Dr. Peter Toner attended the Association of Critical Heritage Studies Biannual Conference in Canberra, ACT, Australia, on December 2 – 4, 2014 to present a paper entitled “Affect, Memory, and Meaning in Archival Recordings of Yolngu Manikay.”

Emotional responses are an essential, yet under-recognized, aspect of performances of manikay, a public genre of ritual song of the Yolngu people of northeast Arnhem Land, in northern Australia. The primary aesthetic goal of Yolngu singers is to “paint a picture” of ancestrally-significant places in layered detail and, when done effectively, this can create a strong emotional reaction in listeners who recall their own deceased kin who had been associated with those places. Yolngu singers also perform with one ear on the past, as they attempt to live up to the high standard of previous generations of singers as they actively strive to emulate their style. Nostalgia for people and for places, then, permeates performances of manikay and is an important element of the generation of meaning in Yolngu ritual music.

The availability of archival recordings of Yolngu manikay through acts of digitization and repatriation creates a new dynamic and a new set of challenges for their communities of origin. Hearing the voices of past generations of singers, sometimes for the first time ever, is an emotionally powerful experience for Yolngu people. It certainly heightens, but is commensurable with, the sense of nostalgia for the past already present in how manikay are made meaningful. Archival sound recordings are also meaningful objects for their archives of origin, which are tasked with their ongoing management as items of intangible cultural heritage. The international principles of knowledge management used by archives, however, are incommensurable not only with Yolngu principles of knowledge management, but also with manikay (and archival recordings thereof) as affectively-charged objects of memory and meaning. In this paper, I will examine these tensions and complexities in the light of my own digitization of almost 400 hours of archival sound recordings, repatriated to four different Yolngu communities. I will argue that the challenge for archival institutions lies in recognizing the affective nature of Yolngu manikay, and in expanding archival knowledge management practices to accommodate it.