(Dis)owning Culture but Preserving Access: Reflections on Field Methods from the World Oral Literature Project

Mark Turin is a linguistic anthropologist. He studied archaeology and anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and holds a PhD in descriptive linguistics from Leiden University where he was affiliated to the Himalayan Languages Project. He is currently a Research Associate at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, where he directs both the recently established World Oral Literature Project, an urgent global initiative to document and make accessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record, and the Digital Himalaya Project which he co-founded in 2000 as a platform to make multi-media resources from the Himalayan region widely available online.