Field research in West Africa is an important part of the [Re:]Entanglements project. This research, which will be one of the main activities of the project’s second year, involves retracing parts of the journeys made by Northcote Thomas during his anthropological surveys in Nigeria and Sierra Leone between 1909 and 1915.
One of the objective of this fieldwork is to reconnect with the communinties that Thomas visited over 100 years ago, and, where possible, to deposit copies of Thomas’s photographs, sound recordings and other archival materials with the descendants of those he documented. The historical archives and collections provide a medium through which to build relationships in the present. As well as ‘repatriating’ the archive, we are learning a great deal more about its content. The photographs, sound recordings and material culture collections are remarkably well contextualised compared with other ethnographic archives, but still there is much we don’t know. The return of the photographs and sound recordings provide occasions for telling the history of the settlement or community, explaining what is going on in a particular scene, or indeed correcting errors in Thomas’s documentation.
In our initial travels with these archives, we have found, of course, that much has changed in the areas in which Thomas worked a century ago. Places that were villages surrounded by forests have become neighbourhoods in conurbations. Thatched, mud-brick houses have been replaced by concrete and glass. Christian churches have often supplanted local shrines and traditional religious practices. And yet the continuities are also striking. Older members of the community still recall the old buildings from their youth; the names of photographed ancestors are known – a family resemblance is detected their descendants’ faces; the sacred grove is still somehow sacred.
We will post longer accounts of our fieldwork here on the project blog, but please also follow our progress by joining the project Facebook Group, where we post more frequent updates.
Represencing the past
Continuity and change
