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- Convenors:
-
Lisa M. Gottschall
(Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Hande Birkalan-Gedik (Goethe Universität)
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- Formats:
- Panel
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- Network Panel
Short Abstract
This panel examines polarisations in the context of archival "fieldwork," highlighting ethical, political, and epistemic tensions and exploring how ethnographic engagement with contested, fragmentary, and digitized historical sources can generate new methodological and theoretical perspectives.
Long Abstract
The commonly held notion of fieldwork in social and cultural anthropology rests on a polarization: the "field" as a distant site inhabited by living interlocutors, and the "archive" as a repository of traces of the "dead." Yet both are spaces of encounter—interpretive tensions marked by gaps and silences.
In accounts of anthropology's history, further polarisations recur: celebrating key figures as pioneers versus critiquing their complicity in colonial or authoritarian regimes; reassessing collections from colonial or wartime expeditions; and debating continuities across colonial, wartime, post-Nazi, and postcolonial academic practices. These contested narratives reveal how tensions continue to shape disciplinary histories and anthropology today.
Another polarisation arises at the intersection of anthropological and historical research. Anthropologists may engage in work similar to historians when dealing with archival sources, yet it could be argued that anthropology approaches the archive with different questions, thereby generating distinct forms of knowledge. This topic has been debated, but it seems timely to revisit the discussion, as archival work is undergoing significant transformations. Digital access alters the sensory experience of handling original documents, while ethical and representational concerns render archival practice increasingly sensitive.
The panel re-examines the practical implications of "fieldwork in the archive." Ethnographic attention to archival absences, contested remnants, and ideologically charged interpretations of the past can illuminate tensions and reveal what has been forgotten or suppressed. The panel thus explores how working with fragmentary or digitized archival sources can generate new methodological and theoretical perspectives on the history of anthropology and its contemporary challenges.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
An ethnographic approach to Argentine archives uncovers Afro-descendant micro-resistances and argues that archival silences and fragmentary records expose anthropological tensions in archival fieldwork
Paper long abstract
This paper treats the archive as a site of ethnographic encounter, foregrounding the voices of racialized populations that dominant discourses sought to erase in Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century. This erasure coincided with—and was actively produced by—the expansion of archival forms of knowledge production that shaped and consolidated imaginaries of Argentina as a “white” nation.
Police photographs and classificatory records, press coverage, and journalistic narratives repeatedly reinforced negative social representations of Afro-descendants, its supposed demographic decline, and its presumed lack of cultural and political significance in Argentina. Yet, drawing on fragmentary judicial files, this paper traces the voices of Afro-descendant individuals accused and convicted of theft, revealing forms of resistance that undermine these representations. These subjects navigated and appropriated dominant legal and moral languages in their defense, criticized police profiling, participated in political life, and operated within networks of power involving police officers and judges.
The analysis reflects on how archival silences and contradictions are analytically productive, allowing to reconstruct the perspectives from which archives were created. Documents, as well as their conditions of production and circulation, are approached as active agents in the making of racial stereotypes. At the same time, the sources reveal that social imaginaries and stereotypes were not static but were continually negotiated and contested in everyday practices. By attending to these dynamics, the paper highlights the methodological and theoretical tensions in archival fieldwork and shows how working with archival materials can generate new anthropological reflections on historical processes of racialization.
Paper short abstract
By juxtaposing fragmented colonial archives with ethnography, this paper shows how archival logics persist and are negotiated locally. Rather than "filling" gaps, ethnography critically reveals ongoing power relations and the lived realities behind archival silences.
Paper long abstract
This paper argues that working with fragmentary and digitised colonial archives and ethnography generates crucial methodological and theoretical perspectives for contemporary anthropology. I ground this argument in my research on land and client-patron relations in a volatile riverine region of India. My archival sources comprise dispersed, often damaged, colonial-era land records and correspondence, which are now partially digitised. These fragments systematically officialise categories of ethnicity and land tenure, while rendering the subaltern presence as silence or a bureaucratic trace.
Anthropology’s distinctive contribution, I contend, lies not in "filling" these archival gaps with ethnographic data, but in using ethnography to read the logic of the archive itself critically and to follow its omissions into the present. Ethnographic engagement with communities allows me to trace how the categorical logics embedded in century-old documents are actively negotiated, embodied, and resisted by living local figures of authority who simultaneously exploit and protect, within structures forged by historical policy. This methodological synergy transforms the archive from a repository of facts into a "field" of enduring power relations. This approach offers a model for anthropological history that is ethically reflective and attuned to the collaborative potential between discontinuous traces in the archives and situated presence in the "field".
