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Potentials of a collection. Tracking, perceiving relationships and sharing

Applicant Dr. Gertrud Boden
Subject Area African, American and Oceania Studies
Term since 2020
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 454798691
 
The aim of the project is to explore the potentials of a collection of documents on the language and culture of the Khwe, an indigenous, former hunter-gatherer population in southern Africa, as well as the possibilties of collaborating with and benefiting Khwe as descendants of the community of origin. The innovative and integrative approach is at the same time historically contextualizing (tracking), regionally comparative (perceiving relationships) as well as collaborative and decolonizing (sharing), and recognizes that the engagement with the history of the collected documents and the decolonization or indigenization of their research and interpretation belong together (cf. Scott, 2012).Tracking as the origin of science (Liebenberg, 1995), relational ontologies, i.e. a being-in-the-world that is focused on relationships and connections, (Guenther, 2015, 2020) and the sharing or common use of resources (Widlok 2017) have been identified as central cultural achievements of hunter-gatherer communities in general and of San, the indigenous former hunter-gatherer communities in Southern Africa, in particular. In the work package "Tracking" we trace how the documents in the collection came into being by scrutinizing the cultural testimonies for traces of work routines and concepts, by examining archival files and by interviewing eye witnesses. The work package "Perceiving Relationships" questions the academic categories, which Oswin Köhler applied when sorting texts and other documents, and asks how Khwe perceive, understand, feel or experience relationships and connections between beings and phenomena, and how the results fit into regional-comparative work on relational ontologies of San more generally. The work package "Sharing" looks at how Khwe interpret the documents and how to configure the collection and the collection database, which is currently under construction, with and for the Khwe in the long term. In summary, the aim is to explore how historical contextualization, recent regionally comparative research on ontologies of San in southern Africa, and approaches to decolonization or indigenization of collections and archives can benefit and promote each other methodically and theoretically, and how this expands or enriches the potentials and significance of the collection.
DFG Programme Research Grants
 
 

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