Paper short abstract:

The paper deals with the establishment of the digital archive of the Italian Ethnological Mission to Ghana, based at Sapienza University of Rome, which is expected to gather relevant materials produced by IEMG scholars since 1954 as well as their publications.

Paper long abstract:

Since its establishment in 1954, the Italian Ethnological Mission to Ghana has been developing ethnographic and historical researches among the Nzemas, in south west Ghana. In such a long period, scholars have been gathering huge amount of materials, including pictures, audio and video recordings, and of course fieldnotes. In 2012 a project aimed at cataloguing and digitizing the materials available has started, and currently is still ongoing.

The paper proposes a broaden definition of ethnographic archive, which includes, besides "raw" materials produced or collected on the field, also articles and monographs published so far. Such an idea represents the final outcome of a shared heritage-making process, in which both anthropologists and natives have been shaping the silhouette of a cultural device, suitable for providing the materials with the necessary arrangement to be preserved as well as for making them available for consultation to other scholars and most of all to natives, in a sort of ethnographic restitution of data collected.

The paper will focus on the challenges that such a project is facing, mostly related to fragmentation of the materials available, the admissible uses of fieldnotes, copyright and translation issues. A great quantity of materials, in fact, are still in possession of the authors or their descendants, so particular actions have to be undertaken - both at institutional and informal levels - in order to include them in the archive, and to get the relevant permission to digitize and put them on the internet.