Ethnographic Returns Conference
The conference Ethnographic Returns: The role of the anthropologist and ethnography in memory and heritage work invites participants to explore the many forms of – and lack of – returns of ethnography and anthropological knowledge in processes related to memory and heritage production.
About the conference
The conference Ethnographic Returns: The role of the anthropologist and ethnography in memory and heritage work invites participants to explore the many forms of – and lack of – returns of ethnography and anthropological knowledge in processes related to memory and heritage production. How is ethnographic knowledge reoccurring and reappearing, repeating itself in new iterations, as tradition, as legacy, as heritage? Playing on economic notions of return as yield, how does the value of ethnographic knowledge shift with the passing of time, and for whom? Last, to what extent has awareness of these dynamics, e.g. through collaboration and activism, resulted in a transformation of ethnography as a research method?
The focus of the conference serves as a starting point to disentangle the complex and contingent ways that people, communities and worlds, through ethnographic practice, become entangled and implicated in one another over time. Of special interest are exchanges and returns involving ethnographic practice and knowledge as memory, history and heritage, including their physical manifestation in museum artefacts and exhibitions.
The conference is a collaboration between The Centre for Critical Heritage Studies and the School of Global Studies, both at the University of Gothenburg, and the Museum of World Culture.
Date and venue
The conference was held 18-30 June, 2020.
The event took place online due to the Covid-19 outbreak.