Revisiting and reframing ethnographic praxis. The return of visual collections from Gothenburg to the Argentine Chaco

Abstract

In this article, I discuss the benefits and shortcomings of deploying an ethnographic approach when studying the digital return of visual collections from ethnographic museums to source communities. I draw on my research process and field work in the Argentine Chaco where I presented and discussed a selection of century-old ethnographic photographic and filmic images from this region with members of the Indigenous Pilagá People. I argue that carrying out extensive ethnographic field work is a way to access the density and multiple layers of social and cultural relations in which returns are carried out. I also discuss and analyze the effects of ethnography on contemporary field work. I specifically reflect upon my own ethnographic praxis from a historical perspective, as part of a longer tradition in which various generations of anthropologists have visited and revisited the Pilagá in the Argentine Chaco. I argue that this historical ”ethnographization” has left marks in the memories of key informants and in local notions of ”culture”. Thus not only are we to reframe our field methods by considering updated and critical literature on the subject but also by paying attention to the field´s own specific historical relationship with ethnography.