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- Convenors:
-
James Leach
(CNRS - CREDO - Aix-Marseille Université)
Céline Travési (CREDO-Aix Marseille University)
Annapurna Mamidipudi (Deutsches Museum)
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- 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:
What if we think of documentation not as the container of pre-existent information (which in effect materialises the differences between knower and researcher), but a materialisation of an exchange about what knowledge is and can do.
Paper long abstract:
As Tony Crook (2007) demonstrated, the ‘modern’ impulse to document knowledge arises in a form of temporality in which there are objects or units of information that disappear if not transmitted or recorded. We fear the loss of knowledge because the past recedes, and we and cannot go back and retrieve something that is gone. Perspectival forward movement in time spurs documentation to prevent things receding into the past. Documentation is elevated to a vital role, but also a role in which the purpose and outcome of the interactions between researcher and informant are ‘pre-figured’ (Moutu 2013). They produce ‘knowledge’. Knowledge in this form can apparently transcend time, become something universal and of stable value. As such, knowledge can and should be rescued from time, put outside time. Data collection and subsequent analysis remakes the space of the museum or the academy as the epitome of the enlightenment project of knowledge making, of what we call ‘civilization’. For this to happen though, data as a basis for expert knowledge making must be acquired in a form in which it can persist. Persistence is a matter of extracting knowledge from the everyday messy mortality of life and purifying it into a universal, reified, and transcendent form. Holding such universal knowledge makes the holder/producer central, and makes the task of acquiring and transforming it a political and a moral question in which ownership, attribution, custody, and value, are naturalised.
What are the alternatives?
Paper short abstract:
This paper takes as its subject a personal archive of photographs of a place and its inhabitants spanning a century of change, reflecting on the challenge, as an anthropologist, in being responsible to its logic of documentation in which knowing cannot be disentangled from relationship.
Paper long abstract:
The documents considered here are photographs. More precisely, a collection of photographs of a place and its inhabitants that span more than a century. The place is Séchilienne, a ‘commune’ in the foothills of the alps on the outskirts of Grenoble that was the site of my fieldwork as part of multi-disciplinary project called Trajectories. The aim of the wider project was to understand and model how society and environment evolve together over time, taking three alpine valleys as its sites of study. As an anthropologist, my interest was in understanding change as a socio-ecological phenomenon from the viewpoint of everyday practices of inhabiting this particular place. It is in Séchilienne that I was introduced to Bernard. A local, he has spent his life visiting and talking with his more or less distant kin on this mountainside, drinking gnôle and listening to their stories. As well as collecting their photographs. These photographs are a form of documentation in which change - of a landscape, its people and their ways of life - became not just visible (and extractable as data-points for an exogenous model of the dynamics of socio-ecosystems) but situated, felt and made sense of, within the relationships in which Bernard has come to know this place.
The aim, in this paper, is to reflect on this collection as a form of documentation, and the challenge, as an anthropologist, in staying responsible to its logic in which knowing cannot be disentangled from relationship.
Paper short abstract:
Using a dictionary is not an obvious practice for an oral language community. To allow the Nisvai community to have a critical perspective on the written resources produced for them, I designed them as a set of inter-referenced language resources in order to preserve the enunctiative information.
Paper long abstract:
Using dictionaries requires that (i) readers have familiarity with the genre 'dictionary', and (ii) integrate its use into the local social life. Creating a dictionary for an oral language community in Vanuatu would thus require the introduction of social practices that emerged in Europe, with uncertain outcomes. Instead of a traditional dictionary, for the Nisvai community, using the transcription and annotation interviews done during the fieldwork, I propose here a set of language resources: a bilingual lexicon, a Nisvai-French narrative collection and their audio recordings. The cooperation model with the members of the Nisvai community was integrative (Mosel 2012): they proposed the topic to work on: narratives, so that we could produce language resources relevant for their local school. My hypothesis was that integrating cues of the enunciative situation (Rabatel 2009) of the recordings into the resources would allow the members of the Nisvai community to reconstruct the points of view associated with the narrative practices and would enable the Nisvai readers to have a critical perspective on the resources. To do so, I implemented a system of references between the narratives, the lexicon and the recordings as well as short descriptions of the recording situations. The audio recordings are associated with the narrative collection to help the Nisvai people interpret the texts as representations of the oral performances. During the fieldwork, the members of the Nisvai community offered critics on the draft versions of the resources. This feedback showed the understanding and interest people had in the project.
Paper short abstract:
This article aimed to describe how the process of co-producing the documentary collection of “Academic Pathways” produced by Xakriaba indigenous students has highlighted different logics of categorization, different uses proposed, and the attempts to make sense of the material for those involved.
Paper long abstract:
The paper aims to describe the process of co-producing the documentary collection of undergraduate monographs by Xakriabá indigenous teachers and researchers. The monographs - locally called “Academic Pathways” - were produced in the Intercultural Training Course for Indigenous Educators (FIEI) at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Brazil) between 2013 and 2019. The monographs articulate their academic experiences with an investigation in order to qualify these indigenous educators as researchers of their own cultures.
It’s possible to observe specific research agendas expressed in Xakriabá Pathways, in which it is clear the concern with how their research can be used in the classroom, as well as reflections on the role of indigenous school for their communities. In this way, the monographs express not only the paths taken by students to produce them, but also the questions raised by their participation in the indigenous movement and in teaching practice.
The analysis presented is part of the project “Capturing New Education Models Among Indigenous and Quilombola Minorities in Brazil”, which aimed to organize the bases for an interactive archive that will be made available first of all to Xakriabá themselves; and will be accessed by other traditional communities and indigenous peoples researchers, teachers and activists. This process of organizing the archive is being carried out in collaboration with Xakriabá teachers and researchers. This co-production has highlighted different logic of categorization in action, different uses proposed for the documentary collection, and the attempts to make sense of the material for each of those involved.