A Talk on 'Ethnography and Memory'

The informants’ memories and the researchers’ own reconstruction of the field partially reconstruct the field for the audience, academic or otherwise. This workshop engages with the method of memory in doing research. With a brief introduction to collective memory in the sociological tradition, this workshop begins with an introduction to memory ethnography. It engages with the move from external memory, from the act of writing to mnemonic aids that now accompany us in the field, and is ubiquitous to the extent that it has become almost an extension of oneself. In this workshop, participants are encouraged to examine new forms of memory practices in their own research and to engage with the imbrications of memory-technology in research and in the social life of our research interlocutors. The workshop also engages with a few key texts and methods of memory—memoirs and autoethnography. In the concluding session of the workshop, the participants are led to interrogate the matrix of memory practices—old and new- and look at memory as an intrinsic part of all research methods in social anthropology, whether overtly mentioned or unacknowledged.