Stephen Hugh-Jones, on Digitising Archives, Open Research and Repatriation

Over five decades of research in North-West Amazonia, Stephen and Christine Hugh-Jones generated an extensive archive of recordings, photographs, genealogies, field notes, and ethnographic materials documenting the Pirá-Paraná, Vaupés, and Upper Rio Negro regions. In recent years, they have undertaken the major task of digitising and depositing these materials through the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA), while also repatriating physical materials to the University of the Andes in Bogotá and to the communities with whom they worked.

In this talk, Stephen Hugh-Jones reflects on the motivations, practicalities, and ethical deliberations behind opening up and repatriating a lifetime of fieldwork, offering an anthropological perspective on open research in practice. As he traces the process of digitisation and return, he will discuss the challenges of cataloguing materials and navigating questions of consent, as well as the responses from communities who now draw on the archive as a source of historical knowledge. Part of this story also involves broader shifts in Colombia following the 1991 constitutional reforms and the move towards ethno-education, which have reshaped research relationships and created new uses for anthropological archives. Stephen and Christine’s AILLA collection can be found here: https://ailla.utexas.org/collections/1821/

The talk will be followed by a response and discussion with Dr Rosanna Dent, before opening up to audience questions.

Stephen Hugh-Jones (Honorary Emeritus Associate of the Cambridge University Department of Social Anthropology and a Life Fellow of King’s College). For nearly 60 years, his research has been focused on the Tukanoan peoples of Northwest Amazonia, often with an emphasis on intra-regional (Amazonian) and inter-regional (Melanesian) comparisons. Research and publications have ranged from ritual, symbolism and mythology; shamanism; kinship and architecture; barter and gift exchange; objects and material culture; books and writing; food, drugs and the drugs industry; zoology, botany and indigenous knowledge systems; ethno-education. 

Discussant:

Rosanna Dent (Lipton Lecturer in Recent History of Science, Medicine and Technology, Department of History and Philosophy of Science). Dent is a historian of science with a focus on recent history of the human, life and biomedical sciences in Latin America. She collaborates on the Rowasu'u digital archive project with six A'uwe (Xavante) communities in Central Brazil to return historical documentation produced since the 1950s to the Indigenous communities they document.

Chair:

Anna Wood (Research Associate / Knowledge Exchange and Funding Facilitator, Department of Social Anthropology)