ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Lost Cylinders: Sound Recording, Physical Anthropology, and Ethnozoology in the Malay Peninsula, c. 1900

• In Event: Collection Stories and Indo-Pacific worlds 4

English Abstract

In July 1899, a man named Seman recited a “spell to make the fish-trap dance” and attract a bountiful catch. This was perhaps the first sound recording made in the Malay Peninsula. At the turn of the 20th century, the phonograph offered a new technology in the arsenal of British anthropologists. On the Cambridge University Expedition to the Northeastern Malay States (1899-1900), W. W. Skeat used the instrument to capture Malay and Orang Asli [Indigenous] speech and songs on wax cylinders. He would later publish selected lyrics in his two-volume Pagan Races (1906), in which he developed a racial classification of Orang Asli partly on the basis of language. Yet these lyrics and recordings were entered as evidence in inquiry beyond linguistic anthropology. The philologist R. J. Lloyd listened to the singers’ vowel sounds and reached physical anthropology conclusions about the physical shape of their skulls. Zoologists drew on these collected lyrics to study Malay animal nomenclature and “zoological theories,” and listened for information about hunting practices and trade in natural products like rhinoceros horns. Through the lens of sound recording as an expeditionary practice, this paper explores tensions between linguistic and physical anthropology and the contested status of ethno-zoological (and botanical) knowledge. The afterlives of these recordings over the last century reveal an irony of salvage ethnography: only one documented wax cylinder remains. I conclude by considering how the entangled disciplinary and material histories of this ‘lost’ collection might shape scholars’ engagement with these songs and their lyrics today.

Author

• Katherine Enright, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, University Museum of Zoology, Pacific Circle