Anthony Seeger: Is it Possible to Safeguard Intangible Cultural Heritage, and If it Is, Should We Try? (April 5th, 12 noon)

The 2012 Ethnomusicology Colloquium presents:

Is it Possible to Safeguard Intangible Cultural Heritage, and If it Is, Should We Try?

A Talk by Prof. Anthony Seeger

Thursday, April, 5, 2012
12:00 pm
The Center for Ethnomusicology
Dodge Hall 701 C
Department of Music
Columbia University

Few musical traditions simply "disappear." Most are actively "disappeared" by intolerance, laws, bureaucratic action/inaction, and changing economic and social processes. Should scholars do anything about this? In 2006, enough member nations had ratified the UNESCO International Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage to enable it to enter into force. This presentation is based on the author's experience with the earlier UNESCO program of the Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity when he served as Secretary General of the International Council for Traditional Music. He will also draw on his own field research as well as discussions of the effectiveness of cultural policies implemented following a given musical form to be a Masterpiece in order to address whether it is possible to safeguard intangible cultural heritage, and if it is, whether we should try.

Anthony Seeger is Distinguished Professor, Ethnomusicology and Director, Ethnomusicology Archive, The University of California at Los Angeles.  He is the author of Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People, Cambridge University Press, 1987 and co-editor of Early Field Recordings: A Catalogue of the Cylinder Collections at the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music (Indiana University Press, 1987). His numerous published articles have focused on issues of land and human rights for Brazilian Indians, issues of archiving and intellectual property, and ethnomusicological theory and method.  Seeger served as Director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings at the Smithsonian Institute from 1988 to 2000. He served as Director of the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University and as a professor in the Department of Anthropology from 1982 to 1988. He was a researcher and professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro from 1975 to 1982. Seeger was Executive Producer of all recordings issued on the Smithsonian Folkways label between 1988 and 2000, a total of about 250 recordings.

Click here to visit his bio page at UCLA, or here to view his curriculum vitae.