The Wax Cylinder Recordings of the German Navy Expedition (1907–1909)

Abstract

This article examines the wax cylinder recordings produced during the German Navy Expedition (1907–1909) in present-day New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, as artifacts of colonial knowledge production. The study situates them within the institutional, technological, and epistemic frameworks of German anthropology and comparative musicology at the beginning of the twentieth century. Drawing on archival sources, the paper analyzes how recording practices were shaped by colonial encounters. Central to this is the concept of colonial role-playing, understood as a recording strategy through which German researchers mobilized their positions as physicians, traders and administrators to elicit performances and ethnographic information. The article demonstrates how these strategies structured recording sessions in the expedition’s base camp in Muliama, during encounters with initiation rites in the mountain village of Unfutt and in the context of a funeral ceremony on Lihir. The study further traces the legacy of the recordings in comparative musicology, which were analyzed in Herbert Hübner’s 1938 dissertation. It shows how the recordings were abstracted from their colonial contexts and interpreted within the racialized and evolutionary framework of Kulturkreislehre (cultural circle theory). By foregrounding the recording processes of the expedition, this paper contributes to critical debates on sound archives and their colonial collections.