Activating Archives: Anthropological Perspectives - Detailseite

This seminar is concerned with the „archive“ as site, technology and promise. For some time now, the so-called “archival turn” has gripped the humanities and social sciences as well as the arts and cultural production, more widely: Exhibitions feature archival materials while cultural analyses increasingly seek to deconstruct and intervene in the archive’s epistemic arrangement (its order of knowledge), particularly in the context of colonial histories. The archival turn then invites us to think of the archive as both, a source for and object of research. This, as the anthropologist David Zeitlyn (2012) has argued, poses a productive “slippage” for anthropological enquiries. Taking its cue from Zeitlyn’s proposal for “anthropology in and of the archives”, this seminar will explore the productive intersections (methodological and theoretical) between archives and anthropology on the basis of concrete archives in and beyond Berlin. The seminar will include a site visit as well as contributions by guests.

Caswell, Michelle. 2021. Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work. Routledge Studies in Archives. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge.

Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. ‘Venus in Two Acts’. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12 (2): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1.

Lowenkron, Laura, and Letícia Ferreira. 2014. ‘Anthropological Perspectives on Documents. Ethnographic Dialogues on the Trail of Police Papers’. Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology 11 (December): 76–112. https://doi.org/10.1590/S1809-43412014000200003.

McKinney, Cait. 2020. Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies. Sign, Storage, Transmission. Durham London: Duke University Press.

Merry, Sally Engle. 2002. ‘Ethnography in the Archives’. In Practicing Ethnography in Law, edited by June Starr and Mark Goodale, 128–42. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06573-5_8.

Zeitlyn, David. 2012. ‘Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates’. Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (1): 461–80. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145721.