Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a recent seminar series on how Portuguese anthropologists reflect about their archives. The Portuguese scenario concerning ethnographic archives is giving its first steps, and we wish to debate some lines of how to change that.

Paper long abstract:

Ethnographic data produced in the present can be future historic archives, that is, ethnographic archives can be regarded not only as academical heritage but also as cultural heritage. But how anthropologists archive their data? If it's true that they often reflect about their more or less organized records, they rarely publish (or even make somehow public) how they do that.

Anthropologists select diverse techniques for their ethnographies. From fieldnotes to photography, film, drawing, maps, and audio records, different techniques have different roles in the interpretation process. The authors of this paper invited their colleagues to share their ways in evening academic talks during the lective year of 2014/2015, and the results have been very challenging.

Our guests have a lot to share, from the ways they recorded their materials, to the ways they accessed their fields. They also deal with a high range of different technologies (from the 1980s to the present time), which in turn brought difficulties when trying to archive.

We have been gathering a group of reflexions that will be debated in this paper. From general considerations about the techniques that Portuguese anthropologists choose, to more reflexive ways of archiving, our guests also shared their ambivalent feelings about the fields, doubts and methodological questioning, that deserve to be described, analysed and discussed.

Paper short abstract:

The paper deals with the establishment of the digital archive of the Italian Ethnological Mission to Ghana, based at Sapienza University of Rome, which is expected to gather relevant materials produced by IEMG scholars since 1954 as well as their publications.

Paper long abstract:

Since its establishment in 1954, the Italian Ethnological Mission to Ghana has been developing ethnographic and historical researches among the Nzemas, in south west Ghana. In such a long period, scholars have been gathering huge amount of materials, including pictures, audio and video recordings, and of course fieldnotes. In 2012 a project aimed at cataloguing and digitizing the materials available has started, and currently is still ongoing.

The paper proposes a broaden definition of ethnographic archive, which includes, besides "raw" materials produced or collected on the field, also articles and monographs published so far. Such an idea represents the final outcome of a shared heritage-making process, in which both anthropologists and natives have been shaping the silhouette of a cultural device, suitable for providing the materials with the necessary arrangement to be preserved as well as for making them available for consultation to other scholars and most of all to natives, in a sort of ethnographic restitution of data collected.

The paper will focus on the challenges that such a project is facing, mostly related to fragmentation of the materials available, the admissible uses of fieldnotes, copyright and translation issues. A great quantity of materials, in fact, are still in possession of the authors or their descendants, so particular actions have to be undertaken - both at institutional and informal levels - in order to include them in the archive, and to get the relevant permission to digitize and put them on the internet.

Paper short abstract:

My aim is to contribute to the shining of problematic situations in which the capacity of the ethnographer to produce data is instrumentalized by social agents, especially in context of social conflicts and public policies.

Paper long abstract:

Some recent trends in anthropology demonstrate the existence of an evident increasing of practices of public and activist ethnography. As Juris and Rasza have stressed recently (2012), "anthropologists are making themselves politically relevant [..]". Opposite current tendencies (Price, 2000) point out how ethnographers and their data - intended as high qualitative and very specific information - can (still) represent a sophisticated instrumentum regni for social control. Ultimately, the dichotomy between these two trends seems to be determined by a deontological and ethical procedure related to the production, the use and the diffusion of fieldnotes and data.

The question of the possibility of existence of ethnographic archives seems to be deeply interconnected to the sphere of the production of fieldnotes. Fieldnotes have often been considered as a private and intimate matter by anthropologists, but also as a symbol of professional identity. On the opposite, archives are usually consider as open, collective and public spaces.I suppose that this dialectic is central.

Starting from a personal experience of a militant research conducted with a social movement for the right to the city operating in Lisbon, my aim is to contribute to the shining of problematic situations in which the capacity of the ethnographer to produce data is instrumentalized by social agents, especially in context of social conflicts and public policies. I would like to focus on the importance of a strong deontological ethic in the process of producing and archiving data in relation to the necessity of a non-hegemonic and public anthropology.