Conversations on the Frontier: Finding the Dialogic in Nineteenth-century Anthropological Archives

Abstract While anthropological archives tend to be named after the collector of the material, they are often the product of conversations and long-term engagements with informants. Focusing on the concept of the dialogic, this article contends that these materials ought to be equally conceived as co-productions, often made via complex, asymmetrical researcher/researched engagements. We specifically home in on the dialogic traces left in the archive of the nineteenth century Australian ethnographer A. W. Howitt and his various conversations with an Aboriginal man named Ienbin. We argue that by being attentive to the dialogic aspects of ethnographic sources we can recognize that the Indigenous or anthropological knowledge contained within them is to a significant degree co-constructed in as much as it emerges from social encounter and interaction. More than merely acknowledging the agency of Indigenous informants we propose a more dynamic reading of these texts as products of discursive interactions and shifting relationships.