A New Journey Through Shared Ethnological Archives For Understanding Anthropology: The “Archives Des Ethnologues”, A Multifaceted Consortium

Social anthropologists have produced numerous hitherto in the field that have been sometimes deposited in documentation centre of research facilities. The nine resource centres that make up the consortium
Archives des ethnologues
and their partners, house multi-media materials collected by French anthropologists who have worked in the field throughout the world and in multiple languages from the 1900s to the present day. Once archived, these notes, field notebooks or various papers, these photographs, films or sound recordings are digitized and some of them are posted online in accordance with ethical and legal guidelines. To combat the misleading way in which digital technology tends to standardize data, the Consortium
Archives des ethnologues
has chosen to diversify access to this data because the uniqueness of these archives reflects their scientific and heritage value, the wealth and diversity of the societies they attest to, the history of the sciences and the methodologies used in the course of time.

To facilitate this access, we have to be able to account for the complexity of the past of these societies via a relational-ethics approach and by providing an overview of the different strata of research. The archive is not only a potentially reusable data for anyone who would like to revisit fieldwork, to compare it with others, or to validate evidence, but also a record of scientists’ real practices. Beyond the task of archiving and preservation, the aim of the consortium
Archives des ethnologues
is to help everyone grasp the diversity and complexity of field data, to keep in mind their production process, to facilitate their re-use in order to propose a new journey through the societies studied. We therefore need―and even more so than in the pre-digital age―to work together, to discuss to compare methods, to involve different professions as well as civil society.

This poster aims to introduce the reader to the wealth of access to the archives of this discipline through the implementation of good practices in digital data processing. It will emphasize the collective development of tools the consortium uses for description and dissemination through which it published in November 2018 a guideline on ethical and legal issues for data dissemination in the humanities and social sciences. The focus will be on four digital manifestations of the archival collections and the technologies used: the geolocation of data, the creation of a frame of reference for tales and songs of oral tradition and more broadly speaking for "ethnology" as a discipline, annotations through an open-access sound player and the creation of a collaborative platform for transcribing field notebooks with Internet users.

Bibliography

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Ginouvès, V. and Gras, I.
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La diffusion numérique des données en SHS. Guide de bonnes pratiques éthiques et juridiques
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Blog
Ethnologia, le carnet du Consortium “Archives des ethnologues”
. Plateforme Hypothèses.

https://ethnologia.hypotheses.org

Mouton, M-D.
(2008). Les ethnologues et leurs archives. Passion, possession et appropriation.
Journal des africanistes
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Zeitlyn, D.
(2012). Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates.
Annual Review of Anthropology
, 41: 461‑480.