| Archival collections of ethnomusicological recordings can be valuable to people in the communities whose practices they document. Often the return of recordings raises complex ethical questions. Some are similar to questions implicated in disputes over the repatriation of objects. Others arise because recordings are replicable replicas of evanescent sound events.; Literature in ethnomusicology, museology, anthropology, photography, and other fields addresses pertinent issues regarding collecting processes, repositories' social roles, identity construction, and ethical and legal concerns.; Questionnaire responses from sound archives in eighteen countries provide a synchronic view of repatriation practices.; A case study of the return of certain recordings of Navajo music provides some sense of the diverse ways of viewing one such process.; From these perspectives repatriation is seen as part of the global flow of recordings, and as enacting an ethic founded in responsibility to the creators of the music documented in the collections for which archives care. |
