of repression threatening cultural survival. During the 1990s, the repatriation of this knowledge coincided with revitalization movements redefining the poetics and politics of indigenous aesthetics and identity. The contemporary re-encounter with returning collections reveals old and new beliefs and practices, contested claims, and meanings.