Paper short abstract
Colonial-era sound recordings in European archives have a dual epistemic status: documents of indigenous sonic practices which are also shaped by European disciplines. Framing them as sonic monuments enables a decolonial perspective that foregrounds aesthetic experience as a source of knowledge.
Paper long abstract
Many sound recordings preserved in European archives today were produced in colonial contexts during anthropological expeditions to former colonial territories. As such, they originate from historical fieldwork shaped by highly asymmetrical encounters. How these recordings can and should be engaged with today?
Against this backdrop, the epistemic potential of these recordings is dual in nature. On the one hand, they may document indigenous sonic practices; on the other, they are co-determined by the disciplinary histories of anthropology, musicology, and colonialism. This duality resonates with Erwin Panofsky’s conceptualizations of document and monument. I argue that conceptualizing archival recordings as sonic monuments opens up the possibility of an aesthetic experience that can be productive for archival research, as it allows both epistemic dimensions to resonate with one another. Such an approach can also reanimate archival recordings, which have received little attention until recently. In anthropology, sensory experience and its reflexive engagement have been primarily associated with fieldwork. However, the sonority of the sounding archive calls for a departure from conventional epistemological assumptions that resonates with decolonial approaches. The aesthetic experience of archived recordings renders audible the archive’s gaps, the colonial encounter, distorted indigenous voices, media formats, orders of knowledge, as well as the disciplinary histories of the institutions and disciplines involved. I will address these issues through case studies and argue that engaging with sound archives and their epistemologies not only illuminates disciplinary histories but also contributes to broader contemporary debates on methodologies of archival research.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on extensive archival research and a process of visual return with colonial medical photographs, this paper reframes the British colonial archive as an ethnographic field. It discusses the afterlives of images and highlights reflexive and creative approaches to archival fieldwork.
Paper long abstract
This paper describes my approach to working with British colonial medical photographic archives by treating the archive not only as a historical source but also as an ethnographic field site. For my doctoral research, I developed an approach that situated the archive as an uncomfortable environment of human sociality, involving a diverse range of actors including archivists, researchers, and the communities to whom these materials may hold contemporary relevance.
The colonial archive is marked by marked by distinct violence, silences, and absences that continue to shape how histories are known and represented. To generate new interpretations, I undertook a process of visual return in which selected medical photographs were engaged with multiple publics through photo-elicitation interviews, workshops, and a walking tour, highlighting the afterlives of these images beyond the archive. This ethnographic-historical engagement unearthed new narratives on debates around restitution, repatriation, and interpretive authority by opening a range of creative and embodied encounters. It also enabled decolonial, subjective and ethical models for writing about historical subjects. By reframing archival fieldwork as a reflexive and generative practice, this paper argues that such work not only reveals the dynamic nature of colonial records but also provides a critical methodological framework for rethinking anthropology’s relationship to its colonial past and its contemporary practices of knowledge production.
Paper short abstract
Based on long-term fieldwork at an independent photographic archive in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this paper makes a case for the ethnographic study of archives, not solely as repositories of documents, images, and objects, but as lived sites of both knowledge production and of everyday life and work.
Paper long abstract
Based on long-term fieldwork at an independent photographic archive in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this paper makes a case for the ethnographic study of archives, not solely as repositories of documents, images, and objects, but as dynamic sites of both knowledge production and everyday life and work. Set against the backdrop of Bangladesh’s polarised political histories, the paper explores how archival absences themselves contributed to the emergence of new archival forms, and the ensuing contestations over historical narration.
Taking the archive as subject rather than source, I resist the polarisation between the field and the archive, refusing the associated bifurcations between living and dead, or present and past. Instead, I turn Achille Mbembe’s argument that there cannot be ‘a definition of the archive that does not encompass both the building itself and the documents stored there’ (2002: 19). Following David Zeitlyn’s observation (2012) that the slippage between these poles provides a particularly fruitful space for analysis, I introduce a third layer to this configuration, namely, to take the archive also as the community that sustains it.
I argue that we must play close attention to everyday life and work at the archive, considering how such work looks, feels, sounds, and smells. This vantage point can thus provide a lens through which to understand how archival practitioners both imagine new political futures and might work prefiguratively to bring them into being. Methodologically, the archive becomes field site, and its staff, community, and collections form a varied set of interlocutors.
