The frontiers of anthropological data – ANTHROPEN

The aim of this project is to test the limits of the open access to past and present anthropological data- be it written, visual, audio or audio-visual-, with regard to the new European injunctions and to the ethical exigencies of intercultural and often extra-European contexts of production and management of anthropological data.This project starts from the good archival practices that the Documentary center of the Laboratory of Ethnology and Comparative Sociology (LESC) has adopted during the past years in the frame of the Consortium Archives des Ethnologues, in order to adjust to the new scientific and ethical norms of the discipline. From there on, the project tries to determine the real costs of the opening of data while still respecting these norms. The project engages in dialogue researchers and archivists coming from various thematic horizons around concrete cases of data sets, published or unpublished, coming from researchers’ visual, photographic or filmic archival funds. The aim is to test the free access to these funds, while noting the problematic cases and to look for more general solutions that these cases prompt to seek, with the aid of jurists, heritage specialists and data management specialists. This would equally allow an evaluation of the needs in terms of time of data treatment and digital technology, which could represent a valuable information for other specialists in Digital Humanities- it is at this level that the partnership with the Maison Archéologie et Ethnologie is crucial. We would also need to undertake a volumetric evaluation of the needs and means for opening the access to the whole dataset managed within the laboratory. Work on archival data is a constant concern for archivists, but the anticipation of frames of production of new data sets stands at the core of researchers’ preoccupation. This is why the training of researchers and PhD students is incorporated in this project. It aims at familiarising them with the technical, scientific and ethical aspects of the collection, conservation and sharing of data and to gather from them, in return, new needs and difficulties encountered during data collection in the field. The final aim of this project is to draw future directions for anthropology as an open science, which means that the lessons learnt from the ‘opening’ of such ‘test’ datasets should be disseminated, debated- via international conferences, publications, restitutions to local communities. How could we conciliate the Western open science philosophy with the cultural relativism in the attitude towards research data? How to respect the demands for data protection, patrimonial claims and denunciations of cultural appropriation in a global world where digital data crosses frontiers despite the will of communities who may not always share the same philosophy of openness? Social anthropology is a social science based on intercultural encounters that crossed two centuries of geopolitical circumstances that have strongly influenced the production and dissemination of its data (e.g. colonialism), and reformed itself often in response to these changes. Thinking through anthropological data is thinking the possibility of an open science beyond frontiers, at the global scale to which new technological possibilities and the desire of shared knowledge aspire. As a result, the international dissemination of the results of this project could be considered a condition of its success.