This article recuperates an overlooked history of a photographic archive created in 1965 to document the cultural diversity of the Portuguese colonies for an ethnological museum in Lisbon during the concluding decades of the country’s last colonial regime (1933-74). Five decades after the country’s democratic transition and the decolonisation that accompanied it, I explore this stillborn archive, which has remained in its institutional successor, and historicise a systematic practice of field photography created as a resource for ethnographic research in a late-colonial setting. I investigate the development of this research-based ethnological museum by examining the case of António Carreira (1905-1988), who, as a metropolitan-based colonial field officer, colleague and subordinate, played a series of critical roles in its institutionalisation. Thinking through Carreira’s five annual missions to Angola (1965-69) conducted during the Portuguese colonial wars (1961-1974), in this article, I engage with images and archival devices rendered obsolete by a capricious political transition to demonstrate their potential to unravel some of the paradoxes of developing modern sociocultural anthropology in a late and contested colonial context.

How does meaning making affect the perceived value of art? In this paper, we focus on a unique form of art, Chinese calligraphy, to explore the effects of literal meaning on the perceived value of art combining both words and aesthetic quality. Based on a 2*4 between-subjects factorial experiment (n = 451), we find evidence that the provision of transcriptions for Chinese calligraphy artworks can have certain impact on the works’ perceived value. Specifically, our findings suggest that transcriptions enhance the appreciation of the value of the literal content and the perceived beauty of certain artwork. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the effect of meaning on the perceived value of Chinese calligraphy artworks, information supply on aesthetic experiences, and the value of Chinese calligraphy as intangible cultural heritage. Recommendations for stakeholders including auction houses are provided.

Most people will be familiar with the metaphor of the onion, which tells us that layers must be peeled away to reveal the core or heart of an issue. This extended article works in the opposite way, by starting with an issue – really, quite a few issues – and adding layers that reveal the complexity of the issues and the importance of engaging in dialogue about them. The core issue here is the question of how researchers and practitioners within and outside of academia can better engage in open dialogue about the challenges and opportunities of bridging research praxes across pluralities of knowledge. Among the related issues and concerns that spring from this central issue are research ethics and shared authority, metrics, value, recognition, and citizen science and research.

There are plenty of objects that are conspicuous in the way they signal to the surroundings that the user has some kind of physical impairment. Most obvious are perhaps wheelchairs, motorized wheelchairs, hearing aids and crutches. These objects can be described as aids in the sense that the purpose is either to mitigate the effects of reduced physical abilities or to compensate for the loss of a sensory faculty. The focus of this article concerns an object that both increases mobility and replaces such a faltering capacity. It might even be the most iconic of all aids: the mobility cane, also known as the white cane, long cane or white stick. Based on the work at a Swedish Low Vision and Resource Centre, this article discusses the use of the white cane among people with severe and progressive visual impairment. The fact is that this aid, which for an outsider would easily seem to be a rather natural choice, can arouse completely different feelings in somebody who has a severe visual impairment. It is a well-known circumstance amongst low visions teachers and therapists that persons with acquired or progressive sight impairment are often not quite happy about using the aid. Therefore, the aim of the article is to utilize notions of everyday experiences to gain further insights into why the white cane for many of its potential users are associated with strong feelings of both personal ambiguity and social stress. In order to highlight these emotional, and still cultural and political, tensions, the discussion is grounded in critical disability studies and informed by ableism, stigma, and passing as theoretical concepts.

In this paper, we analyze some of the platforms and technologies that influence the manner in which we interact and experience historical sites and heritage. Acknowledging that history is a constructed narration of the past, this paper demonstrates how contemporary technologies have agency in reconstructing histories in the present via digital platforms. By comparing online platforms for digital heritage production like Google Heritage with Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) platforms, we demonstrate how digital heritage may undergo a process recontextualization or decontextualization from its originating settings. 
 We also show that digital heritage’s reconstruction of history is done through the act of remediation: by turning actual remnants of the past into digital models or by replacing such remnants with virtual representation that are globally accessible, something new is created and alternative stories can be told. Within that, we consider some of the ethical issues that are raised by the migration of historical narratives into digital platforms, as we point towards a growing tendency in which history and its production can be subjected to major data companies.