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper demonstrates the archive’s centrality in interrogating environmental knowledge. By revealing colonial and postcolonial narratives and their links to contemporary governance, it offers insights on how archives shape anthropological knowledge.
Paper long abstract
This paper reflects on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Oral Traditions Archive (Cape Verde), focusing on testimonies that articulate local environmental perspectives and ecological crises. Treating the archive as a fieldwork site rather than a repository, the paper explores the epistemic potentialities of working with mediated, fragmentary, and historically situated voices on contemporary political matters.
The oral testimonies preserved in the archive reveal the sociocultural imaginary constructed around themes such as droughts and famines, here contrasted with contemporary environmental governance. These materials invite a critical examination of how colonial administrative rationalities were translated into enduring frameworks that continue to shape postcolonial governance and social imaginaries.
Engaging directly with polarizations, the paper interrogates the boundaries of “field” and “archive,” as well as between interlocutors and recordings. The testimonies, simultaneously present and absent, challenge linear distinctions between past and present by demonstrating how historical environmental understandings permeate contemporary ecological discourse and policymaking, much of which remains grounded in Western epistemological traditions.
Methodologically, the paper attends to archival sources as central to ethnographic perspectives on governance and State Anthropology. Theoretically, it argues that ethnographic engagement with oral archives can expose how historical tensions continue to structure the positioning of certain countries within the international system.
Paper short abstract
The paper ethnographically follows objects and documents from colonial field into museum/archive and back into contemporary fieldwork, discussing how field/archive emerge as effects of discursive practices and how knowledge/power relations operate not through erasure but excessive documentation.
Paper long abstract
This paper draws from anthropological PhD research of the identity constructions of the Seljan brothers, two fin-de-siecle Croatian “travellers” and “explorers” of Africa and South America. Inspired by the Foucauldian re/turn in postcolonial studies and historical anthropology, the paper ethnographically traces the recursive movement of objects and statements from (colonial) “field/work” to (colonial) “archives”, from (decolonizing) “archives” back to (postcolonial/anthropological) “fieldwork”. The paper focuses on researching museum documentation, which has traditionally not been considered archival research.
During their joint “field/work” as provincial governors, land-surveyors and “explorers”, the Seljan brothers “authored” and “collected” an extensive collection of material that, through historic contingencies, became part of the collection, documentation and archive of the Ethnographic Museum in Zagreb. As part of contemporary trends in museological/archival practices, these diverse materials are now publicly available (filtered and framed by interpretative gestures) on a specialized website and the museums digital catalogue. These are now used by other actors in commemorative and heritage initiatives.
The paper discusses how “fieldwork” and “archive” emerge as effects of discursive practices in different historic contexts and institutional procedures, and how knowledge/power relations operate not through erasure but excessive documentation, stabilizing concepts, domains, and practices, simultaneously foreclosing polarisations, smoothing tensions, and erasing sources. The paper argues that the field/archive distinction is not merely analytically unstable but historically and institutionally re/produced. By collapsing the field/archive opposition rather than holding it in productive tension, the paper proposes an ethnographic rethinking and refocusing on discursive and institutional operations instead of polarised domains.
Paper short abstract
The paper examines silences in historical narratives and archives concerning the interwar history of Croatian ethnology. Based on doctoral research, it shows how personal archival fonds challenge the established picture of the discipline’s history presenting it in a different light.
Paper long abstract
In various historical overviews, the beginning of the modern history of Croatian ethnology is symbolically placed in 1927. This is an important founding year that begins with the arrival of the young Zagreb ethnologist and museum curator Milovan Gavazzi (1895 – 1992) as the head of the Chair of Ethnology and Ethnography at the University of Zagreb. According to the literature, this seemingly simple and unproblematic act of institutional transfer established the so-called cultural-historical paradigm within Croatian ethnology, positioning M. Gavazzi as its central figure. However, this established picture of the discipline's history begins to change once the researcher ventures into the archives and moves away from official documentary material toward personal archival fonds and ego-documents (memoir records, private correspondence). The research reveals a discrepancy between historical narratives about the interwar history, official documentary material, and events recorded in personal archival material. Based on these, a completely different picture of disciplinary history emerges: one that is dynamic and turbulent, shaped by the ideologization of science, political upheavals, and conflicts among various actors – but also characterized by various forms of symbolic erasure of individuals from its history. This case clearly demonstrates a process of production of silences by anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, operating at multiple levels: from the creation of documents, their archiving, to historical narratives. In this paper, I aim to problematize the role of archives as a repository of selective memories, places of “silencing” different voices but also a space for re-examining the written history of the discipline.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines fragmentary archival traces of a WWII-era exhibition at the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade. Treating archival absence as ethnographic data, it explores how institutional silences reveal the moral, political, and epistemic tensions of anthropology under occupation.
