The panel’s objective is to reflect on the use of archival sources in anthropological research and its relationship with ethnographic production, as well as on the constitution and organization of archives of anthropologists or related to anthropology.
The archival sources pose challenges of various types: how to locate, receive, organize, and make them open to public consultation? What specific characteristics do they have? What contribution can they make to the history of the discipline, either as material to be used in teaching or as an input for research or technical or artistic productions of different types? What is the experience of anthropologists who do research in these archives? This way, we seek to exchange experiences and encourage reflection on the topic.
Our motivation for the panel comes from the perception that, with increasing intensity, anthropologists are carrying out a type of research work – in archives and about archives – traditionally associated with historians. In addition to using archives as a source of knowledge to produce their analyses, since at least the 1980s, anthropologists have been reflecting on the nature of documentary records transformed into sources and, in some cases, created and organized archives and collections from an anthropological perspective.
Our objective with this panel is to expand and diversify the comprehension of how anthropological practice can be thought of and think of archival research as a type of field research.