This article tackles the risks of digitization of sensitive collections and the ethical limits of open access. Research into experience of conflicts and violence requires the submerging into a world of local taboos and practices that usually remain within the sphere of cultural intimacy. Similarly, the digitization of sensitive collections can grant an un-curated uncontrolled access to realms which should be handled with ethical awareness and sensitivity. We focus on two case-studies referring to the Podhale, a region in the Tatra Mountains inhabited by local people called Górale. The first one is the archive of Nazi anthropological photography and documentation recently rediscovered at the Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA). Its digitization in 2007 marked the start of a research project on WWII anthropology in Podhale, evoking at the same time an ardent and emotional debate among both scholars and the Górale community. The most serious issues referred to the impact of the digitized photographs on the present-day collective memory of the Górale. In fact, till the archive’s discovery and digitization, the episode of Nazi racial research was literally cast out from local history and memory. In this article we will ask how to deal with such materials and conduct research among people, for whom such documentation invokes unwanted and traumatic experiences. The second case-study focuses on contemporary memory conflicts related to the anti-communist guerrilla group “B?yskawica” (Lightning) operating in the aftermath of WWII on the Polish-Slovak border in the Tatra Mountains region. Accused by communist authorities of war-crimes, these partisans were officially rehabilitated only in the aftermath of the Polish Revolution of 1989. Memories about “B?yskawica” are still very vivid in this region evoking conflicting feelings from undisputed glorification to total condemnation. This article will inquire into the ambiguous digital discourses in the social media around such conflicting memories build on digitized resources from the archives of the former secret police (now deposited at the Institute of National Remembrance; INR - Institut Pami?ci Narodowej, IPN ). Both case-studies deal with a similar period, region, type of sources (archives produced in the past by the regime’s institutions of power). Both refer to the memory of experiences of violence, difficult choices, local conflicts, oppressive regimes and practices. We argue that the transition of such sensitive data into the digital realm raises the danger of manipulation by various interest groups, arbitrary defragmentation and reconfiguration. It can enliven and even reinforce old conflicts, generate new ones and even undermine the fragile social and cultural balance within a community.

In light of climate change, projected population growth, increasing conflicts over land and the question of food security, the Tanzanian government takes the respective visions of environmental futures as a cause and justification for particular measures in the here and now. One such modality through which agricultural futures in the Kilombero Valley are currently made present and decided upon is the use of the Mobile Application to Secure Tenure (MAST). Through the use of this application, on the one hand, a more capital-friendly land legislation should be developed. On the other hand, by issuing Certificates of Customary Rights of Occupancy (CCRO), which are supposed to offer a certain security to current land users, expected conflicts are sought to be reduced and prevented. Thus, by examining the use of MAST and the particular ways in which it renders possible futures actionable, we contribute to ongoing research that aims to illustrate how “humans [...] do not own and shape ‘their’ future alone” (Granjou et al. 2017: 8). While such technologies are generally developed and employed to increase certainty, following the implementation and effects of MAST, in particular, we will show how the specific materiality of this mobile application not only allows to secure tenure, but at the same time creates new insecurities that contribute to the complex emergence of environmental futures in this part of rural Tanzania.

This article explores the ways in which emergent police forces in conflict-affected Southern societies are shaped by cultural practices operating through social phenomena. It uses the record of the prototypical police forces found in the Somali cities of Kismayo and Baidoa, 2014-2017, to explore the ways in which culture, power relations and local realities — in this case, clan-based calculations, Somali and international politics, and physical insecurity — influence police development. It draws on the cities' experience of a donor-funded 'basic policing' programme to identify the motivating forces shaping police evolution in a society familiar with many aspects of conventional policing operations and vocabulary but positioned at the opposite end of the technical and institutional spectrum to those shaping police studies' canonical literature.

The early 1990s saw Sweden severely hit by financial crisis, electoral upheaval and a swift reorientation within political elites resulting in an application to join the European Union (EU). Focusing on the Swedish blockbuster exhibition project Le Soleil et l’Etoile du Nord (The Sun and the North Star) in Paris during spring 1994, this paper argues that the early 1990s represent a key transition period for the renegotiation of the relationship between business, politics and culture in Swedish foreign promotion and cultural diplomacy. In a wide-ranging campaign launched in France ahead of the EU membership, political communication, cultural heritage narratives, and export promotion were brought together in an ambitious national identity political project that showcased a new, liberal-conservative and inherently European Sweden.