[-empyre-] November 2007 on -empyre- : Memory Errors in theTechnosphere: Art, Accident, Archive

[Madeleine Reich Casad]

Hi Gabriela,

>
> This is something we have to deal with all the time in  
> anthropology: by the
> time a book or an article are published what we are describing has  
> changed,
> often quite dramatically.  Then, the 'natives' we so 'documented'  
> make use
> of these documents to re-create themselves in the present, taking  
> those
> documents as 'true repositories' of their past.  First our  
> documentation and
> writing 'fixed' the 'real' and then it all gets entangled in weird  
> ways with
> the re-enactment of the 'real past'.


This is so interesting... Could you say more about how and why and by  
whom such re-creations are contested or seen as problematic?

Thanks!
mik