Savage Preservation: Race, Culture, and the Making of Modern Media

The period from 1880 to 1930 witnessed both an explosion of American ethnographic attempts to document and preserve disappearing cultures around the world, and a concomitant search for new technological means to help do so: from the written collection of American Indian sign languages in the Great Plains; to the phonographic preservation of African American slave songs and spirituals in New Orleans; to the cinematic portrayal of indigenous tattooing rituals in colonial Samoa. "Savage Preservation: Race, Culture, and the Making of Modern Media" explores the rise of the so-called "salvage" documentary cultural preservation paradigm in the United States, and its influence on popular understandings of racial progress and media change during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The first section of the dissertation considers the practice of linguistic preservation, examining a group of U.S. anthropologists who set out to record vanishing Native American languages. The second section of the dissertation focuses on debates about auditory preservation, exploring a range of written texts that attempt to record African American and Native American speech and music at a time when phonographic technologies increasingly appeared to have authority over the permanent preservation of cultural sound. The final section of the dissertation considers technologies of visual preservation and the evolution of salvage ethnographic cinema.;The central argument of "Savage Preservation" is that efforts to record and rescue "vanishing races" and "disappearing cultures"---linguistic, auditory, visual---were a way to make sense not just of the historical realities of American empire, but of the modern representational technologies that newly served to mediate them. Encounters with ethnographic others produced new theories of media as much as they produced new theories of culture. As such, the modern project of racial documentation indirectly helped to provide a hidden ideological scaffolding for the development of the mass media in the United States during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.