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Paper short abstract:

Based on extesive ethnographic fieldwork with Roma in Finland and Romania, and coupled with archival research on Roma led activism in the two countries, this paper explores the interlinking of history and ethnic mobilisation, with a focus on archives as sources of social and political activism.

Paper long abstract:

The interwar period saw the flourishing of different forms of Roma mobilisation and activism across countries of Central/Eastern Europe. Among these were the establishment of Roma-led folklore collections, Roma-focused newspapers, and Roma organisations, many of which were seeking to increase country-specific Roma solidarities, in the context of tense political climate(s). While these institutions sometimes competed with one another for political and financial resources, their existence has marked the beginning of Roma-led and Roma-focused activism, emphasising the need for unity in the face of both adversity and diversity. Based on extesive ethnographic fieldwork with Roma in Finland and Romania, and coupled with archival research on Roma led activism in the two countries, including the establishment of Roma archives as collective memory formation, this paper explores the interlinking of history and ethnic mobilisation, with a focus on archives as sources of political activism. It does so by exploring the ways in which archives of Roma mobilisation from the interwar period can be (and sometimes are) mirrored in forms of present-day Roma mobilisation. Finally, through examples of three interconnected monographs I was part of (one of which was a sourcebook of key documents in the history of Roma activism), a light is also shone on possible ways in which archival data can prove crucial in dispelling long-established myths and stereotypes concerning Roma communities in Europe, as well as pointing to challenges in both shaping the future from the perspective of the past, and re-assessing the past from the perspective of the present.

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Situated among archaeological activists in India who are formulating a composite history that counters prevalent majoritarian narratives through practices of archiving material remains, this paper explores the potential of archivization to challenge a politics premised on cultural authetincity.

Paper long abstract:

Although disputes over material forms have been central to the formulation of history and national and religious identity (El-Haj 2001; Sutton 1998), of late archaeology has acquired a prominent place in the Indian popular imagination as the key to uncover the genuine origin of historic sites. Initially motivated by the prevailing Hindu majoritarian regime’s interest in ascertaining the provenance of and recapturing buildings allegedly usurped by Muslims, numerous organizations have emerged with the aim of providing archaeological education to the general public. This paper draws on participant observation with archaeological activists working to develop an alternative archive that fosters an appreciation of sanjhi virasat (shared inheritance), which is advanced as a national treasure to which all major religious communities have contributed. Informed by a nascent but richly suggestive anthropology of historical experience (Palmié and Stewart 2016), I explore how the activists attempt to formulate a composite history that counters prevalent majoritarian narratives through practices of archiving, publicizing, and memorializing material remains. Reanimating debates on cultural mixture (Bhabha 1994; Diagne 2013), in the context of a state-backed project to purify national history of ostensibly foreign Muslim presence, I argue that the mixing of difference cultivated by this composite history seeks to challenge the possibility as well as desirability of authentic identity. The paper concludes with an examination of the potentials and limits of archivization as a resource for commoning culture, i.e. for rendering religious difference shared and unremarkable.

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Paper short abstract:

A German anthropologist’s archive concerning the land titling of Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon is the point of departure for studying particular forms of local collaboration and networking which distinguish the archival circuit for environmental advocacy between Peru and Germany.

Paper long abstract:

The point of departure of this contribution is a German anthropologist’s archive (Manfred Schäfer 1949-2003) from the late 1970s concerning the land titling of Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Central Rainforest. Its texts, photographs, sound recordings and films are part of a wider network, promoted by the activists advocating Amazon rainforest conservation and Indigenous communities’ rights to the land and its resources. The activist demand for written testimonies and of visual evidence of encroachment and rights violation incited the creation of independent archives. First, the methodological challenges of studying such “free archives” (Bacia and Wenzel 2017) are explored; in Schäfer’s case his explicitly collaborative approach was predicated on action anthropology. Second, the wider network of transnational Peruvian-German advocacy for the original peoples of the Amazon is examined, in particular its division of labor concerning writing, photographing and publishing in alternative and mainstream media. Finally, it is argued that activist repositories help to reveal how archival circuits diverge depending on the networks between like-minded stakeholders and their production and dissemination of materials. To a large degree, institutional research, activist and evangelical archival processes evolve separately. Depending on their procedures the renewed circulation of the respective materials in the communities where they were originally collected diverge. These are findings related to the ongoing project “Shared Soundscapes” which collaborates with Asháninka and Nomatsiguenga Indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Central Rainforest and their interest in reactivating their cultural heritage based on their own recordkeeping methods as well as resorting to those of activist archives.

