Expanding the Archive: Rethinking Language Documentation through Museum Debates

Abstract (English)

This paper extends current debates on the digitization of ethnographic objects in museums to the domain of linguistic archives. While the virtual return and collaborative curation of material collections have prompted important reflections on power, mediation, and Indigenous refusal (Phillips 2005; Boast 2011), the digitization of language data—recordings, transcriptions, metadata—has often been framed as a neutral act of preservation (Austin & Sallabank 2014; Woodbury 2011). I argue instead that these materials constitute ethnographic objects in their own right and that their circulation in digital repositories raises similarly urgent ethical, epistemological, and political questions.
Based on research with the Tukano people of the Northwest Amazon, for whom language is not simply a vehicle of communication but a bodily and cosmological substance linked to breath, blood, and kinship (Jackson 1983; Chernela 2018; Hugh-Jones 2023), I explore the risks posed by archiving linguistic materials outside the ontological frameworks in which they are embedded. Echoing critiques raised in relation to the extraction and storage of Indigenous genetic data (Reardon 2005; TallBear 2013; Esteves 2023), I examine how language documentation practices often reflect Western assumptions that treat language as an abstract, decontextualized code (Leonard 2017), thereby eliding Indigenous modes of relating to knowledge, persons, and the dead.
This paper advocates for expanding the critical lens applied to museum collections to include linguistic archives, so that we may attend to the cosmological and relational conditions under which language is produced and shared—as among the Tukano. In doing so, I join efforts to reframe linguistic documentation not merely as preservation, but as a collaborative and situated practice accountable to the political and ontological lives of the peoples and forms of knowledge it engages.