Ethnographic Returns
Memory Processes and Archive Film

This Element stresses and explores the affective and political dimension of ethnographic returns.

Anne Gustavsson (Author)

9781108823425, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 16 September 2021

75 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 0.5 cm, 0.136 kg

In the past decades cultural heritage stored at museums and archives has been returned to source communities in various forms and under diverse circumstances. This contribution to the Elements series explores and discusses specifically the return of digital 'ethnographic' images to indigenous and non indigenous people that share a common recent history of coexistence and dispute over the same territory that is to be understood in the light of the consolidation of a Nation State with a settler colonial logic. The author argues that the affective reception of what a given archive labels as tangible and intangible heritage varies according to each audience´s particular memory practices, historical experience and way of relating to shared hegemonic notions of 'whiteness' and 'indigeneity'.

1. Introduction: 'Revisiting Ethnographic Sites, Decentering Authorized Interpretations?'
2. 'Indians' and 'Gauchos' Captured by the Lens of Swedish Explorers in the Argentine Chaco
3. Readings of the Past and the Affective Reception of an Archive Film
4. Final Reflections: Reframing Ethnographic Heritage.

Subject Areas: Archaeology [HD], Museology & heritage studies [GM]