Archiving anthropology in Portugal

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?     

The elephant in the sky: On how to grapple with our academic flying in the age of climate change

This article discusses the author’s personal journey into the anthropology of climate change and his concern about the multiple drivers of anthropogenic climate change, among them an increasing number of aeroplane flights around the world, including those made by academics and more specifically, anthropologists. Given that the people who anthropologists often study will be those most severely impacted by the ravages of climate change, it is imperative that anthropologists find strategies to drastically reduce their flying in relation to attending conferences, research meetings and undertaking fieldwork. In this article, the author urges anthropologists to turn their attention to a growing global ‘fly less’ movement.     

Something for posterity or hostage to fortune? Archiving anthropological field material (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

What do anthropologists do with all the data (both primary and secondary) they accumulate while doing fieldwork? Most continue to draw on it for many years, but there is increasing pressure (e.g. from the ESRC) to place much of it in archives, usually in electronic form. What kind of material could be deposited? What use may be made of such material by others? What are the ethical dilemmas which face anthropologists in depositing confidential data? Are there differences between paper and electronic archives and between textual and other forms of material, such as photos and sound recordings? How can anthropologists best protect their sources? Does anthropology become a form of historiography when its raw data are archived? What forms of ‘knowledge’ are created by archiving?     

Working-with: talking and sorting in personal archives

This paper draws upon experiences of working in a personal archive in a domestic space in order to contribute to recent debates about archival formation, conduct and practice. By exploring the collaborative practices of working-with an archive owner in ordering and cataloguing a collection, we provide methodological insights into how historical geography research is carried out. Although such working-with in archives is, we argue, a common practice amongst researchers, these interactions with others are often absent from published work. This paper provides an explicit discussion of these often hidden collaborations and socialities, highlighting their importance for the conduct of archival research in three specific areas. First, we show how working-with actively (re)shapes and (re)makes archival materials and the stories that emerge from them. Second, we argue that working-with the owners of archives, but doing so without clearly defined research aims and going against the grain of productivist methods of working, can be rewarding both within and beyond academia. Third, in focussing on working-with, the paper extends conceptions of the archive and archival practice. We argue that the domestic setting of archival work produces particular patterns of archival conduct and disrupts the boundaries of collections themselves.     

Anthropology in the news? (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

It is part of our informal culture of anthropology to complain about the way the media portray us, and yet there has been little systematic analysis of media representations of anthropology. I look at stories about anthropologists, stories that quote anthropologists and opinion pieces by anthropologists over a six‐month period in The New York Times. I conclude that biological anthropology and archaeology are over‐represented in these stories, and that the media portrays anthropologists primarily as authorities on exotic others abroad, or ritual behaviour at home. Anthropologists who write about neoliberalism and militarism have had difficulty getting into the high‐end mainstream media, where it is economists rather than anthropologists who are seen as experts on general human nature.     

Theorizing the City: Recent Research in Urban Anthropology

Half of the world's population now lives in cities. This number is expected to grow to two-thirds in the next fifty years. And yet, it is only recently that anthropologists have begun to take urban contexts seriously as fieldwork sites. In this article, I analyze three recent volumes on urban anthropology which each propose a distinctive theoretical and methodological approach to the study of the city. I suggest that there is a fine line to be drawn between urban determinism—the suggestion that the city is the pivotal force in shaping individual lives, a perspective that ignores both human agencies and the complexities of causality—and anthropology which relegates the city to mere context, ethnographies that, almost by chance take place in urban contexts but say little about the realities of city life. The texts examined share two features in common: firstly, they are most effective when they, through close ethnographic or archival engagement, show the complexity and variation in urban contexts; and secondly, each text displays an absolute commitment to ethnographic fieldwork as a powerful tool to understand the lived experience of the urban. As a commitment to long-term participant observation is the sine qua non of our discipline, my central question is whether “urban anthropology,” is not just anthropology after all?     

Archives and care: Caring archival research practices in geography

Archival research has been long recognized as a key method in geography, and such research continues to appeal to scholars excavating historical influences on contemporary places. At the same time, geographical literature on care is growing rapidly. However, while geographers have often implemented care into their archival research and practice, these literatures have remained largely distinct from each other. In this paper, I bring archives and care into closer conversation. Drawing on existing geographical literature on care and on archival methods, work in archival studies, and my own research and ethnographic experiences in archives, I show how the socio-material practices of geographers in the archives help generate spaces of care, where ethical caring practices exist, and caring relationships flourish. I demonstrate how archival work in geography and beyond includes relationships of care between archivists, researchers, and archival records. I share some examples and strategies that geographers and other researchers can—and do—follow in maintaining, continuing, and repairing archival relationships, even in times of precarity and uncertainty.     

