Saturday, January 06, 2007

vachiam eecha

Readers of Museum Anthropology and this blog over the past year are aware that we have been devoting special attention to digital exhibitions and related kinds of websites originating both in and beyond museums. Over the next year we hope to begin reviewing online collections catalogs and related kinds of online resources. Fortunately and unfortunately, there are more great projects out there than we will ever be able to review either formally in the journal or less-formally on the blog. Reviewing all of the anthropologically relevant sites in the Virtual Museum of Canada alone would be a monumental and worthwhile task that we lack space and time to undertake.

The blog does allow me a chance to point out worthwhile and interesting projects that I become aware of. One site that I would urge readers to visit is by my colleague here at Indiana University, David Delgado Shorter. It is titled vachiam eecha: Planting the Seeds and it draws upon his long-term, collaborative work with the Yoeme (Yaqui) people of Northern Mexico. The site is media rich, it is trilingual (Yoeme, Spanish, and English), and it extends older ethnographic literatures, while contributing new findings and, most significantly, privileging Yoeme knowledge and theories. The site is part of the rich Web Cuadernos project of NYU's Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. David's site in particular illustrates the ethnographic potential of digital media online. For an open-access essay reflecting on the project, see David's paper in the second number of the World Anthropologies Network E-journal (May 2006).

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