The ethnographic archive and the poetics of history: Revisiting Godfrey Lienhardt’s archive

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article develops an approach for working with vernacular texts in ethnographic archives. It examines Dinka song texts collected in (South) Sudan by the anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt (between 1947 and 1951), now archived at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Songs were central to developing Lienhardt’s ethnographic analysis; they are also an exciting and unique record of popular and artistic expression at the time of his research. The songs he transcribed offer perspectives on life under colonial rule that are often occluded in the documentary and ethnographic record (including Lienhardt’s own writing). In this article, I examine a selection of songs, showing that to be understood today they must be seen as both a product of Lienhardt’s data collecting practices and works of art in their own right. It is possible to usefully recontextualize these songs by triangulating between Lienhardt’s published work, his unpublished field notes and other academic studies in South Sudanese history and anthropology. Importantly, these songs must be treated as verbal arts – and read with an appreciation of their aesthetic and stylistic qualities. Their meaning and significance is not always straightforward, in fact they are often deliberately opaque. Any interpretation must embrace these ‘difficult’ aspects.