The Things of Others: Ethnographies, Histories, and Other Artefacts

Abstract

The Things of Others: Ethnographies, Histories, and Other Artefacts deals with the things mainly, but not only, mobilized by anthropologists in order to produce knowledge about the African American, the Afro-Brazilian and the Afro-Cuban during the 1930s. However, the book's goal is not to dig up evidence of the creation of an epistemology of knowledge and its transnational connections. The research on which this book is based suggests that the artefacts created in eldwork, o ces, libraries, laboratories, museums, and other places and experiences-beyond the important fact that these places and situations involved actors other than the anthropologists themselves-have been di ferent things during their troubled existence. The book seeks to make these di ferences apparent, highlighting rather than concealing the relationships between partial modes of making and being 'Afro' as a subject of science. If the artefacts created in a variety of situations have been di ferent things, we should ask what sort of things they were and how the actors involved in their creation sought to make them meaningful. The book foregrounds these discontinuous and ever-changing contours. Readership Anthropologists, historians, social scientists, archivists, librarians, practitioners of STS, and all interested in the history of the modernist anthropology; all those who use their hands to manipulate paper objects amassed in archives and collections. For more information see brill.com

Field Station Bahia

“…This process of recognition and recollection was very much in line with what Olivia Gomes da Cunha did in 2003 with Ruth Landes' photos (Da Cunha 2020). In our case, because of our arrangement with the NAA, we could leave copies of the photos on a DVD with the Gantois and Axe Opo Afonja houses, and made the pictures and small excerpts of Turner's recordings available online.…”

“…In the MS Archive,Gomes (2020) found a letter sent in 1942 from Martiniano to Frazier, which I was unable to trace. Livio Sansone -978-90-04-52716-4 Downloaded from Brill.com04/03/2023 05:15:08AM via free access…”

“…Ruth Landes and her photos have also drawn attention (Andreson 2019). Even Herskovits' fieldnotes can lead to multiple readings (see Ickes 2013 andGomes da Cunha 2020). This book makes no claims of uniqueness and completeness and is just one of the possible readings of this context and entanglement.…”

Ethnography in Motion, or Walking With WG Sebald

“…The cultural density of the modern city that was already noted by the classics of urban sociology like Georg Simmel (Simmel, 1950; also DeFazio, 2011; Diaconu et al, 2011; historically Cowan and Steward, 2007) results in a certain sensory overload that requires unpacking making meditative walking particularly well suited to the task (Degen and Rose, 2012; Low, 2015; Middleton, 2010; Pink, 2009). In addition to conventional fieldnotes, walking also enables observations that are made in a variety of other ways such as, for example, collecting random objects discovered along the way (da Cunha, 2020), taking photographs (Tartia, 2018) or flash interviews (Goldstein, 2016: 131–138).…”

Todo archivo es colonial: Estrategias indisciplinadas de agrupamiento y lectura de fuentes documentales

“…Son el resultado de distintos lazos de institucionalidad e itinerarios archivísticos que escapan nuestro control y al que solo podemos aspirar conocer y familiarizarnos con el tiempo para realizar nuestros trabajos de campo/archivo. En este sentido, y no soy la primera en decirlo (Caimari, 2017;Nacuzzi, 2018;Gomes da Cunha, 2020;Estruch y Rodríguez, 2021;Muzzopappa y Villalta, 2022), hacer trabajo de archivo es hacer trabajo de campo, y así como el campo se construye en el interjuego del tiempo y las relaciones sociales (Guber, 2001), también lo hace nuestro corpus. Esos conjuntos de documentos no son inertes, sino que se vinculan unos con otros, crecen, se expanden, algunos incluso mueren o desaparecen.…”