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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.