Vidali and Philips examine “the haunted relationality of ethnographic archives and anthropology” (64). In doing so, they seek to explore the potential for multimodal installations to underline these troubled relationalities while also drawing new audiences and collaborations to anthropology. They argue that experimental ethnographic installations offer nonlinear forms of communication that can be used to illustrate the relations between fieldwork, archives, re/dislocation and aspiration.  They offer two examples as evidence: Vidali’s body of materials collected in Zambia and Phillips and Vidali’s ‘radio program’ developed from these materials as a multisensorial, multimodal ethnographic exhibition in Washington DC, Paris and London. Drawing on these examples, Vidali and Philips argue that archival bodies of materials are never fixed are bounded, but rather they are continuously created and dispersed through oppositional forces of centralizing coherence and decentering diversity. They highlight ethnographic installations as enabling further potential for building and re/dislocating the archive through the engagements of installation visitors (their bodies, voices, memories, and tactile interactions).

What concepts, ideas and examples from this text contribute to the theory and practice of archive ethnography?

Vidali and Phillips offer the term multi-in-habited to highlight how archives, like anthropological projects, are inhabited by many voices—they are resonant, vibrant and often haunted.

What concepts does this text build from or advance?

The authors apply M. M. Bakhtin’s (1981) theory ofcentripetal and centrifugal forces to expose the forces that impinge the process of creating and imagining archives. Bakhtin’s concept is to them in highlightingthe centralizing and decentralizing forces and drivers (e.g. sociopolitical, economic, ideological, material, etc.) that compose the living dynamism of things.