Paper long abstract
My contribution examines archival documentation relating to the Ethnographic Museum in
Belgrade during the Nazi occupation of Serbia, and attempts to assess the position of various actors involved. Particular focus is on an exhibition set up between 1942 and 1944 at the request of the authorities, at a time when the museum did not have its own exhibition space. The exhibition itself is only fragmentarily documented in wartime and post-war sources: archival traces are sparse, dispersed across multiple repositories, and notably absent from the museum’s own archive, for reasons that remain unclear. Rather than treating this absence as a mere obstacle to historical reconstruction, I approach it as an interpretive challenge, asking how institutional silences, gaps, and selective preservation reflect the moral, political, and epistemic entanglements in a historical situation where scholarship and politics intersect at multiple levels. I am treating the archive as a site where, instead of living interlocutors, we encounter voices from the past that speak to our subject unevenly or perhaps not at all. Unlike living interlocutors, these voices are not open to further questioning. Instead of struggling to reconstruct what exactly happened, we can instead direct attention to how (institutional) memory is produced, erased, or sanitized, and also move beyond moral binary oppositions of complicity and resistance.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines visitor books from the Atheist Museum in socialist Albania as ethnographic archival sites, analysing ideological language, performative conformity, and silences to explore how museums functioned as instruments of political discipline.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines visitor books from the Atheist Museum in Shkodër (1973–1990) as ethnographic archival sites through which ideological performance, political discipline, and archival silences can be analysed. Rather than approaching these documents as spontaneous expressions of individual experience, the paper treats them as institutional devices embedded within a broader apparatus of socialist ideological governance.
Drawing on close textual analysis, the paper shows how the act of writing in visitor books functioned as a ritualised moment at the end of the museum visit, where visitors were invited to publicly affirm the exhibition’s anti-religious narrative. Standardised language, repetitive ideological formulas, and explicit expressions of loyalty reveal how conformity was performed and normalised through writing. Alongside these formulaic entries, rarer autobiographical narratives of ideological “conversion” illustrate how the museum staged political transformation as a personal and affective experience.
Situating the analysis within debates on “fieldwork in the archive,” the paper treats visitor books as spaces of mediated encounter rather than passive historical traces. Read alongside institutional documentation such as work plans, internal meetings, and exhibition photographs, these materials allow for a layered ethnographic reading of how ideological consent was both produced and archived within the museum.
By focusing on repetition, silences, and performative language, the paper contributes to anthropological discussions on archival research under authoritarian regimes and demonstrates how museums operated as sites where political subjectivities and controlled forms of public memory were actively shaped.
Paper short abstract
Based on research in the Archives of Portuguese anthropologist Jorge Dias, this paper argues that archival research is central not only to a more complete understanding of the works of past anthropologists, but also to the clarification of more controversial episodes in the history of anthropology.
Paper long abstract
Jorge Dias (1907-1973) was the most important Portuguese anthropologist of the 20th century. He obtained his PhD in Volkskunde at the University of Munich (Germany) in 1944. Back to Portugal he published extensively in Portuguese peasant cultures. In the late 1950s his attention turned to Africa, where, together with his wife Margot Dias, he did research among the Makonde of Northern Mozambique. This paper is based on extensive research in the Jorge and Margot Dias archives (National Museum of Ethnology). After a general characterisation of the archives I will present the methodologies I have adopted to their study, with particular emphasis on the archives’ sections that I have considered more important. Issues related to the challenges of 'fieldwork' in the archive and the differences between ethnographic ‘fieldwork’ in the archives and historical archival research will also be addressed. By exploring the role of archives in clarifying two controversial issues of Dias’ research – his possible links to Nazi Volksunde and his views on Portuguese colonialism in Africa – the paper also argues that archival research is central not only to a more complete understanding of the works of past anthropologists, but also to the clarification and eventual rectification of controversial episodes in the history of anthropology.
