Area 3. Actualisations of pasts

Examining relations with the past and with its traces (material, digital or mnesic), this line takes more direct advantage of certain questions raised by projects developed in the context of the LabEx PP.

The first component takes note of a set of research practices concerning the history of our own discipline, based on the study of multiple archive documents and means of memory expression. Though ethnography is the main source of anthropologists’ knowledge, they also spend a lot of time studying documents, putting them together themselves, and roaming archive departments. Archives are an extension of the anthropologist’s field site in addition to being his or her second field site. But they have also become a major part of the restitution practices and new forms of memory formation used by the ethnographed groups themselves.

Bolstered by the reflexive detour into how we as anthropologists make time or make do with time, the second component of this line takes a new look at a now-traditional subject: the relationship of societies with their history, and that of individuals with their past, extending the study of phenomena of ritual creation, heritage creation, apprenticeship, identity construction and political construction, which, each in its own way, proceeds from the actualisation of memory and of the past through their placement in words, objects and bodies.

Finally, the third part goes deeper into the question of the transmission and reconstruction of traditions, by broaching it based on forms of memory selection and systems of forgetting, using approaches that combine ethnographic methods and cognitive protocols.