The text builds on ethnography by linking it to archives as a feasible method.
A question that this text suggests for my own work is how do archives advance ethnography as a method? In what ways do combining archives with ethnography and the practice of each strengthen or complicate the situatedness of myself as a researcher and the ethics involved?
An exemplary quote is “Significantly, there are a number of ways that the body of the archive has weight as an archive of a certain type” (73).
The examples used that support the main argument draw from Vidali’s fieldwork in Zambia (1986-90) and Phillips and Vidali’s radio program on original materials. The examples show that coproduction is a key factor to “interrupting the centralizing and decentralizing forces that pull on the archive” (86).
The main argument draws on Bakhtin’s pulling forces, but also considers contributions from Jackson (1990), Zeitlyn (2012), Smith (2012), and Captlan (2010). From Jackson and Zeitlyn, the authors frames the relationship between researchers and fieldwork ass ambivalent and liminal (71). Yet, the researcher holds power through the agency throughout the research. Drawing on Smith, the authors points out that many ethnographers are hesitant to archive from a decolonial perspective that “the very act of collection is considered a potential violation and violence, one with a questionable legitimacy of appropriation, capture, extraction, and possession as well as a questionable authority to speak definitely about the objects captured (cf. Smith 2012)” (71). These frames lead the authors to frame in their own work “what type of archive was called for, who had interest and stakes in seeing it become a ‘thing’, and who had the energy and resources to create it” (72). They argue that engaging in an archive can address the issues raised and tap into the potentially transformative opportunities through ethnography and archives.
Visual Anthropology review is a journal from the Society for Visual Anthropology and a section of the American Anthropological Association. Its focus is visual studies including “visual aspects of cultural lives and experience, and the use of visual techniques and technologies in anthropological research, representation and teaching” as well as to “explore the potentialities of sensory scholarship”.
Debra Vidali is an Associate Professor of the Department of Anthropology and Director of Undergrad Research at Emory College of Arts and Sciences. Their research specializations include experimental ethnography, ethnographic theater-making, and democracy & Civic engagement. Kwame Phillips is an Associate Professor of the Department of Communications and Media Studies at John Cabot University. Their research specializations include sensory media production, ethnographic documentary and soundscapes.
Vidali, D., & Phillips, K. (2020). Ethnographic installation and “The archive”: Haunted relations and relocations. Visual Anthropology Review, 36(1), 64–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12197
The text addresses the reluctances of anthropologists to create ethnographic archives although they keep data materials that haunt them. They argue that anthropological work and archives have a lot in common if we consider Bakhtin’s concept of centripetal and centrifugal pulls. Applying them to language, standardization and normativity can be seen as centripetal pulls. Meanwhile, everyday realities of linguistic diversity are centrifugal pulls. These pulls are “forces that impinge on archive-making and archive-imagining”, suggesting that archives are different than against the grain, rather, against and along the grain. Through this lens, the authors state that archives are never fixed and have “a myriad of agentive forces” (70). Archives have a lot in common with anthropological ethnography in that they have “lingering and tugging resonances, echoes, hauntings, associations, traces, and the like” (69).