Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
James Leach
(CNRS - CREDO - Aix-Marseille Université)
Céline Travési (CREDO-Aix Marseille University)
Annapurna Mamidipudi (Deutsches Museum)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Evidence
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 31 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
What does responsible documentation look like today? We wish to explore forms for documentation that are responsive to different ways of knowing. What are the consequences, and the possibilities, when we understand documentation itself could be an exchange about what knowledge is and can do?
Long Abstract:
Assumptions about knowledge that have prevailed since the European enlightenment impel an alienated view of knowledge (as detach-able from persons and processes). In this mode, the gathering of information for documentation is responsible for constituting the positions of document-er and documented, data gatherer and data gathered, and the subsequent translation and transformation of the knowledge of the practitioner into knowledge about the practitioner.
This session seeks to explore whether we can reformulate the process of documentation itself to constitute different outcomes/positions for the people involved. The idea is to see how we could make documentation a process, a relationship, responsive to an understanding that there are different ways of doing knowledge, and different modes for value to accrue in those processes.
Two matters of concern are intended to shape contributions to the session. First, we are interested by 'incomplete' and 'material' practices of documentation and their relation to the effects of documentation.
Second the focus on relationships, on attempting to grasp not the document or the knowledge it represents, but the relation that documentation produces (or can produce) between knowledge and document, and between those involved. Participants are invited to engage debates around the history of craft knowledge, of professional practice, of indigenous knowledge, of material and artistic practice, the process and value of documenting cultural heritage, of writing and producing academic knowledge in experimental forms, and deliberately relational modes of documentation and writing.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 31 March, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP) at the British Museum raises questions about the nature of documentation. What is known is formed and shaped by how it is known: this paper asks how material forms shape knowledge and how we can attend to those processes in documentation.
Paper long abstract:
The development of the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP) at the British Museum makes it possible to address a number of significant questions about the nature of documentation. This grant-giving programme, funded by Arcadia, focusses on documenting knowledge around material objects. In the end all knowledge can be linked in some way or other to the material world, so the opportunities for documentation through the programme are significant. However, what is known is formed and shaped by how it is known, and I would argue that we need to attend not just to what can be known through the material world, and through material practices, but to how material practices constitute knowledge. This process is known best to Melanesian anthropology through events of material revelation, like the display of the Malakulan rambaramp figures that reveal the whole of a man’s secret cult achievements after his death. The principle applies also of course, to the process of documentation: the forms of documentation we use determine the nature of our knowledge. This paper reflects on these issues.
Paper short abstract:
India has 2.3 million are handloom weavers still today. Weavers keep their complex knowledge alive through creating value for their products in the market. How then can we document weaving as knowledge -not as product or process alone- but as a sum of its material, social and cosmological parts?
Paper long abstract:
In 2018, a group of handloom and craft activists organised a week long weaving conference in the weaving town of Chirala, in South India. It was attended by 200 weavers from all over India, and over a hundred panellists drawing from different aspects of the handloom world -designers, policy makers, researchers, marketing agencies. While a lot of the sessions- which included interactions between weavers talking ‘loom’- were recorded, through audio, video and textual interventions, no formal documentation emerged out of the Chirala conference. This was doubly puzzling because the Chirala meeting enjoyed unprecedented approval from most of the people who attended, many who were scholars and reporters. In this paper I would like to reflect on why documentation is particularly difficult for this kind of knowledge practices. Does the medium of text pose a problem to the grasping of this kind of material knowledge? Does the notion of individual authorship interfere in the production of accounts of pluralities that emerged in Chirala? What inhibits the writing of adequate narratives by even those sensitive to the entanglements of text and practice, science and craft, gender and power? Taking James Leach’s idea of knowledge as relation, would it be more apt to think of documentation as a map of relationships, that reveal resonances and dissonances in aligning narratives, rather than seek the narratives themselves?
Paper short abstract:
This contribution aims to examine how Indigenous conceptualizations of knowledge and knowing are used by Aboriginal people as a mean to represent themselves and initiate, or rather, reverse, a form of asymmetrical reciprocity between them and the western figure of the expert.
Paper long abstract:
The aim of this contribution is to report on the documentation process of the knowledge of the Bardi, an Australian Indigenous group from Northwestern Australia. This kind of project often involves assumptions about knowledge that differ greatly from Indigenous people’s own definitions and aspirations. I will compare these assumptions about, and view of, knowledge with Aboriginal people’s own conceptualizations of their knowledge. Based on my own experience of the process I had to go through in order to be authorized to access and report on this knowledge, I will then consider the way those Indigenous conceptualizations of knowledge and knowing are used by Aboriginal people as a mean to represent themselves and initiate, or rather, reverse, a form of asymmetrical reciprocity between them and the western figure of the expert. In order to document Indigenous practices, the ethnographer has to learn how to perform, understand and respect them first, which, more practically, means she has to place herself in the position of the novice. In this particular context, this also means accepting the fact that some things cannot be told and that some knowledge stay unlearned. That is, acknowledging the fact that documentation can be, and sometimes must stay, an incomplete practice.