TRACES, RUINS, AND DECAY: EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE ARCHIVES

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I try to think the archive as a city and the city as an archive. The analysis formulated around this two-way itinerary, which permeate both documents and streets, are based on three conceptual images: traces, debris, and decay. From Maputo, capital of Mozambique, I discuss my fieldwork by showing how this affective and epistemological activity of “walking-researching” involves a duplicate gaze over the archive and the city. On the one hand, this gaze has led me to analyze the mechanisms of control and silencing that surround stories and memories in both spaces; on the other hand, to excavate other senses that threaten these mechanisms. My argument is that the archive, like the city, is a living space, full of tensions, gaps, and ambiguities. Therefore, it is necessary to test the limits of thinking, together and comparatively, of the institutional archive and the urban archive. With this duplicated gaze, I problematize the traces of official history and how they are negotiated and disputed - in images kept by the State or in hidden monuments.

KEYWORDS:
Archives; Maputo; memory; photography; ruins