Paper short abstract:

I will present the case of repositories which I call "archivos latientes" (latent/beating archives) in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico. They are kept by individuals engaging in local Zapotec history and diverge from the conventional categories used by institutional archives.

Paper long abstract:

I will share a field experience from my long-termresearch in Teotitlán del Valle, a community in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. There I discovered several personal archives dealing with local Zapotec history in private spaces that are dispersed. In comparison with local cultural heritage presented in Teotitlán’s community museum, the private collections are handled according to diverging criteria of valuation and affectivity. I therefore call them archivos latientes (latent/beating archives). This example serves to reflect on the way we anthropologists work with certain archives, which often do not fall into the category of "musealizable". At the same time, I will provide some ideas on the possible uses that individual anthropologists' archives could have within the communities of origin where they collected their materials, that is, ways in which they can be reactivated and put into circulation.

Paper short abstract:

The Weiss collection includes a large set of papers, dozens of tape recordings, thousands of slides, and some two hundred cultural objects. A named individual may have their manufacture appreciated, be heard singing, read about, and seen, representing an immense opportunity for nuanced repatriation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper describes the ethnographic collection created by anthropologist Gerald Weiss (1932-2021) in Ashaninka communities of Peru between 1961 and 1980. A large set of papers, dozens of tape recordings, and thousands of slides are currently being preserved at the California Language Archive (University of California, Berkeley; cla.berkeley.edu), with some two hundred additional cultural objects to be housed at the Museo Nacional de la Cultura Peruana (Lima). The papers include diaries, ethnographic field notes, transcriptions of sound recordings of stories and songs, draft manuscripts, and copious secondary notes on topics such as kinship and ethnobiology. The cultural objects are diverse, and were collected under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History, together with many biological specimens already preserved there. The objects relate to the recordings, which relate to the papers and slides in that, because of the meticulousness of Weiss's tags, a named individual may have their manufacture appreciated, be heard singing, read about, and seen, representing an immense opportunity for nuanced repatriation. The collection was necessarily retrieved in haste from Weiss's home following his death. The paper frames this archival acquisition in terms of a broader program of outreach among anthropologists and linguists who have carried out fieldwork in the region, detailing the practicalities of such acquisitions and emphasizing the quantity of cultural heritage material held in private hands, the importance for proactive relationship building, and the need for specialists for the interpretation of the material and the involvement and empowerment of indigenous participants.

Paper short abstract:

In "The Sound of Memory" we immerse in "ArchivOlares", a family archive of traditional Venezuelan music compiled between 1960-1980 by Oswald Lares, which consists of music, videos, photographs, interviews and instruments. It was activated as an outcome of an intergenerational family experience.

Paper long abstract:

How does one deal with the legacy of a family archive that encompasses a great collection of traditional Venezuelan music? How can the archive be activated with care, be shared, (re)ordered, contextualized and its multiple materialities and temporalities be synchronized?

Between the 1960s and 1980s Oswaldo Lares Soto, a Venezuelan architect and music lover, initiated a long journey throughout Venezuela in search of the traditional rhythms of his country while rediscovering his own identity. From his travels emerged a unique archive of audio and video recordings, photographs, letters, interviews and a collection of instruments, assembled on his own initiative.

ArchivOlares emerges from this family legacy. It was created in 2013 by Oswaldo’s son Guillermo and his companion Laura Jordan to disseminate and keep this archive alive together with the richness and wisdom of Venezuela's traditional music. They propose to imagine and create new ways of managing the archive; they strive to open it for audiences, making it proactive and alive. The initial independence of this archive has been maintained by forming alliances with national and international musicians, researchers, artists and anthropologists as in my case. Together we imagine and create new formats while dealing with the response-abilities that are part of the process. This is how our collaboration called "The Sound of Memory" started. It is also the title of a short documentary of the research process which includes interviews and archival material through which we immerse ourselves in the inception of ArchivOlares with its diverse materialities and intergenerational experience.

Paper short abstract:

In this presentation I will discuss the recent discovery of legacy materials from Robert Meader, a missionary who worked with the Mỹky-speaking Iranxe in Mato Grosso, Brazil, in the 1930-50s, as well as the research process that led to locating these materials and the aftermath of their resurfacing.

