1. Background
The MuseoChileno de Arte Precolombino has a very extensive website (http://www.museoprecolombino.cl) with around 4,000 individual pages divided into sections on the museum's exhibitions, collections and library, special sections on Amerindian cultures and art, and a children's Web page, among others. Like the museum itself, the website is dedicated to Amerindian cultures across the continent, from Mexico to Chile. In 2005, the museum was recognized as the "Best Museum Web site in Latin America and the Caribbean" by INFOLAC UNESCO.
The museum is currently working on a large Chilean prehistory and ethnography project that includes a website. One section of the site will be an extensive audiovisual archive with photographs and video and audio recordings. The museum's current website already has an audiovisual section that contains 35 documentary films and animated features, as well as around 20 audio CDs for listening and downloading (http://www.precolombino.cl/mods/audiovisual/), but the new site we will be much larger.
We are now working on this new site one section at a time, and have already uploaded more than 1,000 photos from the collection of the museum's founder, taken during his travels throughout the Americas in the 1950s, and from that of a German photographer who traveled through the Americas in the 1930s. (This test site is not yet public, but can be found at : http://www.archivosfotograficos.cl ( user name: demo2 password: museo).
We are presently digitalizing some 400 additional photos from fieldwork and research carried out by the Museum's archaeologists as well as photos of objects in our collection. Our current website already has around 1,000 photos of objects in our collection (see: http://www.precolombino.cl/mods/coleccion/piezas_cultura.php?id=9).
2. The author's contribution
We have digitalized and systematized all audio recordings collected in ethnomusicological fieldwork since 1990 by José Pérez de Arce and myself, both of us museum researchers. This audio material consists of some 600 hours of music, songs, stories, histories and soundscapes of the native peoples of Chile, and recordings of pre-Hispanic musical instruments of the Museum's collection.
I am currently selecting around 100 hours of these recordings to upload to the new website. In addition, I wish to upload around 50 hours of video material on Chile's indigenous and peasant populations from my personal archive, which includes approximately 700 hours of recordings.
3. Ethical Questions
The question I would like to put forward in this paper is related to ethics and intellectual property rights. In my work as an archivist and researcher at the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino for the past 20 years, I have created many audio and video recordings of Chile's native peoples. I would now like to make available material such as songs that I was allowed to record because of a relationship of friendship and trust that was built with the musicians over many years of collaboration.
Can I upload songs that I recorded at the invitation of the sons of an elderly peasant singer who asked me to preserve their mother's memory? The songs, like the singer herself, are extremely beautiful. The sons in this family are also singers who make their living by playing and teaching music. As a researcher and family friend, do I have the right to make these recordings available to the world? On the other hand, do I have the right to keep these recordings in my personal archives? The issue in this case is not about retaining personal ownership, but about my obligation to share these materials with the world.
Ownership
The video material I am speaking about is personal, and is the product of research I financed myself or through competitive grants I have been awarded. It has not been funded or otherwise facilitated by the Museum. For many years I have engaged in highly participatory anthropology and ethnomusicology, working with and for many communities, and have amassed what now amounts to some 700 hours of video recordings. What began as filming for a specific study has expanded to the point that today, twenty years later, I have an inventory and archive of film of enormous value for our heritage: a small treasure trove.
This leads me to ask: What will happen to this material if I die today, tomorrow or the day after? In 20, 50 or 100 years, this material will delight any documentary filmmaker working in the areas I have studied. The material should be available; it is part of our heritage, fragments of Chile's 20th Century rural history.
Creating a systematized archive
A second question emerges, then: How can I convert this material into a systematized archive that can be used by researchers and documentary filmmakers? Technically it is simple: I just have to digitalize everything and make a metadata base. This just requires time and money. But some issues arise as I examine the task before me, and those are what I wish to examine in this paper. I do not offer any answers, but ask the reader to accompany me as I reflect upon the questions that occur to me.
Open access
I have always believed that documentary film and music recordings should be freely available to all, and that educational materials should be open to anyone who wishes to use them. Based on this, I fully agree with the principles of the Open Web and Open Video Movement (Kaufman, 2010). Indeed, this has been the modus operandi of Chimuchina Records, the small label that I co-founded with José Pérez de Arce in 1990 to publish the records, books and documentaries we had produced over the years. The audiovisual section of the Museum's website operates in the same way, allowing users to download material freely.
