The Entangled Colonial History of Sound Recordings

The beginning of a process

Many of the phonographic recordings of the Phonogrammarchiv, including Rudolf Pöch’s Papua New Guinea recordings (1904–1906), form part of its colonial legacy. Rudolf Pöch (1870–1921) was an Austrian physician, ethnographer and anthropologist whose ‘collecting’ activities were motivated by racist and evolutionist theories and were only possible through his active use of colonial structures of violence.

Other sources connected to these holdings are dispersed within Austria and around the world. Unless one is able to find such sources internationally, it is impossible to access and reconstruct the entangled colonial history of sound recordings from multiple perspectives. With this project we intend to address this issue.

Read more about the project
On a table are all the materials relating to the Poech Papua New Guinea Collection (1904-1906): Three large volumes of transcripts with an opened volume containing an exemplary transcript page, a metal matrix and a wax plate cast, two CDS and the booklet of the 'Complete Edition of Historical Holdings 1899-1950', Series 3, and two stacks of the 94 epoxy resin plate casts of the sound recordings.

‘Kleine Hefte’ from Pöch’s expedition to Papua New Guinea, 1904–1906 (Natural History Museum Vienna). Photo by Alexander Silaen, 2023.

Working with a letter of request for support from Pöch to the Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1904 (BAS:IS Archive, OeAW). Photo by Alexander Silaen, 2024.

Working with a photo from the Pöch Collection (Collection Analog and Digital Media, Weltmuseum Vienna). Photo by Alexander Silaen, 2024.

Working with a slide of two canoes and part of the ship “Valk” (Pöch Collection, Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Univ. of Vienna). Photo by Alexander Silaen, 2024.

Collection of historical sound recordings (Phonogrammarchiv, Austrian Academy of Sciences) © ÖAW/Klaus Pichler 2023.

New Guinea shelf (Depot, Weltmuseum Wien). Photo by Alexander Silaen, 2024.

Findability

An annotated list of institutions and sources on the ‘expedition’ to Papua New Guinea

The goal of this website is to give a transparent overview of the institutions that hold the dispersed objects, audio recordings, photographs, film recordings and paperwork, ‘collected’ and produced by Rudolf Pöch. They were made before, during, and after his colonial ‘expedition’ to today’s Papua New Guinea (then known as British New Guinea, German New Guinea and Dutch New Guinea), Indonesia (Dutch East Indies), and the Commonwealth of Australia between 1904 and 1906.

With this project and website, we wish to highlight the sources and the historical implications they reveal, as well as the institutions that hold them. The annotated list is intended to aid findability and provide information on access, for future engagement with the materials, whether academic, artistic, or personal. The list will be updated with further sources or additional information over time.

View the list of institutions

Beyond Pöch

Centring Austria’s and Vienna’s research institutions within an entangled colonial history

This project is an important step in a longer, continuous collaborative research process. Our intention is to go beyond the idea of Rudolf Pöch as an individual main actor, and to focus instead on infrastructures, to see his collections as one example of many Austrian colonial research projects. 

We hope that scholars around the world will continue this research with us.