Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a recent seminar series on how Portuguese anthropologists reflect about their archives. The Portuguese scenario concerning ethnographic archives is giving its first steps, and we wish to debate some lines of how to change that.

Paper long abstract:

Ethnographic data produced in the present can be future historic archives, that is, ethnographic archives can be regarded not only as academical heritage but also as cultural heritage. But how anthropologists archive their data? If it's true that they often reflect about their more or less organized records, they rarely publish (or even make somehow public) how they do that.

Anthropologists select diverse techniques for their ethnographies. From fieldnotes to photography, film, drawing, maps, and audio records, different techniques have different roles in the interpretation process. The authors of this paper invited their colleagues to share their ways in evening academic talks during the lective year of 2014/2015, and the results have been very challenging.

Our guests have a lot to share, from the ways they recorded their materials, to the ways they accessed their fields. They also deal with a high range of different technologies (from the 1980s to the present time), which in turn brought difficulties when trying to archive.

We have been gathering a group of reflexions that will be debated in this paper. From general considerations about the techniques that Portuguese anthropologists choose, to more reflexive ways of archiving, our guests also shared their ambivalent feelings about the fields, doubts and methodological questioning, that deserve to be described, analysed and discussed.