Unfolding Musicking Archives At The Northwest Amazon

This dissertation proposes a decolonial revision of the archive consolidated by scholars, travelers and missionaries who previously sound recorded the Northwestern Amazon region, and introduces alternative ways of producing archival artifacts open to non-Indigenous and Indigenous perspectives and epistemologies alike. It studies the formation of sonic archives and points of listening that represented worlds of Indigenous expressivity in sound during the twentieth century in the Vaupés region, southern Colombia. This study focuses on Tukanoan musicking and specifically with the Cubeo Emi-Hehenewa clan, an Amazonian indigenous community living in a village called Camutí located at the Vaupés River Basin. This dissertation aims to reposition ethnomusicological practice in the Northwest Amazon as a collaborative and ethical research endeavor that can contribute new theoretical and methodological knowledge about and from the Vaupés region.