New Meanings in the Archive: Privacy,Technological Change and the Status of Sources**

This essay reflects on how technological changes in biomedicine can affect what archival sources are available for historical research. Historians and anthropologists have examined the ways in which old biomedical samples can be made to serve novel scientific purposes, such as when decades-old frozen tissue specimens are analyzed using new genomic techniques. Those uses are also affected by shifting ethical regimes, which affect who can do what with old samples, or whether anything can be done with them at all. Archival collections are subject to similar dynamics, as institutional change and shifts in ethical guidelines and privacy laws affect which sources can be accessed and which are closed. I witnessed just such a change during my research into human genetics using archives in the Wellcome Collection. A few years into my project, those archives had their privacy conditions reassessed, and I saw how some sources previously seen as neutral were now understood to contain personal sensitive information. This paper describes the conditions of this shift—including the effects of technological change, new ethical considerations, and changing laws around privacy. I reflect on how these affected my understanding of the history of human genetics, and how I and others might narrate it.     

Introduction: Biographies of Anthropologists as Anthropological Data

Biographies of anthropologists are widely recognized as useful for the history of science and the discipline. Introducing this special issue “Biographies of Anthropologists,” I argue that they not only provide information about anthropology, but also data for anthropology because they are studies of human agents enmeshed in social and cultural contexts, comparable to life histories of ethnographic informants. Biographies of anthropologists are of similar importance for empirical and theoretical anthropology as ethnographies, grammars, and monographs in archaeology and biological anthropology. They depict cultural dynamics from a person-centered, intimate, experience-near, and diachronic perspective on anthropology's cluster of sodalities.     

Public anthropology and the financial crisis (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

When anthropologists write about finance and the economy, their publications seldom reach audiences as wide as those of economists or journalists. Is there a space for anthropologists in public debates about our era's acute economic dilemmas? The short answer should be yes, partly because anthropologists are trained to probe social silences and make the invisible visible, and because we reject the pitfalls of Econ 101, oversimplifications that pervade public discourse. Academic anthropologists can draw lessons from what we might term ‘public economics’, as well as from the writings of Gillian Tett, an award‐winning financial columnist trained in anthropology. Perhaps we can also learn a little from tricksters – or from satirical activists who deploy irony, caricature, and paradox as sharp instruments in this age of austerity and billionaires. As we analyze finance and the economy in the aftermath of a financial meltdown whose causes and policy implications are intensely debated, our challenge still is to satisfy journalists' appetite for sound‐bite narratives without sacrificing nuance, historical contingency, and complexity.     

Environmentalism,Culture, Ethnography

Such is the ubiquity of environmentalism as a significant community experience throughout the world that most anthropologists will nowadays find themselves attending to the concerns their respondents have for the environments which surround and sustain them. In this article, we take stock of some of the issues addressed, and the achievements realized, by environmental anthropology to date. First, we emphasize that there is already a literature which stands as testament to the variety of environmental issues ‐ water, whales and the weather, for instance ‐ on which anthropologists have original insights to offer. Second, we argue that an important anthropological focus is on how ordinary people think and talk about their environments, especially when faced with external forces that have to be responded to in innovative and creative ways in order to be effective. It is not the view from above or below, but the view from within environments that matters most in local settings, which anthropologists have been concerned to unravel. Third, we emphasize that the Asia Pacific region constitutes an exceptionally rich field for anthropological research. Studies already carried out in places as diverse as Papua New Guinea, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, the Philippines, Indonesia, Chile and the Torres Strait make categorically clear that local and regional environmental concerns and conflicts are influenced by history, religion, Indigeneity, ethnicity, gender and other considerations that deserve critical anthropological enquiry. It is a crucial message that is endorsed and amplified by our fellow contributors in this special issue.     

Transcending the academic/public divide in the transmission of theory: Raglan,diffusionism, and mid-century anthropology

Anthropology is plural, not singular, and only a section of its history is decided within universities. A critical re-examination of the work of Lord Raglan demonstrates that retaining an overly academic conception of anthropology impoverishes our understanding of its pasts and its futures. The last of the gentleman-scholars in British anthropology, Raglan was a prominent polemicist of the mid-century, who persistently kept anthropological approaches to contemporary concerns within the public eye. Though a postwar President of the Royal Anthropological Institute and praised by scholars in neighbouring disciplines, Raglan’s diffusionism was sharply criticized by standard-bearers of structural-functionalism. Adopting a broader perspective, Raglan can be viewed as both a sharp-eyed scholar and a successful public intellectual; re-assessment of his work and its effects leads to a re-consideration of the historiography of mid-century UK anthropology: particular theories, though denigrated by mainstream anthropologists, may continue to flourish in other disciplines or extra-academic arenas.     

THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE

This rich collection analyzes science in the archives over the past several thousand years. The chapters work together to tell stories of ambitious attempts to provide timeless data for science, which will be used for generations to come—ranging from ancient astronomy to geology to life‐logging and the development of web search. They also demonstrate convincingly that archives are powerful forces across the sciences—every science discussed has an archival base—which partly determine what kind of general knowledge claims can be made by future generations: it is hard to read an archive askance. The collection works best as a series of individual chapters, though some work is done to indicate where they speak to one another. It is a pity that there was not more input from archivists themselves in the project: their noninclusion means that some archival issues (especially what goes on with data after it gets into the archive—how it gets cleaned up, changed, reorganized) are treated somewhat lightly. The collection does provide a very useful set of tools for thinking about scientific archives. It is also an excellent introduction to the peculiarities of scientific archives—one that reflects back on the use of archives in history in general.     

