Abstract

ROQUE, Ricardo. The archive, the collection and the hunter: autobiography of a historical ethnography. Etnográfica [online]. 2022, vol.26, n.2, pp.303-325.  Epub Sep 19, 2022. ISSN 0873-6561.  https://doi.org/10.4000/etnografica.11119.

In this article I propose an autobiographical reflection on the practice and the method of ethnography in/of the archive. Using the metaphor of hunting, I argue this mode of research situated at the crossroads of the anthropology and history disciplines can be approached as a kind of semiotic hunt. That is: as an investigative work oriented to pursuing and interpreting traces, trails, clues - sometimes fragmentary and broken; embodied in different materialities - that read as signs of events that really happened in the past. In the research practice here examined - the historical ethnography of a colonial collection of human skulls from East Timor now held by the Coimbra University Museum of Science - the semiotic hunt concerned a dynamic trail of archival traces, which ultimately revealed a past of colonial violence.

Keywords : archival ethnography; semiotic hunt; historical anthropology; human skulls; colonialism.

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