What is the main argument, narrative, or e/affect?
In this piece, Vidali & Phillips struggle with what seems to be a common theme in archive ethnography, how to bring to life an archive from countless hours of fieldnotes and collected materials? As the authors note, anthropologists often have hundreds of hours of recordings, images, fieldnotes, documents, and other collected materials produced through their ethnographic fieldwork. Yet, what to do with these materials and whether or how to archive them is often a difficult undertaking, and like Vivaldi and Phillips point out, an endeavor that continues to be undervalued and polemical within the field of anthropology. Scholars who would like to pursue this work, must think critically about “the ethical dimensions of consent, respect, ownership, stewardship, legacy, and propriety” in relation to creatively using ethnographic collections to construct archives and build artistic installations (p. 72). Overall, Vidali & Phillips’ work in building a remix and artistic installation from years of Zambian radio fieldwork, demonstrates one of many ways to repurpose ethnographic materials to recreate memories and spaces in time for a public audience, allowing both the researchers and the public audience to actively engage with such materials on their own terms.
While not perhaps the intended argument of the authors, one of my main takeaways from this article was affirmation that other researchers come up against a similar dilemma which is the desire to hoard research materials but the lack of desire to formally and systematically archive the assets. Using their experience with material collected in Zambia, the authors lift up multimodal installations as an opportunity to renew and reinvigorate archival assets and create a multisensory experience that increases opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and not only understanding tensions that arise within the archive but experiencing them firsthand.
The article primarily revolves around a more nuance and multi - modal approach to archives. Essentially it argues that archives are not bounded or fixed entities that are constructed primarily of material documents and a single interpretation of a researcher using them. Instead, the authors put forwar the argument that archives are in a constant process of negotiation between institutional factors that seek to bound it within a framework and decentralized actors and forces that push for diversity. The ethnographic archive, therefore, is in man ways a decolonization project, speaking back to the homogenizing narrative of the state, essentialization of meaning and understanding of ethnographic and archive date as processes of collection, appropriation and linear representation.
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.