Un-finishing Memory

Memory plays a significant role in anthropological research and in ethnographic exchange. In anthropological disclosure, the memories shared during ethnography become re-remembered and then extended in the stories researchers must pass on with care. It is in this way that anthropology becomes “memory-work.” To share and acquire memories in a community cements the researcher and subject affectively. Importantly, this demands ethical “response-ability” and accountability: the commitment to a critical ethnography. What then is my responsibility as investigator to the memories of the community of Santa Clara del Cobre? To all the identities and affects, emotions and feelings disclosed, the oral histories of the people imbricated in these stories? What does memory mean to the artisans of Santa Clara? What is memory in coppersmithing? What is memory in a place where digging up earth to build a road might mean an archeological excavation ignored or attended to? What is the memory-work of a critical ethnography? What is remembering to readers of these stories? How does memory-work involve the body-mind-self? How does experience in the present help us remember what is absent, differently? How does memory form a nomadic archive? How does memory un-finish the past? And how is remembering always un-finished?