Description
Ethnomusicologist Edward Herbst, an independent scholar, has since the early 1970s dedicated his career to studying the artistic and cultural traditions of Bali. Over the past 15 years, with support from foundations including Ford, Mellon, Wenner-Gren, Luce and the Asian Cultural Council, and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Award, he has led the Bali 1928 Repatriation Project to find, document, research, restore and repatriate the first recordings of Balinese music, made in 1928. Herbst’s research recovered 111 seminal musical tracks that had gone out of print and were unknown in Bali, together with related archival photographs and silent film footage shot by Canadian composer Colin McPhee, Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, Swedish dancer Rolf de Maré and American dance ethnographer Claire Holt when they lived in Bali in the 1930s. This recovered work was published in 2015 in the form of five CDs with extensive accompanying contextual notes, in English and Indonesian, based on in-depth exchanges with Balinese scholars and artists. The findings, which reintroduced techniques, performance styles and cultural practices that had been lost, have been disseminated, as well, through presentations and seminars in venues ranging from Balinese communities to American museums, and the archival materials are now available online.
More recent investigations pointed Herbst toward new avenues for research, including his discovery in the Library of Congress (LOC) of additional films, photographs and field notes from the 1930s of Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Jane Belo and their Balinese collaborator Made Kalér. Herbst and his Balinese partners propose to complete the repatriation of the Bali 1928 resources and the LOC materials through a series of interrelated projects over the next three years. The Asian Cultural Council, whose mission is to advance international dialogue, understanding and respect through cultural exchanges between Asian and American artists and scholars, will serve as fiscal sponsor for the project.
With a grant, Herbst would conduct additional fieldwork; finalize a monograph on the Bali 1928 Repatriation Project; release edited and annotated versions of the LOC material; and co-author with Balinese scholar and mask maker Ketur Kodi a book on Bateson’s photographs of 60 sacred and historical dance masks. The mask collection, no longer extant, was carved by Ida Pedanda Madé Sidemen, a Brahmana priest and one of the most significant cultural figures of 20 th century Bali. Herbst collaborates extensively with Balinese counterparts, from performers in the villages to scholars in universities and arts institutions. All of the resources will be in English and Indonesian and made accessible in Bali through archives, village performance clubs, universities, libraries, and regional cultural centers as well as to the descendants of the 1928 artists, many themselves performers.
The circumstances of loss, rediscovery, reacquisition and revival evident in Bali 1928 have drawn attention in the field of cultural heritage because of the project’s broad implications for inspiring and informing repatriation projects elsewhere. The monograph in particular will address repatriation strategies, research methodologies, restoration techniques, collaboration between foreign and indigenous artists and scholars, and challenges. Anthony Seeger, the founding director of Smithsonian Folkways, has written that the project is “a world model for a sensitive and productive way to reintroduce old and unique recordings in the 21 st century.” Herbst explains, “Repatriation can allow indigenous cultures to reclaim regional diversity, local knowledge, and understanding of the dynamics of creative change.” An essential element, he stresses, has been the dialogic nature of the research process: “Our repeated visits with Bali’s oldest generation—including some who performed on the 1928 recordings and appear in the films—were less structured interviews, and much more open-ended conversations full of humor, camaraderie, and profound memories stimulated by the unprecedented archival materials, as if windows had been opened after almost a century.”
Grant funds will support research and writing, stipends for the Balinese research team, translation, travel and accommodation, and administrative costs of the Asian Cultural Council. Participating institutions include the information technology institute STIKOM-Bali, UCLA’s Ethnomusicology Archive, Indonesia’s Museum Nasional, Library of Congress, Arbiter of Cultural Traditions, Dansmuseet in Stockholm, and other libraries and archives in North America, Europe and Asia.
Recommendation: That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a three-year grant of $275,000 to the Asian Cultural Council to support the Bali 1928 and Library of Congress-to-Bali Repatriation Project .
