Utopian archives, decolonial affordances Introduction to special issue

Basu, Paul; Jong, Ferdinand de

doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12281

Cited by 37 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…We begin with an anthropological approach to the archive (Almeida 2007;Axel 2002;Brettell 1998;da Cunha 2004;Dirks 2001) that gained ground among colonial archives (Basu & de Jong 2016;Stoler 2009). In Along the archival grain: Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense (2009), Stoler identifies a methodological change in the approach to archives.…”

Section: Ethnographic or Anthropologists' Archivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Archiving anthropology in Portugal

Almeida

Cachado

2019

Anthropology Today

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This article examines some of the issues surrounding archiving in anthropology. It provides an account of archiving in the Portuguese context and seeks to problematize anthropology archives, contributing to the as yet timid debate over this question in the field. There are various ways of recording ethnographies and saving the ensuing records. Anthropologists often reflect on their archives, but rarely make these reflections public. Nor do we know much about what anthropologists in general plan to do with their fieldnotes, diaries, images, maps, drawings, audio and video recordings and objects, once a specific research project is complete. How do anthropologists store their data? What should be done with these materials? What stories can they tell? Will the ethnographic materials produced in the present be considered historical archives in the future?

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Section: Ethnographic or Anthropologists' Archivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Archiving anthropology in Portugal

Almeida

Cachado

2019

Anthropology Today

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“…As Paul Basu and Ferdinand De Jong show in their special issue on the future‐producing potential of colonial archives in postcolonial nations, ‘prognostic politics’ are not only about environmental and demographic issues, but also about ‘utopian politics’ (Basu and De Jong : 6) made imaginable by other materialities. For example, Joshua Bell examines the use of objects, recordings and the anthropologist's own GPS mapping as testimony in battles over resource rights and compensation in Papua New Guinea.…”

Section: Futures and Humanity On Edgementioning

confidence: 99%

‘Edgy’ politics and European anthropology in 2016

Coates

2017

Social Anthropology

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Focusing on anthropological publications in Europe‐based journals in 2016, this review reflects on the politicisation of anthropology in recent years, tracing the contours of this scholarship through the trope of ‘edges’. From debates about the marginalisation of Euro‐anthropology and analyses of lives ‘on edge’ within Europe, to efforts to push political thinking to its conceptual edges as a form of ‘alter‐politics’, this review explores the ‘edgy’ politics of Euro‐anthropology in 2016. The paper examines how the edges of state and solidarity, self and sociality, human and non‐human futures intersect in the political emphasis of European scholarship in 2016. At the same time, it critically reflects on how and why it is important not to allow this form of political optimism to turn into Eurocentrism, arguing for the continued importance of comparison and encounter outside of epistemic central Anglo‐European worlds.

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“…Moreover, encounters with actual dead bodies in a museum context suggest that history and other forms of knowledge-whether in the humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences-are created in and with, not 'after' (as Steedman's essay title would have it), the archive. Archival technologies applied to objects, whether documents or dead bodies, have historically striven towards a utopian state of perfect knowledge and complete data (Basu and de Jong 2016). Technologies of inscription, recording, sorting, and storage are contingent in practice, prone to errors and oversights, but in intention, they are thorough, definitive, and perhaps above all, functional.…”

Section: Among the Mummiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The body in the box: archiving the Egyptian mummy

Riggs

2016

Arch Sci

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Linking the archive in its literal sense to the metaphorical repercussions of 'the archive' in a conceptual sense opens new lines of inquiry into the processes employed in museums to catalogue and store their objects. Archaeology-which was influential in Freud's theories of memory and Derrida's 'Freudian impression', Archive Fever-invites particular consideration in this respect, especially through the collection and interpretation of ancient Egyptian human remains. Embedded in colonial and imperial discourses of race, the Egyptian mummy confronted the West with the uncanny survival of what it had conceived as its near-double. The fates of two Egyptian bodies, a mummy dissected in the 1820s and a skeleton excavated in the 1920s, exemplify the archiving of these archaeological objects, whose multiple traces speak to what Derrida characterized as the archive's self-destructive drive, as its objects (and bodies) resist archival containment. This theoretical point encourages museums to intervene in and through their archives, for the creation of alternative histories and futures.

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Utopian archives, decolonial affordances Introduction to special issue

Cited by 37 publications

References 35 publications

Archiving anthropology in Portugal

Archiving anthropology in Portugal

‘Edgy’ politics and European anthropology in 2016

The body in the box: archiving the Egyptian mummy

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