Preventing misuse
The current Web archive project is designed to include downloadable material with high resolution for use by students, teachers and researchers. This mode is not problematic for material already "published" in documentaries, but becomes so for unpublished materials, raw camera footage. How can we ensure these materials will be used responsibly? How can we prevent situations in which, for example, a piece of music downloaded from the website is used in an advertising commercial because of some relation with the song's lyrics, or in a political campaign, or as a theme song for a television program, or some ridiculous purpose that takes it absolutely out of context?
Many people have pondered this issue, and the current fashion is to speak of open heritage files and digital archives. I am aware that the inventors of the Creative Commons license, for example, have developed very clear guidelines about this, while I am a relative amateur asking questions that many have already answered. But as I commented recently in an Audiovisual Colloquium held at the Universidad Católica de Chile, Creative Commons operates through a kind of gentleman's agreement, and such a thing no longer exists in the 21st Century. Anyone can use the materials licensed under Creative Commons for commercial purposes as long as there is no enforcement and/or judicial agency to prosecute those who violate the rules for commercial gain.
At any rate, having such an infrastructure in our Museum would be impossible; there are so many other needs that take priority that even proposing it would be absurd. Such a system would have to be self-financing, with materials sold for commercial purposes and the revenue generated used to monitor and enforce its legal use. But this is unrealistic; our archives would not generate enough journalistic interest to generate such revenues. We are not the INA in France, which has tagged all of its material with metadata, monitors its use around the globe using a system of cyber spies, and knows perfectly well if one of its files is being used without permission.
Value of the materials
The materials I refer to were filmed and became part of the history of humanity because the society in which we live has recognized the value of our heritage and its need to be recorded, safeguarded and conserved. Human diversity has taken on great value in our time. Museums, archives, libraries and television channels have found a new commercial niche that relies on this valuation and on the notion that it can be used for the betterment of humanity. And thus I find myself the owner of material that carries a lot of weight in this regard. I smile wondering how many people would laugh at my reflections, people who live according to the rules of contemporary society, in which everything is for sale, in which the aim is to amass money and power. How and by what means this is accomplished are of little importance. And if one can make money while providing some cultural understanding to people and to governments, then that is even better.
Red flags
Our institution is just beginning to realize what a treasure trove we have in our audiovisual archives. At the same time, after 30 years in operation, the Museum is undergoing massive changes. It is being transformed from a sort of family institution accustomed to donating valuable educational material, to one that can only survive by engaging in the market. New managers have become concerned about leveraging the Museum's cultural capital to generate revenue. It is in this context that this new digital archive - which has been a dream of mine for the past twenty years - is becoming a reality. But it is being envisioned according to the Museum's new paradigm, which states that in addition to promoting heritage and education, it should earn revenue for the institution. This leads to an inevitable clash between those of us who believe that the materials in the archive are a supremely valuable part of our cultural heritage and those who see it as merchandise that should be used to generate profit. The latter is the new view of the cultural/heritage industry: The 21st Century view. And so another question emerges: How can we harmonize these two viewpoints?
Do we make the unpublished material that we upload on the website available for viewing only and not for download? That is a bad policy, as videos are usually made available for downloading so users can view them at a convenient time. Do we put a watermark on all our material and monitor its use? The watermark is very ugly, and diminishes the visual beauty of the material. There is an obvious aesthetic pleasure that is lost when a watermark is superimposed on every frame or image. So I do not believe the watermark is a good option. One of the most obvious and practical solutions seems to be to make material freely available in medium resolution, but require users who want high resolution material to fill out a form explaining the intended use of the material before allowing its download, with the Museum reserving the right to accept or reject any request.
Rights of the subjects
Still, the real and, I think, deeper problem is an ethical one. I feel uncomfortable posting unpublished material on the website to allow people to publish or use it when they do not know the people who were filmed and when they do not have the express permission of those subjects to use the recordings.
Why should I hand over this footage - which was shot because of a relationship of trust that existed between the filmmaker and those being filmed - to people who have never been to those places, who have not lived with the people there, who have not earned the permission to record and use the material? This is the most important point I want to reflect upon in this article.
