COMMUNICATIVE HUMAN MUSICALITY

Aim

A cross-cultural comparative study of dance, singing and musical instrument skills in 12-15 year olds.

Background

Through the Australian Research Council funded project Communicative Human Musicality, The University of Western Australia (UWA) facilitates access to and stimulates research on the John Blacking Collection. The Collection was presented to the University by Professor Blacking’s widow in 1997. It contains Blacking’s original fieldwork from his time among the Venda and other African peoples as well as his published and unpublished materials. As custodian of the John Blacking Collection the Callaway Centre Archive is responsible for the development and management of the Collection and takes a lead role in overall project management.

Goals

The Archive plans to establish sustainable management practices and undertake major processing of the John Blacking Collection at UWA.

Activities

In support of the project’s research requirements, the Archive responds to requests for appropriate research material by identifying and retrieving suitable items from the largely unprocessed collection.

As part of the processing, the Archive is developing a series of ‘finding aids’. Chief among these are a comprehensive listing of the entire collection, an authoritative bibliography of Blacking’s writings, and a chronology of Blacking’s life and career based on biographical information taken from documents in the collection.

Project Outcomes

At the 31st National Conference of the Musicological Association of Australia (MSA), Melbourne, December 2008, the Archive team presented two papers as part of a themed panel-session titled John Blacking the Multi-Disciplinary Man: Reflections on the Life and Work of John Blacking.

The papers were:
Archivist Meets Ethnomusicologist: Reconstructing the Papers of John Blacking
and
How Organised is Man?: the Research Practices of John Blacking

Acknowledgements

This project is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP0879196). The Chief Investigators acknowledge and thank the ARC for its support.