Podcasting Collaborations and Ontological Relationships of Being ‘Here’ and ‘There’ in the Lower Marañón River in Peru

Abstract

This article is about podcasts and mobile phones not only as "daily technologies of life" but also as ways to convey personal stories and to do ethnographic research. However, we do not romanticize the use of digital technology for anthropological research. We use podcasts as a form to write our ethnographic work with our collaborators, and also as a way to keep in contact with our collaborators while in a global pandemic. For podcasts, we had to do several interviews and later edited them as both dialogues and individual stories. Interviews were mostly done by other digital devices such as WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, and telephone calls. The stories in our podcast series are mostly about an Amazonian indigenous community struggling to survive the global pandemic after several oil spills and other epidemics. Podcasts create a sort of intimacy and co-presence stimulating a multimodal, sensorial experience. However, power relations do not disappear, nor did they become invisible. Rather, power relations are accommodated in the new audio/digital scenario.María Eugenia Ulfe and Roxana Vergara, "Podcasting collaborations and ontological relationships of being 'here' and 'there' in the lower Marañón River in Peru",

Editors’ introduction to Sound “Repatriation” in South America: The Politics of Collaborative Archive Reactivations

“…The current transformation of analog archival material into more accessible digital formats is one of the main topics dealt with by the introduction to the comprehensive handbook on sound repatriation authored by Frank Gunderson and Bret Woods (2018) and an issue edited by Valentina Vapnarsky (2020). Until now, the ways that everyday technologies like cell phones are used by local communities in South America for documenting and archiving have received comparatively little attention (but see Ulfe and Vergara [2021], Sánchez [2019]). Serving as mini-computers, cell phones are harnessed to revitalize oratory, music, and dance heritages using both historical and present-day sound recordings, often in the context of identity politics.…”