A floreo ritual
I remember vividly when I was filming a floreo ritual in Chulluncane, an Aymara town in the Chilean altiplano situated at 5,000 meters above sea level. A floreo is a family celebration held once every three years to give thanks for the llama and alpaca herds and to ask for fertility, abundant rain and grass, and the growth of the herd. The ritual, which lasts two days and two nights, includes different ceremonies dedicated to water and the land. The herd is brought to the corral and adorned with colorful yarn attached to the animals' ears, as an offering. This ritual is common among Andean groups that trace their roots to the pre-Hispanic period.
I had been invited to film the floreo festival by Eugenio Challapa, head of the family and organizer of the event. Few families perform the floreo in the traditional way any more, with the sequence of specific songs for each kind of animal. Don Eugenio wanted me to record the ritual being performed in the traditional way, the way his parents and grandparents had performed it before him.
The day before the festival, family members began to arrive from different cities where they had migrated. Today, only six older couples live in Chulluncane; all others have migrated to the city, and only come to the town for festivals. The first night, Eugenio introduced me to everyone, telling them I had come to perform a very important task, to record the floreo, so the songs would be preserved, so their grandchildren could listen to them and learn them, even while living in the city. He asked them to show me respect and assist me in any way they could; said that I was a friend of the family; that we had met 8 years ago when he had invited me to film the carnaval. He trusted me because the last time I filmed with him, I had sent him the footage. After that, we began meeting more often to plan a documentary on the herding cycle. This film on the floreo was part of that project, although the project itself had not been executed owing to a lack of funding.
The floreo ceremony is imbued with a deep and intimate sense of affection and gratitude for the animals and for mother earth.
On the second day of the floreo, in the midst of the mayhem of bellowing llamas and shouting men in the corral, with the air full of guano dust, and the sounds of singing and bandurrias (stringed instruments), and the colorful yarn that the women attach to the ears of the animals, I filmed incessantly, recording everything through my lens, conscious of the absurdity of wanting to capture this reality on tape, to experience the world through the camera lens, knowing that Jean Rouch was entirely right when he spoke of the cine- trance, experiencing the unreality of seeing life - another unreality - through the camera lens, through a photographic frame.
I was caught up in this wonderful fluidity when a young man about 22 years old, a relative of Eugenio, came up to me and, emboldened by alcohol and caught up himself in the passion and emotion of the festival, said: "I'm not going to see any part of this video out there, in a commercial, a musical clip, on the news, not anywhere, this footage is for the family, it is sacred".
Given that I am archivist and am aware of the value of these films for our heritage, in addition to making them available to don Eugenio, who asked me to film, shouldn't I also include them in the archive and make them available to the world?
I firmly believe that the work I do recording the rituals, music and dance of different peoples should be given back to the community itself, to help maintain the traditions that bind these people and cultures together and give them meaning. For years now I have been producing books, discs and documentaries that I share first of all with the individuals and groups with whom they were recorded. It is the same thing with my camera footage. Even when a film has not been produced, I send the raw footage back to the place in which I filmed it. That is what I have done for the past twenty years as I documented the chino dances, a ritual performed in peasant and fishing villages of central Chile. I have worked with Gerardo Silva on these film projects for the past 12 years, and we have given to the chinos more than 700 copies of raw VHS and DVD footage of these festivals.
Issues of trust
Like life itself, anthropology is an endless loop of relations and exchanges, and as the material I record returns to the subjects themselves I am invited to film new situations and celebrations. Something as simple and obvious as making sure the subjects have a copy of the material filmed in their communities is a surprisingly rare occurrence, and is the biggest stumbling block for filming or photographing in new venues where the people do not trust photographers because of previous experiences, when material was not shared with them. At least in my country, people from rural communities are tired of people coming from the city to photograph or film them, then not following through on their promise to send a coy of the material.
The invitation to film is therefore a gesture of trust, an act of trust for trust already earned. Do I then have the right to hand this material over to whoever is willing to pay to use it?
An example that highlights this problem occurred in 1997, when I traveled to the Aymara town of Cariquima to film the local carnival. I was invited by the alférez, the person who had been appointed to organize and obtain funding for this community festival that year. I filmed for four days and nights, with no problems. The following year a team from a Chilean television channel went to the same town to film the same festival and were driven out of town with sticks and stones, as they had not been invited to film and the people did not accept any intrusion in their rituals.
