Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at a sound archive in Berlin and discusses how it grapples with the contentious heritage of knowledge production while handling ethical dilemmas and the possibilities of repair. To what extent (if at all) can time be undone in an archive? What might sound offer in this respect?

Paper long abstract:

The history of phonographic archives is inextricably linked with the arrival of the phonograph, as the name suggests. Anthropologists, along with musicologists, linguists and psychologists, made use of this technological invention. They employed the phonograph – and shortly after also the gramophone and other devices – to record and study sounds and store them in the newly established archives. The materials these archives hold were collected in a range of contexts, including in former colonies and prisoner-of-war camps in Europe, and some of their practices embodied a form of violence, not just recording and technological formatting but also the preservation of sound data.

This paper looks at one such archive in Berlin. I discuss how this archive grapples with its contentious heritage of knowledge production and handles ethical dilemmas and the possibilities of repair. To what extent (if at all) can time be undone in an archive? What might sound offer? What difference does it make in the case of the so-called ‘sensitive collections’? While things may be returned across space, time does not necessarily hold the same kind of redemptive power. There seems to be no return across time in this respect. Yet sound – and the sound archive, for that matter – offer forms of dealing with violent pasts ‘time-wise’, as I propose and will show in the paper.

Paper short abstract:

Since the full-scale Russian invasion, TikTok has become a central tool of communication and documentation for many Ukrainians. This paper explores the anthropological and historical implications of the production of a real-time digital archive of conflict, displacement, war crimes.

Paper long abstract:

Since the full-scale Russian invasion on the 24th February 2022, TikTok has become a central tool of communication and documentation for many Ukrainians. Many legal and judicial processes are underway to record the unfolding of the conflict and assemble an archive of the war, yet other grass-roots processes of archiving are also emerging. Alongside journalistic and human-rights reporting, social media has been mobilised as a tool of journalism, documentation, narration, and negotiation, and TikTok has emerged as a particularly central platform. Some Ukrainian TikTokers go as far as to articulate their content as a form of archiving for future war-crimes investigations.

Drawing on digital ethnographic research that I have carried out since the invasion began, on long term research on TikTok since 2020, and in Ukraine since 2016, this paper explores the political, historical, and anthropological implications of this continuously growing, living social media archive of conflict. How might an attention to the archive allow us to engage with the lived experience of invasion, conflict, displacement, and violence? What role does the collective creation of a digital archive play in the crafting of imagined post-conflict futures? How can we methodologically explore such a fast-moving, continuously changing digital landscape? This paper will begin to tease out these questions and offer a set of tools for working with social media archives of conflict.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes how minority citizens in Antakya, Turkey, keep a record of the city (and its destruction) as an archive of ongoing state violence in the wake of 2023 earthquakes

Paper long abstract:

Cities are archives, scholars have recently claimed (e.g., Burgum 2022; Sheringham and Wentworth 2016). They are palimpsests bearing the sedimented patterns of activity, memory, and movement. Buildings, monuments, districts, and even ruins stand as physical records of past epochs, telling tales of change, decay, revision, or deliberate erasure (Hetherington 2012). But what happens when the all such layers and their material traces are obliterated through a profound rupture caused by the destruction of political or natural disasters?

This paper examines this question in post-earthquake Antakya, a city near Turkey’s border with Syria that has historically witnessed the displacement, dispossession, and enduring coexistence of Arab Orthodox, Alawi, and Jewish minorities as well as recent Syrian arrivals. Drawing on follow-up research in Antakya in the aftermath of the February 2023 earthquakes, I focus on the motivations and methods by which Antakya’s minority communities, now dispersed across and beyond the country, keep a record of the city (and its destruction) as a repertoire of past, ongoing, and anticipated state violence. I argue that they do so not only to grieve the sudden loss of a place-based history and its material traces but also to harness this loss to assert a communal existence in anticipation of future challenges. The multitemporal and collective orientation of this process allows us to rethink archival qualities and chronicling of the city beyond mere scale or scope, touching upon their very form and existence.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores a Nubian family archive,chronicling displacement after waves of inundation by Dams between 1912-1964.It argues that popular historiographies of displacement and dispossession should inform our own practices of knowledge production and history-writing,rather than yielding to them.

Paper long abstract:

How can we experience and narrate community archiving practices in a way that acknowledges the structures and relations of knowledge they represent? Through this paper, i explore a Nubian family archive, while asking how to read historiographies of displacement and dispossession in ways that inform our own practices of knowledge production and history-writing.

