Historical ethnography and the ritual archive

The 2024 Jensen Memorial Lectures

Abstract

The general theme of these lectures engages with the generative crossroads between anthropology and history, an interdisciplinary relationship with its own distinguished history, as evidenced by the illustrious genealogy of articles on the topic that have emerged since Evans-Pritchard’s signal Marrett Lecture of 1950. Based largely on my own experience in bringing anthropological methods to the topic of Afro-Atlantic historical ethnography, 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 that rituals make manifest, which in the first lecture I pose as the complex problematic of gaining access to ‘what actually happened’. In the second lecture, I sketch the contours and methodology for an operating manual of the ritual archive to help discern the relevant categories and practices of the ritual assemblages one encounters in the field, and to develop a standpoint for working from them. The third lecture explores Yoruba ideas about history and historicity within various ritual contexts based on my own ethnographic research. In the final lecture, I turn the entire expedition upside down, as befits the vexatious spirit of Leo Frobenius, by exploring the ritual foundations of his Yoruba archive.