Straight Pins,Gauze, and Linotypes: The Cuban Post-Soviet Artists’ Book

Matanzas’s Ediciones Vigía and Holguin’s Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro construct an arc from the revolutionary 1960s and its investment in collective and communal goods, to the increasingly privatized 1990s and 2000s through their materials and procedures, as well as through their engagement with the figure of the archive. I contend that the books printed by Ediciones Vigía and Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro are both artists’ books – that is, books that are art unto themselves – and books as ‘archives’. Here, I understand the ‘book’ as ‘archive’ in a similar fashion as art historian Hal Foster interprets ‘archival art’: that is, art, in this case book art, that ‘draws on informal archives but produces them as well’ in an effort ‘to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present’. The hand-made books of Ediciones Vigía and Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro project a new figure of the reader and occupy social spaces that are radically different from their predecessors. Where Cuban institutional archives have left incomplete territories of the Revolutionary-era and pre-Revolutionary book, the 1990s and 2000s ‘archival book’ incarnated in Ediciones Vigía and Cuadernos Papiro has come to occupy these voids in a compensatory fashion as an ‘archival’ product.     

In Search of Religion

Anthropology began with a concern for exploring religion. Over time it abandoned its interest in origins, including the origins of religion. The influence of Boas's cultural history approach and Malinowski's functionalism directed anthropologists into particularistic studies of religion as part of given cultural systems. There was a movement away from the search for universal themes and the psychic unity of humans. Most anthropologists contented themselves with heuristic definitions of religion, which aided them with fieldwork. This article examines the tension between theoretical and empirical, and humanistic and scientific impulses in anthropology and some of the major trends in the field.     

Afterword

ABSTRACT

In approaching history as a site of scholarly analysis and activist praxis, the papers in this volume open up new ways to think ethnographic and archival methods together. This afterword considers how these activist ethnographic representations work as part of the ethical and analytic commitments of contemporary anthropology more broadly. I ask what possibilities are opened when we as scholars think with other people’s struggles. Such dialogic encounter is a way in which activist anthropologies create possibilities for new imaginative frontiers and shared projects.     

Add language documentation to any ethnographic project in six steps

All anthropologists should take to heart Dell Hymes' frequent quip: ‘Language is too important to leave to linguists and linguistics is too valuable to ignore’. This century will see the disappearance of hundreds of languages and a significant reduction in the use of thousands of others, at the very least. Documenting endangered ways of speaking (in any language) is part of producing sophisticated and ethically robust anthropology. Most indigenous communities want their knowledge documented and many are enthusiastic about collaborative projects with anthropologists. Producing language documentation has never been easier with the recent proliferation of computer software and inexpensive quality audio equipment. Collaborative anthropology need not eclipse theory‐driven anthropology or divert junior scholars from the production of PhD dissertations and journal articles critical for professional advancement. This article provides anthropologists with a six‐step programme to add a language documentation element to their current ethnographic research practices. Documentary linguists preach to their colleagues that people speak in a context, and this context needs attention. Anthropologists know that, of course, but they need to be reminded of the importance of form in expression and the documentation of specific, original forms leads to a richer and deeper anthropology. It is also a vital part of ethical research practices, good relations with source communities, and an easy way to make a significant impact now and forever. A small investment in time and money produces anthropology that makes a difference in people's lives.     

On the Ambivalence of Orthodoxy in American Anthropology

The establishment of professional anthropology is contrasted with the flawed limits and freedom of early self-trained anthropologists working outside of the academy. The work of ethnographer and linguist Jaime de Angulo and photographer Edward S. Curtis are oppositional examples of early 20th century self-trained anthropologically informed field research. While Curtis's career illustrates how work outside of academic anthropological circles often failed to document Indian culture, de Angulo's work provides an example of a brilliant scholar producing innovative, high quality work that would have been difficult to produce under the strictures of early 20th century academic life.     

Anthropology of the far right: What if we like the ‘unlikeable’ others?

Drawing on her own experience of studying the far right, the author discusses the recent tendency to establish far-right activists and supporters as anthropology’s new ‘exotic others’. Three main tools of ‘exoticization’ and ‘othering’ are described, which the author deems to be co-responsible for the peculiar status of the subject of the far right within the discipline. She relates these tools to three research steps: ‘naming’, ‘locating’ and ‘explaining’. In providing her own reflections on these problems and relating them to the literature on the subject, the author attempts to shed some light on the growing presence of various far-right extremisms and to show the ways in which the study of the far right reflects some broader problems that anthropology and anthropologists have been addressing in recent years.     

Editorial Introduction

Franz Boas defined anthropology over a century ago as a four-field discipline in danger of fragmentation. It has endured with stresses and strains by maintaining many integrative ties among the sub-disciplines. Vibrant links indicate that a healthy endeavor remains among anthropologists dedicated to an interdisciplinary approach. Little and Kennedy suggest that the story can be told by the histories of individuals, institutions, ideas, and traditions. However, they focus on individuals and institutions and seldom consider the histories of ideas, leading them to omit significant events. Fagan describes the origins of archaeology more thoroughly and situates individuals within the larger context.