This story is structured by a family lullaby, one sung by Nafissa Zurar, and that is part of a larger corpus of Nubian songs lamenting the loss of the Nile with their displacement after the building of the Aswan High dam in 1964. Within the folds of the lullaby is the story of the uncle, Ahmed Zurar, whose family archives chronicle his own struggle to petition against the heightening of the Aswan reservoir in 1933. His efforts culminate in petitions, levied by Nubian communities against a British colonial administration, and fliers, pleading that fellow Nubians not accept the monetisation (financial compensation) for their land. This petition and flier are to be found in the British Foreign office archives, with the signatures of the diasporic Nubians who strategically link their struggle to other indigenous communities.

Inspired by the work of Samia Khatoun, i attempt to tell the history of this struggle, as a story within a story within story. Starting with a family history, stretching to global solidarity. These are histories of struggle that are not about teaching us how to win, but reminding us, how and why we continue to struggle, thus forging community.

Paper short abstract:

The term Palestine in Jewish biographies and Holocaust archives signals survival. This paper explores this telos of survival as part of a national pedagogy to inculcate a sense of repair and belonging in Germany, and how Palestinians reach through sediments of history to recover their experience.

Paper long abstract:

In the last two decades, Holocaust history and memory has shifted from a "difficult heritage" (Macdonald 2018) to an agreeable past. As a genocide that has been publicly acknowledged and monumentally displayed, the Holocaust is not an obstacle to a collective national self anymore. Quite the opposite, as a history of sedimented layers of violence against Jews and Others, it serves in the national narrative of Germany to justify the censoring, canceling and even the denial of basic human rights of current political, ethnic, racial and religious minorities. Moreover, Holocaust education is heavily deployed to inculcate a sense of belonging in Germany through the repair (Wiedergutmachung) of the genocidal past. This repair is placed on the relationship to the figure of the Jew, replaced from the 6 million victims of the Holocaust to historical Palestine-turned-state of Israel, often conflated in public discourse with a Jewish collective.

The layering of History includes the violent dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, to be precise only in the term Palestine. This paper has its starting point in museums and archives that display Holocaust history and Jewish survivor biographies in civic education programs that target predominantly immigrant groups in Berlin. Although, these educational initiatives have been critiqued by anthropologists as reproducing racism and racial hierarchies (Partridge 2010; Doughan 2022; Ozyurek 2023), this paper seeks to address "the minor detail" (Shibli 2016) of Palestine as a way of building a different kind of ethical relationship with past violence and the notion of belonging.

Paper short abstract:

This paper retraces my encounter with ‘Yasmeen’ –a woman, mother, daughter, (ex-)wife– and her archive of legal documents to question the nature of repair from the different forms of violence –war, patriarchy and ethnonationalism– making up her archive and repertoire between Syria and Germany.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2011, Syrians have been saving and retrieving copies of mundane legal papers as official proof of legal identities, education and relations to kin in their attempt to flee war-torn Syria. These papers are fundamental in any migratory project where they are needed for numerous procedures such as getting married. They are also central in preserving a connection to family members scattered between Syria and the diaspora.

I retrace my encounter with ‘Yasmeen’ –a woman, mother, daughter, (ex-)wife– and her archive to capture the affective entanglement of these repositories with people’s life biographies and families’ relations. However, to what extent can this archive and its political history be disarticulated from state forms of knowledge-power? Yasmeen’s archive is shaped by Syria’s Personal Status Law and its patriarchal principles that record her only as the daughter of her father or the wife of her husband. Such principles have been violently reproduced outside the archive –in wartime Syria– and reinscribed ex-novo in the archive by Germany’s bureaucracy and its ethnonationalism.

The paper captures the different forms of violence –war, patriarchy, ethnonationalism– making up the relationship between Yasmeen’s archive and her repertoire questioning the possibility of repair. I argue that repair becomes an act of emancipation that cannot fully occur through a migratory project. Indeed, repair cannot be situated in the archive per se but it may occur in ephemeral, unfinished and unstable forms of mending such as the re-reading of the archive and the cultivation of a new voice and historical consciousness.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores Sardinian wetlands as archives of hydro-social violence, spanning from Fascist land reclamation and post-WWII malaria campaigns to current environmentalism. Heritage ethnography investigates repertoires of contestation and repair, pointing to other archives & wetland relations.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores wetlands as archives of recurrent hydro-social violence. Inspired by Veronica Strang’s observation on the “vital relationship between state power and the ownership and control of water," it unravels the impact of strategies employed to control waterscapes, revealing the emergence of patterns of epistemic violence.

The Sardinian wetlands have been imagined as key to solving the Southern Question— the perceived inability of the Italian South to achieve development. In the 1920s, wetland control played a crucial role in the Fascist "battle against the swamps," aiming at land reclamation and settling the marshes. Post-World War II, wetland malaria became a key battleground for international modernization. The UN-Rockefeller Foundation's “Malaria Blocks Development” model attributed poverty to the environment, deflecting attention from social and political issues. The DDT-based malaria eradication initiative, framed as liberating Sardinia, aligned with Cold War political objectives, including military base establishment.