Paper short abstract
Extracting the forgotten contributions of folklore collector, Kathleen Hurley, from the gender gaps in Ireland’s National Folklore Collection, required searching the boundaries of archival absences. This paper considers the potential of liminal fragments to challenge and to bridge archival absences.
Paper long abstract
In Irish folklore, women often dwell in or near liminal spaces, or through them, just out of sight. This is reflected in Ireland’s prodigious National Folklore Collection (NFC), where the role, contributions and lore of Irish women largely remain obscured, absent, or in the periphery. Founded in 1935 by the Irish Folklore Commission, the NFC archive conceals its scant female contributions with the enduring shroud of its androcentric origins and structures. Concealed primarily by disinterest and neglect, 3,000 pages of material gathered by an exceptional, female folklore collector, Kathleen Hurley, mouldered in the archive for nearly a century. Buried in misconceptions, misplacements, and misogyny, exhuming Kathleen Hurley’s material has required engaging not only with absences, but with traces, remnants, and clues. This paper considers preliminary outcomes from exploring the murky, messy liminal spaces at the fringes of archival absence in conducting the first comprehensive academic study of a female folk-lore collector for the Irish Folklore Commission. Investigating Kathleen Hurley’s contributions necessitated delving into and beyond both her overlooked and her missing material, into the fringes where entangled vestiges remain bound in inconsistences, restrictions, and errors, alongside uncontrolled and uncatalogued material. Too often, that which is found in the margins is deemed marginal in nature and significance. Through Kathleen Hurley’s inestimable contributions to the NFC, this paper aims to illuminate archival boundaries as a sources of revelatory liminal fragments that have the potential to challenge and to bridge archival absences.
Paper short abstract
This paper draws upon my journey in Spain’s historical memory movement confronting the legacy of violence of the Civil War. With few archival traces, I focus on the death certificate for what it can reveal about necropolitical strategies of domination and resistance in a single bureaucratic form.
Paper long abstract
Spain remains deeply polarized over how to reckon with the legacy of violence perpetrated during its Civil War and subsequent dictatorship (1936-1975). In the transition to democratic rule after Franco’s death, political elites agreed upon a “pact of silence.” Archives remained closed, memorializations and research shunned. In the end, it was the earth, littered with mass graves, that became the archive of undeniable evidence with which the grass-roots historical memory movement began in the early 2000’s to seek recognition and dignity for the victims. This paper presents an excerpt from my journey to join that movement investigating my grandfather’s death by firing squad in 1936. Like so many others, my project faced fragmentary evidence, incomplete memories, forged papers, fears and sedimented silences. I reflect on one of the very few and startling archival records I encountered: the legal petition my grandmother had to make to obtain a death certificate for her husband in 1939. A Kafkaesque ordeal, the certificate is testament to the fascist state’s necropolitics, using its legal apparatus to terrorize civilians. At the same time, I propose that when read against the grain, this is also a document of a woman’s refusal to be intimidated. I examine the document’s discursive structure and the doubled voiced nature of my grandmother’s signature, performing both her obligatory assent to the regime and her determination not to give up.
Paper short abstract
The precondition for fieldwork in the archive is knowing about it and getting access. Despite attention from scholars, activists, and policymakers, access remains shaped by informal power structures. How can more ethically sound archival practices and pluralistic interpretations be promoted?
Paper long abstract
The precondition for conducting fieldwork in the archive is knowing about and getting access to the archive. In the emerging field of postcolonial provenance research, issues relating to the accessibility of collections and archives have therefore been a central point of debate. Activists and scholars have demanded more transparency and easier access to holdings. Guidelines and policies that aim to create frameworks for more equitable knowledge production have urged institutions and their staff to provide online inventories, respond promptly to requests, and disclose what they have. However, despite this long-standing attention from scholars, activists, and policymakers, access to archives remains shaped by multiple layers of informal power structures. Too often, the decision about who gets access and to what, as well as the knowledge about who does which kind of research in that particular archive, lies with the very same individual. Informal networks of gatekeeping and selective granting of access are far more common than formal frameworks suggest, and archives often operate without formal, transparent rules regarding their politics of access. Complex webs of dependency and a lack of institutionalised, transparent monitoring, mediation, and accountability complicate an open discussion of such hindrances. In this presentation, we would like to discuss the impact of these conditions on the production and circulation of knowledge. What strategies can be developed to ensure more transparent, accountable, and ethically sound archival practices that foster pluralistic interpretations of the diverse field sites?