Archival Sovereignty: Indigenous Digital Media, Language Revival and Land Defense in the Andes

• Applicant: Walther Maradiegue, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology ; African, American and Oceania Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 546936267

The junior research group applies for a project that analyzes the formation of digital archives by Indigenous groups and actors in their own epistemological ways and in connection with their ancestral lands and environments, understanding that such formation is related to agendas of language revitalization and defense of their territories. Using the original concept of "Archival sovereignty," the research group analyzes the principles, agencies, and cosmopolitics related to archival formation by Quechua Cañaris peoples, an Andean Indigenous group. This concept poses a challenge to European/Western conceptions of the archive: (i) considering an archive as a space, a practice, and a process to gather and produce knowledge; (ii) considering Indigenous archives as founded on temporalities divergent from the temporality of the archives of modernity; and (iii) inspecting how Indigenous Andean societies understand and interact with the agential capacities of contemporary digital infrastructures. Archival sovereignty emphasizes the relational reproduction of Quechua knowledges and the role of other-than-human beings in knowledge and archival production, and allows to focus on projects of digital archives preservation from the perspective of Indigenous epistemologies, having as a main case an understudied Andean community. At the same time, this project aims to understand how Quechua Cañaris activists navigate other non-Indigenous archival regimes and participate in the restitution of historical audiovisual materials preserved at university archives. Work methodologies include elicitation of audiovisual materials, ethnographic in-person research, digital ethnography, and the collaborative production of a public exhibition, a multimedia website and a co-edited monograph. Thus, the junior research group will emphasize the role of collaborative and co-creative research in initiatives of archive preservation and cultural autonomy. This project contributes to media anthropology, the anthropology of archives, and global Indigenous studies scholarship by highlighting the role that relational and land-based epistemologies, inter-species learning, and digital media play in current projects of language revitalization, territorial sovereignty, and autonomy, focusing on digital archives. The conclusions of this project will be useful to debates on the relation between Indigenous media and digital archives, and the politics of language and land defense coming from different Indigenous areas around the world. The applicant and two doctoral students will explore these topics with their respective three subprojects in collaboration with a Peruvian university and three Indigenous co-researchers.

• DFG Programme: Emmy Noether Independent Junior Research Groups