Recent concerns over coastal erosion renewed state and international interest in the wetlands. Climate change risks led to new environmental initiatives to protect the wetlands from the population. The waterscape emerges as an archive of sedimented layers of development and intervention.

Drawing on ethnographic research with Sardinian basket-makers, the paper explores heritage practices as sites of repair and contestation within the evolving epistemic order of development and safeguarding. It considers the potential role of local practitioners as wetland archivists and caretakers, showing how these everyday, ephemeral, careful activities point to alternative histories as well as other repertoires of hydrosocial, more-than-human, and more-than-economic relations of wetland life.

Paper short abstract:

Algeria became a French settler colony in 1830. Since 1962 independence, colonial prisons are razed or repurposed as museums. How are penal buildings, inscribed with perpetrator history, rehistoricized and reappropriated? I focus on Algiers’ Serkadji / Berberousse and Constantine’s Coudiat prisons.

Paper long abstract:

Constructed by the French military in 1856 on the Ottoman fortifications which guarded the Algiers Casbah, Berberousse / Serkadji Prison was inscribed in Algeria’s national patrimonial register in 1992 and decommissioned as a penal institution in 2014. It is currently in the planning stages for conversion to a museum, an official Algerian government project undertaken by the Ministry of Justice, the Directorate of Prisons, and the state’s own architectural unit and design office. In contrast, transforming Constantine’s Coudiat Prison, erected in 1857, is an initiative by that city’s local preservation society formed in 1989 under Algeria's new liberal association laws. In 1992, they listed the buildings as official Algerian national patrimony and authorities agreed to a museum project in 2013. However, the still-functioning prison was never closed. I discuss the preservation society's detailed proposals submitted to the authorities to evacuate the current prison population and compare it with the project for the Algiers Prison. Both prison conversion proposals model potential museum exhibitions about storied political prisoners since the French occupation of Algeria (1830-1962). These museum proposals to be discussed include exhibition spaces, archives and library, conference halls, and a restaurant and teahouse specializing in Algerian gastronomy.

Paper short abstract:

Given the destruction and inaccessibility of public archives of the Armenian genocide, this paper discusses the relation between dispossession, property forms, different archives and the politics of repair by focusing on the (ironic) potential of private company archives.

Paper long abstract:

The Armenian genocide of 1915-x not only involved the murder of about 1,5 million Armenians, but it also entailed a programme of comprehensive dispossession by way of so-called commissions for abandoned property. Interestingly, these commissions emerged out of legal interventions that secured expropriation while officially upholding the victims’ rights to their private property, if converted into monetary value. While murdered in real life, Armenians thus retained a ghostly presence as proprietary rights-holders in the archives of the commissions and other institutions such as the cadaster office. The late Ottoman state meanwhile reached the limits of its power to capture Armenian wealth at the threshold of foreign or internationally operating private companies, including banks and insurance companies, many of which retained the assets of their dead clients. In the early 2000s however, descendants of survivors launched two class action law suits in California against two life insurance companies, resulting in a settlement. Further attempts have so far been thwarted due to geopolitical reasons. In this to some extent speculative paper, I explore this complex relation between property forms, the different kinds of archives (notably state and private company) across which they span and the potential and politics of contestation and repair more than a hundred years after the genocide. In particular, I want to think about the (ironic, possibly) potential of private company archives as sites of restitution, compensation and repair given their relative seclusion and protection from the destructive politics of denial by the Turkish state.

Paper short abstract:

This paper asks the question: what forms of solidarity and intersubjectivity are possible with people accused of terrorism. It draws on a theatrical project around the figure of Ali Aarras, to inquire into how theater both makes and unmakes solidarities and acts as a form of repair.

Paper long abstract:

This paper asks the question: what forms of solidarity and intersubjectivity are possible with people are accused of terrorism. It draws on an ethnographic study among families and friends and activists mobilised around the figure of Ali Aarass, a Belgian-Moroccan who was accused in 2008 of providing logistical support to a terrorist network. While he and his environment always contested the accusations and claimed his innocence, the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels suspended the solidarity work that had been going on. Some members of the group transitioned into a theatrical form and created what would become “le choeur de Ali Aarrass” (the choir of Ali Aarrass). In this paper, which draws on participant observation and interviews with the group between 2018 and 2020, I will describe how solidarity works through a sensorial and aesthetic engagement, which I describe here as affective solidarities. Yet the medium of theater also implied a remythification and aesthetisation of Ali, which eventually lead to frictions. I take these frictions as a starting point to reflect on how theater, as a medium of representation, both makes and unmakes solidarities and acts as a form of repair.