Harold C. Conklin Philippine Collection
Catalog Record: http://lccn.loc.gov/2003682277
General International Standard for Archival Description
Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center Library of Congress Washington, D.C. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/folklife.home
Encoded by Judy Ng, May 2007 ; Revised by Nora Yeh
Encoded Archival Description
Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Version 2002
collection
Harold C. Conklin Philippine Collection 1955-1995 1961-1995
733 items (450 manuscripts, 99 preservation and 183 reference sound recordings, and 1 zip disc)
Conklin, Harold C.
Biographical History for: Harold C. Conklin Philippine Collection 1955-1995 1961-1995
Biographical History Harold C. Conklin (professor emeritus, Yale University) is a renowned anthropologist, linguist, ethnobiologist, and preeminent authority on the Ifugao and Hanunóo people of the Philippines. Born in Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1926, Conklin developed an early interest in anthropology and the history and culture of Native Americans that was supported and encouraged by his family. By the end of his high school career, Conklin had formed a number of influential friendships with American Indians, worked as the only non-Indian National Youth Association Indian Counselor, and served as a part-time volunteer at the American Museum of Natural History, where he worked under the supervision of curator and department chairperson, Clark Wissler. By 1943, Conklin's interests in high school, particularly in American Indian studies and linguistics, had prepared him for undergraduate study at the University of California, Berkeley. In his first year there, he was introduced to Austronesian languages through a hasher (cook's assistant) job at the Gamma Phi Beta sorority house, where he first began speaking, reading, and writing in Malay. In his second semester, Conklin built upon this introduction to Malay by enrolling in an advanced linguistics course where students were assigned the task of transcribing Australian and American broadcasts for Indonesians living throughout the archipelago, then occupied by the Japanese during World War II. In July of 1944, Conklin was inducted into the U.S. Army and served two years with the 158th Regimental Combat Team in the Philippine Islands, northern Luzon. After arranging to be discharged in the Philippines in 1946, Conklin spent a year and a half conducting serious anthropological research and fieldwork in Manila, Mindoro, and Palawan. During this period, he made his first set of Philippine recordings, and was given locally crafted artifacts, plant leaves, and cuttings in exchange for his freely given store of seed beads, post-war relief clothing, and medicines. The resulting collection of artifacts was later donated to the Philippine National Museum. During his stay in Manila, Conklin was also given a serendipitous crash course, by botanist H.H. Bartlett, on the proper way to prepare, press, and store the botanical specimens he had accumulated during his stay in the Philippines. Upon his return to the United States in 1948, Conklin finished his undergraduate work at Berkeley, but not before cataloging his collection of bamboo manuscripts written by natives from Mindoro and Palawan, publishing two articles on the Mindoro, and typing up a 600-page Hanunóo-English dictionary. During his first two years as a Yale graduate student (1950-51), Conklin continued to engage in scholarly dialogue with numerous faculty members, visiting scholars, and fellow students who shared his interest in anthropology and linguistics. From 1952 to 1954, he returned to the Philippines to complete fieldwork on the Hanunóo people for his dissertation. At this time, he began making his second set of Philippine recordings with equipment lent to him by Moses Asch of Folkways Records. Although he officially completed his graduate research in 1955, Conklin's analysis of the Hanunóo, based on his four field trips to Mindoro between 1947 and 1958, was not completed until 1961. Almost immediately thereafter, he began studying the Ifugao of northern Luzon in order to provide cultural contrasts to his work with the Hanunóo. From 1961 to 1973, Conklin continued his fieldwork in northern Luzon, making six field trips during this twelve-year span. The audio material he recorded during these visits comprises his third and most comprehensive set of Philippine recordings. In 1954, Conklin accepted a position at Columbia University, where, for the next eight years, he taught and explored his research interests in cognition, kinship, language use, and folk classification. From 1962 to the present, Conklin has taught at Yale University, where he has continued to pursue research on shifting cultivations, ethnology, and ecologies of tropical forested areas of the Pacific Basin. A prolific writer, Conklin has authored over thirty scholarly essays and seven books. In addition, he has contributed to, co-authored or edited over forty other publications and provided the source material for the Folkways recording, Hanunóo Music From the Philippines (1955). Conklin has also served as the Chair of the Anthropology Department, Director of Graduate Studies, and Curator and Head of the Division of Anthropology at the Peabody Museum, Yale University. He holds professional affiliations with the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Anthropological Association, and continues to remain an active scholar and mentor in the anthropology department at Yale. He currently resides in New Haven, Connecticut. Anthropology at Yale: Emeritus Anthropology Faculty. Yale University. 18 December 2001. http://www.yale.edu/seas/Conklin.htm Conklin, Harold C. "Language, Culture, and Environment: My Early Years." Annual Review of Anthropology 27 (1998): xiii-xxx.
