On the mediality of ethnographic tools: from field notebook to digital ethnography, storytelling as media of exteriorized memory

Abstract

Through fieldwork that aspires to participant observation, ethnographers immerse themselves in the life of a particular techno-geographic-human reality. An ontogenetic inquiry places media at the core of the anthropological experience of fieldwork: to observe is to record information – and within the descriptions crystalised in the field notebooks of the seminal participant observers, to the later aggregation of photographic imagery, sound, and film, and more recently the relevance of algorithms triggered by digital ethnography, memory is continuously being stored. In light of these ontological implications, this paper proposes an archaeological excavation of the medial nature of the ethnographic tools to find storytelling as a continuous media of exteriorised memory. Whether in craftsmanship, in maritime life, in rural labour, or at the workshop, stories were told as a retention medium that assesses the validity of experience over time.

However, transfers of knowledge are vulnerable passages precisely because structural information can be lost. Hyper-industrial grammatisation is, as Stiegler demonstrates (2007), the culmination of a long process of hypomnesis, which is why technical educability has to take into account the loss of knowledge and memory that occurs when knowledge is transferred. Hence the importance of the storyteller, who functions as medium of exteriorized memory in the stories being told. In conclusion, we argue that an ethnohistory can be perceived as a means of retaining techniques and work experience, which is relevant to the constitution of a broader technical encyclopaedism.