Benefits to the community being recorded
These days, community members have a clear sense of the importance of recording their traditions and of using audiovisual means to encourage young people to participate. When I began to plan the production of the documentary "La Reina del Aconcagua" (The Queen of Aconcagua), a film on the traditional chino dances held in the Aconcagua Valley in Central Chile, Guillermo, a leading figure in the local dance community, became very enthusiastic about the idea and we worked together on the ethnography and recording because he knew that a film, among other benefits, could encourage young people in the town to join the dance movement by seeing it presented in film. And that is what happened (Mercado, 2003).
In other words, there is a clear awareness that the use of recordings can benefit the community that is being filmed. The community decides who will film them and who will not. The community featured in the film has every right to decide whether it wants to allow someone who has not accompanied them to use footage of their dances.
Privacy issues
Another question that occurs to me is: Do I have the right to upload footage of a lengthy, intimate conversation with a peasant who tells me about his life and what he has learned because we have been friends for the 20 years I have been dancing and playing the flute in his ritual chino dance? What will he say if part of that conversation appears in a television program? "Look, there I am, look, look", he will say to his wife and children, "but I have never spoken to those people, the only one who has interviewed me is El Rucio (that is what they call me in the country), El Rucio must have sold them that film, what a dishonest person El Rucio is".
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that I do not have the right to do that. But will I be as absurd as some researchers with whom I have argued, who have valuable materials and hide them away so no one can use them, reserving them for "future publications" that will never appear?
No, definitively not.
So, some way has to be found to allow the regulated use of these materials. Regulated by me? A warning could be posted on the archive access window stating: "This material may only be used to produce serious documentaries". Absurd. What makes me think that filmmakers will make good use of the material? And what does "make good use" mean? Am I the best judge of what is the best way to use footage? What is the best way?
"This material may only be used for research and documentation purposes by students, teachers, researchers and the film community itself". Also absurd.
I see a possible resolution to the problem by means of a donation coupled with a detailed legal agreement stating that the material can only be sold to documentary filmmakers with prior approval of the project in which it will be used. I just spoke with Museum Director Carlos Aldunate, who is a lawyer as well as an archeologist, about these issues, and his response was quite clear: "We draw up an agreement in which you donate your material to the Museum, which agrees that the material will not be sold, or sold only with restrictions, and we make sure the agreement details all the materials you want to share, and what is permitted and what is not, and there you have it."
But one important detail is that to do it this way, we would need a system by which to notify a given community whenever someone wishes to use footage in which they appear, and allow them to decide whether or not they would allow its use on a case by case basis. I believe this would be the ideal way to handle the issue; i.e. to have a committee that decides whether or not to grant permission after studying the project for which the material is to be used. That committee should consist of a Museum representative, in this case myself, and a representative or representatives of the community in question. This infrastructure must have a mechanism for contacting the communities and encouraging them to respond quickly. Once this formality is completed, if the material is requested for commercial use, then it should be sold and the profits divided between the Museum, the community…and the individual who recorded the material? And then the money must be sent to the community.
But establishing an infrastructure capable of maintaining fluid contact with the communities involved will be a challenging task for our little Museum. It can be difficult to maintain contact with the members of these remote communities; Chile is a long country. I would have to visit each of the communities in which I have filmed to explain the project to the people. Then each time some of the footage is requested, we would have to send a letter to the community and await its response, which could take months.
How do other institutions handle this issue? Many are certainly much larger than ours and have the necessary infrastructure. Now, if this infrastructure that I have proposed as a solution after a lengthy process of reflection and so many words cannot be implemented in our Museum, then how do I proceed to build the archive?
Perhaps I should only upload small segments of each situation and create a kind of sample inventory of the archive. This could exclude intimate situations and/or interviews. It would function as a kind of online window to the archive. Anyone who wished to obtain more material would have to come by the Museum to review the full archive, and this raises again the whole series of questions.
5. Conclusion
To summarize, as I said in the beginning, this paper only poses some questions, and I believe that attending this conference may help me to define some way to address this task effectively.
6. References
Mercado, C. (2003). "¿Haciendo videos?" Revista Chilena de Antropología Visual Nº 3. Santiago.http://www.antropologiavisual.cl/art_mercado.htm
Kaufman, P. (2010). "Video for Wikipedia and the Open Web". Intelligent Television. www.intelligenttelevision.com