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Paper short abstract:

In the “Traces of Mobility” project, ethnography and participatory production of representations of migration from Africa to Europe collaborate to assemble an archive of the 2010s-20s migration as a dialogical platform of the experience, analysis and public relevance of socio-political dynamics.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores the production of a digital archive of migration memories, solidarity, border violence and resistance between the Horn of Africa, the Mediterranean space and Europe. Under an ongoing multidisciplinary project started in 2022, scholars from Europe and North Africa are applying ethnographic methodology and participatory approaches to co-construct with migrants an archival representation of the political cultures of migration in the Mediterranean space. This representation aims at contributing to different but interrelated domains: the production of anthropological knowledge; the archival representations as the byproduct of narration experimental practices; the archive as a hybrid laboratory addressing the public sphere.

In relation to the production of anthropological knowledge, the authors take seriously the issue that archives are “surrogates for anthropology” (Zeitlyn 2012), as archive is not a “natural” product of ethnographic research but the reflexive axis of the fieldwork itself. Researchers and migrant participants continuously and horizontally engage with the reflection on how and with what implications (moral, cultural, economic, political etc.) the production, sharing, formalization of existential materials such as migration pathways and experiences takes place during the ethnography. In relation to experimenting with narrations-for-the-archive, the latter’s assemblage during the ethnography allows a practical reflection on migration as an existential, generational and cultural terrain for thinking and re-forging both individual selves and collectivities. Finally, the project aims at using ethnography as the hybrid laboratory in which researchers and migrants engage with the cultural and political formalization of the silenced representations of migrations within public spheres between Africa and Europe.

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This paper presents the counter-archive I am involved in creating in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. It discusses the importance of preserving visual testimonies to constitute inter-generational understandings of trauma. The paper also reflects on the archive’s ethical and political dimensions.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents my project called “Preserving Memories, Bridging Gaps: The Kurdish War and Memory Archive”. This project revolves around the constitution of an archive meant to preserve memories of war and genocide in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). I will not only reflect on these memories, but also on the process of constituting the archive.

The archive is rooted in the observation, made during my fieldwork in the region (2014-2022), that many young people in today’s Kurdistan glorify Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime. They perceive the era of Saddam’s reign as a period of stability and prosperity and are drawn to his self-portrayal as a national hero who could bring “his” people and “his” nation together. This glorification goes hand in hand with a historical “forgetting” or trivializing of Saddam’s genocidal campaign, Anfal, which targeted Kurdish civilians. For my current project, I collaborate with young people in the KRI, establishing a dialogue about the area’s traumatic past with older generations who themselves experienced genocidal violence.

My paper will specifically emphasize the ways in which the archive addresses human rights violations through recordings of testimonies of survivors and their children and grandchildren. I will discuss ethical and political dimensions of representing the past, with a particular focus on the role of visual testimonies in (re)creating historical knowledge of trauma. The influential notion of ‘postmemory’ will play a crucial role in this discussion, and the archive will be characterized as a counter-archive that destabilizes hegemonic narratives about the region’s past.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper demonstrates how personal digital archiving and decentralized preservation bring to light " undesired" pasts and enable long-term preservation through decentralized peer-to-peer network, which builds a memory system resistant to centralized control, failure, censorship, or destruction.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents an interdisciplinary project “From Ruin to Resilience: Digital Revival of the National Library of Serbia (NLS),” supported in part by the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW). Using the case of the NLS, established in 1832 and destroyed in a Luftwaffe air raid in 1941, the paper asks how new digital practices can be used to mitigate suppression, manipulation, and destruction of knowledge, which is pervasive today both in warzones and in culture wars focused on controlling access to knowledge through book bans, censorship, or lawsuits.

We focus on two types of digital practices—personal digital archiving (PDA) and decentralized preservation.

Rooted in social history as history from the bottom up, as well as in cultural theory and postcolonial studies, PDA focuses on various non-deposited sources and ego-documents, highlighting "undesired" pasts that never found their way to the official records. The digitally reimagined NLS seeks to undo “selective tradition” (Williams 1961/1971) by empowering individuals and communities to contribute materials to the digital library in a participatory knowledge form of public humanities.

Furthermore, we seek to enable long-term preservation through FFDW’s decentralized peer-to-peer network, which is based on InterPlantery File System for data storing, sharing, and preservation. By providing data mirroring, an immutable public record of all actions, and strong anonymity, the network promotes decentralized architecture that prevents any individual, corporation, government, or other actor from centralizing control over architecture, protocols, or content, and builds a memory system resistant to centralized failure, censorship, or destruction.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper presents a methodological aspect of working with historical photographic archives. Exploring the collection in question as ethnographhic fieldwork, a Counter archive is created, examining gender performance, aesthetics, and historical narratives within the photographic production culture.