Paper long abstract:

This talk discussed the recent discovery of legacy materials from Robert E. Meader (1912-1997), a protestant missionary who worked with the Mỹky-speaking Iranxe (Manoki) in Mato Grosso, Brazil.

Meader played a crucial role in a moment of very important transformations for the Iranxe society, taking part in the first ongoing contacts of outsiders with Iranxe villages in the 1930s-40s. At Utiariti mission, the Jesuits exerted enormous pressure on the indigenous people living there, banishing traditional cultural and spiritual practices, while also forbidding the children forced to live in the mission's boarding school from speaking in their language.

Meader, who studied the Mỹky spoken by the Iranxe from a peripheral role at the Utiariti telegraph station, documented a period of time for whith there is virtually no surviving documentation. At a time when the Iranxe-Manoki are reclaiming their ancestral language and culture, the resurfacing of unique written, sound and photographic records from 80-90 years ago represents a small miracle for this community, where today only three elders speak the language.

Meader would have deposited his linguistic and ethnographic research materials at the Museu Nacional (in Rio de Janeiro), as was required of misssionaries doing research work among indigenous communities in Brazil. With the loss of the Museu Nacional in a fire in 2017, the only surviving Meader materials are the ones that he had kept, which have remained in the possession of his family. This paradoxal situation poses additional challenges to the conversations about potential devolution actions to Brazilian institutions.

Paper short abstract:

Taking three individual collections kept at the Peruvian Institute of Ethnomusicology as my point of departure, I examine the place that the Amazon region occupies within this research archive. I reflect on the challenges of accessing heterogeneous archival materials since they were collected.

Paper long abstract:

Taking three individual collections of Peruvian and foreign researchers concerning Indigenous peoples of the Central Rainforest stored in the sound archive of the Institute of Ethnomusicology as my point of departure, I examine the place that the Amazon region occupies within this institutional research archive. It was created in 1985 as the Archive of Traditional Andean Music based on a project to preserve traditional Andean music supported by the Ford Foundation. Starting in 1999, its audiovisual ethnographic documentation began including the Peruvian Amazon, but it did so according to the Andean model of cultural preservation: audiovisually documenting the calendar of festivals, dances and music. Several individual collections concerning original peoples of the Peruvian Amazon entrusted to the Institute of Ethnomusicology followed other objectives, among them the collection of Richard Chase Smith concerning the Yanesha. I reflect on the challenges of accessing and analyzing these heterogeneous archival materials since they were collected pursuing different objectives ranging from cultural preservation to ethnopolitical empowerment and according to diverging criteria.

Paper short abstract:

I present the case of the activist archive initiated by the German anthropologist Manfred Schäfer, who advocated for Amazon Indigenous peoples’ sustainable lifeways. It is argued that activist “collecting” was a co-production of archival materials and transcended the concept of “cultural rescue.”

Paper long abstract:

For several reasons activist archives have not been recognized as “real archives”: They have not applied this term to their record-keeping activities and their personnel, who work part-time in self-determined ways without hierarchies and without receiving an income. On the other hand, for a long period of time these facilities effectively gathered materials that had been produced for a particular group, movement, or thematic focus. They therefore prove to be unique sources, while at the same time adopting an anticolonial position and advocating for the causes of marginalized peoples. The German anthropologist and activist Manfred Schäfer (1949-2003) systematically collected and disseminated texts, photographs, sound recordings and films concerning the land titling of Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Central Rainforest since the late 1970s. The private archive he initiated is the main source of recorded historical oratory, music, and dance of one Asháninka Nomatsiguenga community. I reflect on the methodological challenges of studying the activist archives that emerged in the transnational Peruvian-German setting to support the process of land titling Amazonian Indigenous communities and to stop settler land invasion as well as illegal resource extractivism. It is argued that the particularities and independence of the activist archival circuit can be traced to networks that like-minded stakeholders established and their innovative co-production and dissemination of materials. While collecting, they transcended the conventional anthropological concept of “cultural rescue.” I query how today such characteristics influence the reactivation of these specific archival materials in the communities where they were originally collected.