Over the past three decades if not longer, cultural anthropology has been critically engaged with the politics of ethnographic knowledge and practice by highlighting the imperial conditions of anthropological reason and those epistemological legacies of its discourses, appropriations, and modes of objectification which remain so difficult to exorcize from the discipline’s remit. Can we ever escape the pitfalls of what V. Y. Mudimbe has called the colonial library? Can we improve our self-reflexive awareness by critically attending to what Bruno Latour has dubbed »the ethnographic interface« between observer and observed? Can we salvage cultural anthropology from the dustbin of its checkered history, or, as some recent critics have advocated, must we simply »burn it down«?
These are some of the larger, indeed pressing, questions that motivate my more focused project on the »Yoruba« collection in the Frobenius Institute’s archive. For a Yoruba specialist like myself, this collection is a treasure trove of fieldnotes, artifacts, images and »data« that exemplify both the racism and violence of Africanist ethnography and the valuable insights it still can provide when critically relocated in its historical and ethnographic contexts. Following an earlier text-based work I presented at the Frobenius Colloquium in 2022 entitled »Frobenius Unbound: Black Atlantis and the Poetics of Displacement in the Yoruba Diaspora,« my current project as a resident fellow will explore the networks of secrecy, exchange, substitution, and appropriation that mediated Frobenius’s Yoruba data collection in Nigeria and underlie the very categories of his archive. (Andrew Apter)