Multiple Audiences and Co-curation: Linking an Ethnographic Archive to Contemporary Contexts

Abstract

This paper reports on a collaborative project between the authors and the historical anthropologist, Wendy James. The authors are developing strategies through which James’s fieldwork recordings from the Sudan/Ethiopian borderlands can be digitized and archived in such a way as to make them relevant to contemporary contexts. Most of the original recordings are in the Uduk language, but there is also material in other minority tongues, as well as national languages. While this archive needs to be relevant to academic users and the wider general public, most particularly it must be relevant to the people themselves who are now starting to document their own experiences. A key issue to be discussed is how to embed the context of James’s work within the archive without prejudicing these aims and her voice. It is also important that these materials are seen as belonging to a wider set of regional records from Northeast Africa linked to diaspora communities now living in various parts of the world.