What concepts, ideas and examples from this text contribute to the theory and practice of archive ethnography?
In particular, I liked this quote from the piece, “In order to truly have the archive speak for itself, it should be made to speak for itself” (Vivaldi & Phillips, p. 75). I found this line to be provocative in terms of how Vivaldi and Phillips demonstrate that ethnographic materials collected through fieldwork not only serve as reflections of a memory—specific moments in time—but can be reshaped and reimagined to say something about the present, that can inspire or create memories for contemporary publics. Archives do not necessarily have to be static materials that leave the speaking to others (e.g. scholarly interpretation via academic publications), but through active arrangement like that of an installation, an archive can “speak for itself.”
I think many of the concepts and ideas in this article apply broadly to the theory and practice of archival ethnography. Again, this article builds on previous assigned readings, and raises more questions and considerations for archival ethnography than perhaps offers concrete guidelines for archiving anthropological assets. One of the assertions of this article that I found especially compelling was that an archive is never finished/fixed, that an archive is both alive and “haunted” through creation, immersion, new questions, and dispersal. The authors introduced the term “multi-inhabited” to describe how archives are animated and spirited, never embodying a single-voiced or single-bodied. And that even the singular “body” of an archive may defy its intended purpose and gives way to many experiences and voices. Additionally, the use of multimodal techniques in archival installations may invigorate the archive, body of work, and assets by lifting tensions and reaching a broader audience.
“Most human constructs are these kinds of ‘things’ that are not things” (Vidali and Phillips 2020, 69). Vidali and Phillips compel the reader to think of an archival exhibit as a kind of living body with centripetal and centrifugal modes of movement; the archival exhibit then becomes an immersive site of encounter for its listeners, readers, and participants. Their work contributes to practices toward decolonizing archival ethnography – through using multimodal media and through considering the archival exhibit as ever-changing and as a practice designed for human, and community, engagement. The authors emphasize the importance of “hoarding” – letters, recordings, artifacts, and more, as a practice of preservation and as an opportunity to provide an immersive connection for the exhibit’s participants.
“Most human constructs are these kinds of ‘things’ that are not things” (Vidali and Phillips 2020, 69). Vidali and Phillips compel the reader to think of an archival exhibit as a kind of living body with centripetal and centrifugal modes of movement; the archival exhibit then becomes an immersive site of encounter for its listeners, readers, and participants. Their work contributes to practices toward decolonizing archival ethnography – through using multimodal media and through considering the archival exhibit as ever-changing and as a practice designed for human, and community, engagement. The authors emphasize the importance of “hoarding” – letters, recordings, artifacts, and more, as a practice of preservation and as an opportunity to provide an immersive connection for the exhibit’s participants.
A number of creative concepts and ideas are pushed forward by the authors in the essay as well as from their own work. One example could be Vidali's efforts to 'release' the archive from capture by reaching out to individuals and organizations that may have interest in their collected material, locating the descendants of the individuals that they recorded as a means to 'give back' and the lauch of the Bemba Online Project as a repository of a continously changing archive.
Similarly, Philips efforts for the archive to speak for itself by "splicing" and remixing David Yumba previously recorded statements and stule of rhetoric in order to produce and read out scripted letters so as to reproduce and bring the listeners as close as possible to Yumba's workplace is unconventional but speaks to the idea of interpretating and connecting to an archive in more ways than one as well as bring insights for the present by reconnecting to the past (s). Finally, the use of physical and interactive installations in order to bring about the engagement of the audience not just as a silent observer but an active and intrepretative one in order to produce 'new' meanings collectively and thereby bringing in more voices to the continued production of the archive ( instead of only the singular one of the archivist or ethnographer )
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).