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 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.