Ethnographic Installation and “The Archive”: Haunted Relations and Relocations

Abstract

This essay examines the haunted relationality of ethnographic archives and anthropology, and the potential for multimodal installations to highlight these tensions while bringing anthropology toward new audiences and new types of collaborations. We argue that experimental ethnographic installations can be used to foreground complex relations among fieldwork, archives, re/dislocation, and aspiration, through nonlinear forms of argumentation and engagement. The particular cases considered are as follows: (1) Vidali’s corpus of material collected in Zambia (1986–90) and (2) Phillips and Vidali’s remixed and relocated “radio program” based on these materials and installed as a multisensorial, multimodal ethnographic exhibition in Washington, DC, Paris, and London.

Sensate memory: An introduction to the special issue

“…Multimodal anthropology emerged from visual anthropology and sound studies as a way of shifting from a predominant text-only analysis to address culture, social relations, and practices in multiple formats (Collins et al, 2017). As Gupta writes about the rapid transformations of Bangalore (this issue), “Our journal articles did not seem capacious enough to (…) convey their sensorial and embodied dimensions.” Importantly, this development has less to do with an effort to “capture more fully” culture as a system of meanings and more to do with the situated nature of anthropological knowledge and its complex relationships with the communities it engages (Gilbert and Kurtović, 2020; Miyarrka Media, 2019; Vidali and Philip, 2020). In fact, recent work in multimodal anthropology suggests that multimodality could facilitate theoretical and epistemological innovations in the discipline because it could help reimagine how we produce knowledge, with whom, and for what purposes.…”

“…The different elements of their piece (such as drawings, pictures, annotations, and texts; wide landscapes and close-ups), and the way they create a composition are here intended to “express the work of anthropologists, who turn impressions and conversations into coherent accounts.” Pigg explains how “the textual narration was pieced together from phrases scribbled in our respective notebooks in the moment, from recorded conversations, from Shyam’s [Kunwar] earlier research, and its extension into his explanations of his own understandings to me” (this issue). By bringing to the fore processes such as these, the goal of multimodality is “disrupting the typical epistemological mode characterized by a single ethnographer interpreting through the production of written text” (Hartblay, 2018: 153, cited in Vidali and Philip, 2020: 86). Doing so opens up opportunities for many commentators and scholars to work together on common/public anthropology projects, such as the Anthropocene Primer, Feral Atlas, the online archive on resistance in Chile, or the “Anthropology of smartphones and smart aging” series.…”

The ‘haunting’ and the ‘haunted’: Whiteness, orthography and the (post)-apartheid condition in Namibia

“…In addition, the situations also pointed to the ways in which my own experience of whiteness remained problematically intertwined with local understandings, with the experiences of white people living in Namibia, the enduring practices of race, and the legacies of apartheid. 2 Vidali and Phillips (2020) argue that the ethnographer's archive is messy and at best aspirational; rather than static, it is in an ongoing, expanding and progressive state of 'becoming'. In this respect, the ethnographer's archive conveys continuities and discontinuities and junctures and dis-junctures in time and across time.…”