Roundtable: Cultural Heritage and Politics, October 12, 2008
MLCP kicked off the 2008-2009 academic year with a roundtable in which three faculty members new to our faculty core gave presentations relating to the working group theme of Cultural Heritage and Politics.
Hilary Kahn gave a talk entitled "Owners and Images: The Challenges of Authority, Sight, and Community Collaborations in Livingston, Guatemala and Beyond" in which she touched upon her experiences organizing a collaborative video project in Livingston, Guatemala. She spoke about various ways to think about sight and the unique way in which the native video collaborators seemed to view and relate to the images they had created. She is interested in using the current MLCP working group theme as a starting point from which to explore the issue of ownership in relation to the images created through the project.
Stacie King's talk was entitled "Archaeology of/as Political Action in Southern Oaxaca, Mexico." She touched on the importance of community collaboration and how involving the community has been integral in shaping her archaeological work in Nejapa, Oaxaca. She is working to include more collaborative elements such as oral history interviews and educational workshops in her ongoing work in Nejapa. Central to her talk were questions of archaeological ethics and the need for archaeologists to ask themselves questions such as these: Where do the collected materials go? Exactly whose story is being told? Does the researcher do a disservice to the community by placing an economic as well as an intellectual value on the information and items collected?
Anya Royce spoke on "Isthmus Zapotec Language as Political Instrument." Focusing on Juchitan, Mexico, she touched on the long and expansive Zapotec literary and musical tradition that plays an important role in the maintenance of the Isthmus Zapotec language. She stressed the need for anthropologists to let go of feelings of ownership about the projects and communities with which they work and to adopt a more collaborative approach that thoroughly integrates the community and its people.
A lively discussion followed in which the common themes of collaboration and ownership were brought under closer inspection. Discussants added these questions: How do different forms of media affect and perhaps challenge issues of ownership and control of material? Where is the line drawn between maintaining culture and language and creating it? The three talks were linked through addressing the questions, What is the role of the researcher in indigenous communities? And, what is her or his responsibility?
