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worth repeating |
David Akin of the University of Michigan gave a public lecture about returning anthropological materials to the community in which they were collected. An excerpt: “When you talk to somebody about whether field materials ought to be returned to those communities, people basically see this as a no-brainer. Their answer is ‘Of course anthropologists should return field materials to their host communities—it’s their culture.’ It is seen as unproblematic. . . . In effect, that’s the easy part.… “But the problem is that once you’ve made that decision, you’ve decided to repatriate, you’re suddenly faced with unescapable and much more difficult ethical decisions about how you are going to do that. Most of these questions are questions of confidentiality and access. Who’s going to have access to this material when it’s returned, and under what kind of constraints and rules? . . . “The logistical difficulties of actually returning materials to those communities is often underestimated—and really unanticipated—by people who decide they want to return their data. Especially these days, with digital photos and photocopying and all these new technologies we have for managing data, people tend to think that it’s pretty easy to do. . . . But especially when you get anthropologists who have worked in the same place for a long time, maybe over many trips over several decades, there’s a huge amount of data and it’s a really daunting task to organize this -material in a form that can be used by people in those communities. . . . “And then there are also real challenges in preserving the material once it gets there. You can’t just simply plop down large quantities of material and various media in a local community and think that you’ve done your job.” |
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—Beth
Roberts |
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