Short Abstract:

This panel seeks to discuss the processes and consequences of ethnological or folkloristic practices in which researchers have deliberately or inadvertently not recorded, described or represented certain cultural details, and which have resulted in misinterpretations.

Long Abstract:

Field work is often done not only across cultural, linguistic and social borders, but also across national ones. While the borders have frequently been described as natural, they are, in fact, constructed within the fieldwork process, and especially within the consequent, nationally oriented practices, such as archiving, travel writing, research, or museum exhibitions. The routines, conventions and ideologies related to the recording and production of ethnologic and folkloristic knowledge typically produce areas of obliviousness and misinterpretation. These may arise for example when the actors deliberately or inadvertently turn their heads away from the impact of modernisation or details that do not fit to the larger frameworks of narrating cultures and histories. As a result, some things remain in the shade. This can be useful for those working in knowledge production, but unfavorable for those being studied.

In this panel, we are interested in rereading and unwriting the disciplines’ research histories, especially the moments or processes and consequences of not viewing, not recording, not describing or not exhibiting. We are especially interested in papers that discuss the objects, human beings and communities that lie in between national borders or are marginalized inside a nation and whose voice and culture have hence been neglected or misinterpreted. We invite researchers to unpack the process through carefully rereading and relooking at the materials, their collecting, archiving and exhibiting processes and hence producing possibilities for new understanding. We also welcome scholars working with minority or indigenous perspectives in our panel.

This Panel has so far received 3 paper proposal(s).
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