This archive is intended to expose its own discursive risks… which is a carrot on a stick. That is, though it will also inevitably reproduce them (there is always an outside to thought), the archive is intended to encourage a practice of looping attention back onto its own “unthought” aspects. It is intended to put these discursive risks to work!
The purpose of the archive is to produce “archivists.” Whether or not they participate in “my” archive, I intend to enable and provoke an archiving practice, which is an end in itself because archiving changes the way you orient to your surroundings. Becoming an archivist changes what you can “see” and what you can “say.” What can/should be recorded? What can/should be made publicly available? These are not innocent questions.
This archive is just now coming into its own. That is, I have only just begun to take the archive as a question, rather than an assumption. It started as an iteration of the Quotidian Anthropocene, and still reflects a number of the design logics of that project. However, substantive changes have been made to the questions that have guided the collection and curation of the data it contains and that I am still in the process of depositing. As previously stated, I had tried to enroll my interlocutors into the archiving process, but I wasn’t able to draw their interest well enough.
Right now, the collections in this archive are organized around the questions that have shaped my dissertation chapters:
The archive is hosted on the Disaster STS Network. The PECE team provides technical services and assistance.
not related to the Rice-Circle Archive-to-come but rather a place to quickly throw in these links to essays elsewhere: one on style that I started long ago on The Asthma Files instance (also highlightinng the problem of cross-instance flow and sharing) -- and this is as good a place as any to note that style is a concept we have not explicitly built out or developed but is nevertheless all over PECE, which is heartwarming -- and another on
(From interview with George Marcus, September 12, 2023)In this particular field work moment I encountered a figure who was, for lack of a better term. in a state of alienation from his own embedded culture. And that's a difficult place to be in these small exhaustively ranked communities. He never lost the tinge of the rank that he had lost. So his adaptation was basically, a kind of alienation, a kind of eccentric, but one who was tolerated because of who he had been, but had lost the outside demonstrations of the ring.
