"Historical ethnography and the ritual archive" (3/4) - Andrew Apter - Jensen Memorial Lecture 2024

The general theme of my lectures engages the generative crossroads of anthropology and history, an interdisciplinary relationship with its own distinguished history evidenced by the illustrious genealogy of articles on the topic that have emerged since Evans-Pritchard’s signal Marrett Lecture delivered in 1950.
Based largely on my own experience bringing anthropological methods to Afro-Atlantic historical ethnography over the last two decades, I explore the possibilities of using rituals as archives for unlocking repressed historical memories and the pasts which they reenact.
Whereas “fetishized” forms of ritual invocations and representations of the past provide standard fare for anthropological reflection, few studies meet the far greater challenge of determining the pasts which rituals manifest, or what I pose as the deceptively complex problematic of “what actually happened.”
How are “actual” pasts ritually archived and accessed? How can we account for their generational transmission through performative genealogies predicated on ritual surrogation? And how do we transform them into historical narratives without doing violence to their culturally specific epistemological frameworks? These are some of the questions that I will pursue in my lectures.
Lectures:
03 June 2024: My Life in the Forest of Spirits
10 June 2024: An Operating Manual for the Ritual Archive
17 June 2024: The Ritual Archive in Yoruba Culture
24 June 2024: 'Yoruba Culture' in the Frobenius Archive