Scope and Content There are approximately 140,000 Ifugao living in scattered districts over some 170 square miles in northern Luzon. They are agrarian farmers who have perfected a system of sustainable rice terracing uniquely suited to the heavy rainstorms and rugged terrain of northern Luzon, Philippines. In their tribal society, rice is more than a basic sustenance; it also serves as a medium of exchange and a signifier of status. Rituals, ceremonies, and events are tightly interwoven into the Ifugao people's daily lives. The characteristic richness and diversity of the Ifugao agriculture, religion, and music is strongly evident in The Harold C. Conklin Philippine Collection, which includes what arguably is one of the largest, most comprehensive set of audio recordings on the Ifugao in existence. It documents continuity and change in some of the most important features of Ifugao culture over the course of forty years. The recordings chronicle a wide range of Ifugao ceremonies, events, rituals, and sub-rituals, with much of the collection divided between strictly oral, strictly instrumental, and combined oral/instrumental field recordings. Field recordings document, for example, mythical or genealogical recitations, women's rituals, chants, invocations, rice harvesting, storytelling, children's games, language exercises, voice letters, interviews, and discussions. While a handful of the recordings are in the languages of Buhid, Hanunóo, Ilongot, Kallāhan, or English, the majority are recorded in the Ifugao Baynīnan dialect, one of the twenty-three dialects spoken by the Ifugao. With regard to geographical coverage, the documentation comes from twenty-seven of approximately one hundred and fifty agricultural districts, thereby providing a respectable sampling of the Ifugao. Therefore, due to its topical, geographical, and temporal scope, the recordings not only capture the exact details of ritualized Ifugao ceremonies, they situate them within the larger cultural context. Additional recording locations in the Philippines include: Tukukan, Nueva Vizcaya-Dupax del Sur, Nueva Vizcaya-Kakidūgen, and Mindoro Oriental. Conklin began making original field recordings of the Ifugao in 1961. He used a combination of tape recorders (Fi-cord, Nagra, Sony, and Uher), recording formats (discs, reel-to-reel tapes and cassette tapes), and recording speeds (1 7/8, 3 3⁄4, 7 1⁄2, and 15 ips) in the course of his field work, adopting new technologies as they became available. Recordings on 5-inch reel-to-reel tapes and sixty-minute cassettes are the predominant original formats in this collection, which totals 262 first-generation sound recordings. All recordings were originally given three distinct numbers by Conklin. In this system, the first number denotes the year, the second denotes the reel or cassette number, and the third denotes the side of the reel or cassette as noted (example: original field recording 61.5b is the B-side of the fifth recording made in 1961). With the exception of twenty-four recordings made in 1955, 1960, 1965, 1966, 1970, and 1977, Conklin is the primary recordist or interviewer for all of the original Ifugao recordings. A copy of Conklin's own Philippine Collection Catalog and Expanded Contents, which provides item-level descriptive data on original field recordings, is included in this collection. The prefatory material in Conklin's Catalog lists recording locations, languages, and individuals (interviewees, interviewers, and recording operators), provides a key to his abbreviations and symbols, and indexes specific field recordings by instrument, ceremony, event, and ritual. This is a useful resource that can be used in conjunction with the AFC 2001/007 Reference Concordance to facilitate use of the audio materials. The Reference CD Concordance lists the original field recording number, the corresponding CD, track duration, date of original recording, original format, and track content description. In addition, the database for this collection allows for term and phrase searching using Ifugao terms found under the Appendices.
series
Series I: Manuscripts
item
Collection Guide for the Harold C. Conklin Philippine Collection
Includes this Collection Guide and the Reference CD Concordance. Also includes list of searchable terms on Access database.
Administrative Information for the Harold C. Conklin Philippine Collection
Includes AFC's correspondence with Harold C. Conklin and the Cutting Corporation (sound engineer and recording laboratory). Also includes acquisition and transferal records, Cutting Corporation's bidding proposal, AFC research on potential recording laboratories, and AFC funding proposals for the Conklin duplication project.
Original Catalog Recording Log
Conklin's Catalog provides indices to the musical instruments, events, locations, languages, recordists and performers that relate to this collection of recordings. Also includes an abbreviation and symbol key, and a brief description of recording data, date, and content of each original recording.
Original Expanded Content Recording Log
Conklin's Expanded Content provides further information on the duration of the recording, sound quality, and contents of each original recording.
Duplication Project Recording Specifications
Information on the stock, size, format, sampling rate, and duplication assignment of the 10-inch reel-to-reels and CDs used by the Cutting Corporation Recording Laboratory.
Series II: Sound Recordings
Reference CDs 001-029
Field recordings from 1969-75, 1977, and 1980.
Reference CDs 030-058
Field recordings from 1980 and 1982-84.
Reference CDs 059-087
Field recordings from 1984, 1990-91, and 1995.
Reference CDs 088-114
Field recordings from 1960-61, 1968, and 1995.
Reference CDs 115-137
Field recordings from 1961 and 1963-66.
Reference CDs 138-164
Field recordings from 1966, 1968, and 1970.
Reference CDs 165-183
Field recordings from 1955, 1961-62, 1966-68, and 1970.
Series III: Electronic Media
Zip Disk
100 Mb Iomega zip disk; includes a searchable database for this collection, created by the AFC.