Paper long abstract:

The paper revolves around the photographic collection of Pierre de Gigord, which comprises over 6,000 photographs produced in the Ottoman Empire. Amidst the vast diversity within the collection, the intention is to analyze photographs pertaining to the erotic topic represented through the concept of the harem. To do so, one must consider the context in which photography developed in the Ottoman Empire, the orientalist discourses that permeate its production and preservation, the role of the collector, and the repository in which they are housed. The central thrust of the research is to shift harem photographs from the periphery of photographic albums, series, and folders of individual photographs

to the forefront, making them the focal point of the discussion. To achieve this, a counter-archive has been constructed, serving as both a research methodology and a visual intervention in relation to Pierre de Gigord's collection. The term

"harem photography" is used as a category of analysis, and this study seeks to highlight the specificities of Ottoman harem photographic aesthetics and their integration into Western popular culture.

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In this paper I analyse the Fight4Aylesbury (an)archival exhibition, where housing campaigners, artists and academics engaged in a “politics of invention” that convened novel publics to produce imaginings of shared equitable futures.

Paper long abstract:

In early 2023 housing campaigner Aysen Dennis transformed her apartment located on a housing estate in inner London into a multimodal and multisensory exhibition featuring reworked archival materials. The exhibition traced her 20+ year history of political organising against the planned regeneration and demolition of the housing complex. With the help of artists, academics, neighbours and campaigners (the Fight4Aylesbury collective), Aysen used her archive of struggle to create an immersive experience that aspired to conjure collective moments of thinking and organising in the present moment. As a visual anthropologist working with the Fight4Aylesbury collective, I reflect on the way the F4A exhibition became a site that convened novel publics to produce imaginings of shared equitable futures. I argue that the Fight4Aylesbury exhibition was driven by an anarchival impulse (Foster 2004), as materials were copied, reworked, collaged, juxtaposed and ruined in the display. The very idea of archive was also stretched to include the lived-in domestic space - as a repository of personal, architectural and infrastructural histories – prompting questions about that which is unarchivable and excluded from the archive. I argue that my role as the anthropologist in this context was that of a cultural co-curator and co-producer who engaged in a shared “politics of invention” (Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamón 2019). This irreverent inventive process used archival materials to create spaces and moments of communal envisioning, which concomitantly questioned and undid the logics and materialities of the archive itself.

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This paper proposes to explore the relation to voice, presence and absence within queer history in India, considering historiographical literature on queer heritage with current initiatives on archival activism.

Paper long abstract:

The lack of archives has been a central concern for feminist, queer and decolonial historiography, as the erasure of traces, voices and bodies in historical sources and narratives is considered as the marker of a “subaltern” condition. If silences are relevant spaces of investigation and indignation, they are also anchored in a dualistic division of “loss and found” that scholars such as Dave and Arondekar have been questioning, the latter’s proposing an abundance-based approach to history of sexuality. This paper thus proposes to explore the relation to voice and silence in militant archive within queer movements in India, considering both literature on queer history and current political initiatives of community archives. While the anticipation of loss is an essential motivation for archiving projects, these same initiatives remain invested with power issues and class tensions intrinsic to processes of categorization and data collection, resulting in divergent sensibilities and complicating the construction of common queer memories, including in the context of competitive historical narratives with nationalist discourses. The diversity of theoretical orientations and political challenges within community archives lead us to question how to move beyond a dualistic schema of presence and absence without reducing the materiality of archives, but also to address the debates and tensions within archival activism, where the question of voice and inequalities of representation remains.

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Paper short abstract:

By focusing on the case of “ViteArchives”, a collaborative archival project in the neighbourhood of Vite (Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain), we explore the limits of archiving as a practice of political activism and social justice.

Paper long abstract:

Vite is a neighbourhood located in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain. It was considered a marginalized area in the latter part of the twentieth century. Its evolution, from a rural area to a public housing development in the 1970s, has been influenced by grassroots struggles and a network of caring relationships spanning various generations and social groups, fostering a collective sense of neighbourhood pride. A recent collaborative project, in the form of a community archive, between the “Coordinadora del Barrio de Vite” (that includes different neighbourhood stakeholders) and INCIPIT-CSIC (a research institution), revisited the histories and memories associated to those struggles. This paper raises some questions about the limits of archiving as a practice of political activism and social justice in urban areas marked by a growing fragmentation of their community infrastructures. Drawing from our involvement in the activation of 'ViteArquiva', we take a critical stance on the power dynamics involved in participatory research projects. This reflection aims to address the methodological challenges posed by such projects.