This seminar is concerned with the „archive“ as site, technology and promise. For some time now, the so-called “archival turn” has gripped the humanities and social sciences as well as the arts and cultural production, more widely: Exhibitions feature archival materials while cultural analyses increasingly seek to deconstruct and intervene in the archive’s epistemic arrangement (its order of knowledge), particularly in the context of colonial histories. The archival turn then invites us to think of the archive as both, a source for and object of research. This, as the anthropologist David Zeitlyn (2012) has argued, poses a productive “slippage” for anthropological enquiries. Taking its cue from Zeitlyn’s proposal for “anthropology in and of the archives”, this seminar will explore the productive intersections (methodological and theoretical) between archives and anthropology on the basis of concrete archives in and beyond Berlin. The seminar will explore the question of activating archives on the basis of 4 interconnected operations: contexts, materialities, feelings and fabulations. The seminar will include a site visits to the Landesarchiv Berlin and the archive of the Schwules Museum in Berlin.
- Kursverantwortliche/r: Tahani Nadim