The National Anthropological Archives has received a $1 million grant from

the Arcadia Fund to launch the first two years of a long-term project to
digitize endangered-language materials currently housed in the NAA. As
many of you know from first-hand experience, the materials found in this
archive preserve an unparalleled collection of primary sources for
investigating endangered cultures and languages, indigenous environmental
knowledge and the connections between these subjects. The project will be
implemented by the National Anthropological Archives Program working in
collaboration with the Recovering Voices Program on development of
outreach.

Through this project, the team will digitize its entire collection of
ethnographic sound recordings, estimated at 3,000 hours, as well as 35,000
pages of manuscript materials, using techniques that will make these
electronic sources readily available to the public through the Smithsonians
online and openly accessible catalog system. The project team plans to
create digital surrogates of voice recordings and paper documents in the
NAA, and make them publicly available to support researchers and
communities struggling to research, document and revitalize indigenous
languages and cultures. Online access will make the material widely available
for use without damage to the historic originals.

Anthropology and the Arts
The intersections of aesthetic and cultural production, art and critical social theory, and
experience and the senses inform conversations among a number of faculty. Paulla
Ebron has focused on performance and the politics of representing Africa. She is
currently working on two projects, one on landscape and history, artifact and memory,
and writing as an engaged practice. A second project centers on globalization, Western
art music, and forms of cultural capital. Angela Garcia explores literary craft in
ethnographic writing and the efficacy of such modes to engage human experience,
social forms and broader publics. Lochlann Jain takes graphic production, and
representation more generally, as a central feature of how Americans understand and
practice law and medicine. Jain is currently researching graphic practices in medicine
and teaches courses on graphic novels and visual theory. Tanya Luhrmann examines
outsider art and specifically work produced by people with psychotic disorders. Thomas
Blom Hansen has written on how popular theatre and film are powerful media for
debating public morality and community ethics in urban South Africa. Liisa Malkki is
interested in visual culture, the social and political uses of the category of "art", as well
as the ethics and aesthetics of humanitarianism. She is also working on the material
practices that people other than professional aid workers engage in as they seek to
identify subject positions from which to be of aid, to be "useful".
Duana Fullwiley is experimenting with how voice and narration in cross cultural fiction
might prove useful in relating ethnographic accounts of high tech science for the
broader public. As an anthropologist of science and medicine, she also queries how
images of nature, and especially geography, are used in scientific renderings of genetic
maps and other visual constructions of social orders. She is generally concerned about
the pictorial use of the physical world in scientific models to instantiate specific truths
about human difference.
John Rick looks at cognitive issues concerning the use of sound and light, and the
display of iconic, graphic imagery in early heirarchical societies of the Andes. Barbara
Voss collaborates with San Francisco Bay area artists to expand the representation and
interpretation of local archaeological collections and sites. Lynn Meskell's research
ranges from "object lessons" in ancient Egypt; materiality, form, and human and animal
figuration at Catalhoyuk, Turkey. Her more current work centers on the often fraught
politics of UNESCO practice, particularly as it informs struggles over "World Heritage"
sites.