The text addresses the reluctances of anthropologists to create ethnographic archives although they keep data materials that haunt them. They argue that anthropological work and archives have a lot in common if we consider Bakhtin’s concept of centripetal and centrifugal pulls. Applying them to language, standardization and normativity can be seen as centripetal pulls. Meanwhile, everyday realities of linguistic diversity are centrifugal pulls. These pulls are “forces that impinge on archive-making and archive-imagining”, suggesting that archives are different than against the grain, rather, against and along the grain. Through this lens, the authors state that archives are never fixed and have “a myriad of agentive forces” (70). Archives have a lot in common with anthropological ethnography in that they have “lingering and tugging resonances, echoes, hauntings, associations, traces, and the like” (69).
Analytic (Question)
Everyone can view this content
On