Anthropology?its methodology, its paths to knowing; but also its epistemology, its modes of knowing?saturates the practices of Science and Technology Studies (STS). In a nutshell, anthropology has helped STS find ways to break open the discourses of science. If we were to believe our ?natives??scientists?and accept what they say about what they do and know on their own terms, we would not be able to add anything to these stories. And so in STS, we have modified the anthropological propensity to (...) make the strange familiar and invented the technique of making the familiar strange. Now we can reimagine our natives? stories, note how they are told, and investigate why they are told the way they are?relating them to the practices from which they spring. Our terminological tinkering?refusing to adopt the terms of the actors?is, then, also an epistemological tinkering; we account for these practices in terms of our own. (shrink)

"Consacrée dans des intitulés de cours, mobilisée dans les nomenclatures des organismes internationaux, prometteuse de débroussaillages très vites décevants ou de synthèses faussement structurantes, l'appellation objectivante communication internationale ne présente aucune valeur scientifique, sinon en tant qu'objet de recherche. Pour autant, la référence produit des effets de sens, qu'il est urgent de mettre en perspective, tant elle prête le jeu à des constructions discursives à géométrie variable, en fonction des intérêts croisés et souvent masqués d'acteurs de plus en plus nombreux (...) à l'échelle planétaire, et des espaces politico-culturels de diffusion de ces productions tactiques. La première option de repérage éclairant passe par le fil conducteur d'une discipline, académiquement reconnue. Précisément, la constitution depuis la France des sciences de l'information-communication en 1978 ouvre à un corpus d'approches théoriques et de questionnements épistémologiques déjà signifiant, même ainsi territorialisé. Prenant acte, -- quel que soit le continent cette fois -- des productions et des collaborations scientifiques transfrontières multiples et parfois concurrentes, l'interrogation croisée révèle des inflexions épistémologiques, théoriques, conceptuelles et méthodologiques justificatives d'un état, provisoire, de la recherche. Alors, la Communication-monde, esquissée par Armand Mattelart et érigée dans l'ouvrage au rang de concept structurant, permet de lire les enjeux communicationnels planétaires à l'aube du troisième millénaire, jusqu'à provoquer le décentrement contre les risques permanents d'ethnocentrisme de la pensée."-- Fourni par l'éditeur. (shrink)

The social sciences often explain behavioral differences by appealing to membership in distinct cultural groups. This work uses the concepts of “cultures” and “cultural groups” like any other demographic category (e.g. “gender”, “socioeconomic status”). I call these joint conceptualizations of “cultures” and “cultural groups” _demographic cultures_. Such demographic cultures have long been subject to scrutiny. Here I isolate and respond to a set of arguments I call _demographic skepticism_. This skeptical position denies that the demographic cultures concept can support metaphysically (...) plausible and empirically principled research. I argue against the skeptic, showing that their position relies on a questionable alignment between the demographic cultures concept and what I call the _folk anthropological model_. While the commitments of that model are problematic—they are not necessary for comparative work in the social sciences. In addition to clarifying skeptical arguments, then, I provide four recommendations for the comparative social scientist that allow them to avoid demographic skepticism. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to current discussions about methods in anthropological (especially ethnographic) research on the cultures of the internet. It does so by considering how technology has been presented in turn as an epistemological boon and bane in methodological discourse around virtual or online ethnography, and cyberanthropology. It maps these discussions with regards to intellectual traditions and ambitions of ethnographic research and social science, and considers how these views of technology relate to modernist discourse about the value of (...) technology for producing a particular kind of objective knowledge. For this article, I have examined a number of monographs and methodological texts in which the internet, as both a new setting and a new technology for doing ethnography, is shown to raise new issues for ethnographic work and for theorising anthropological approaches. In this material, questions of presence, field relations (including trust and confidentiality), and new possibilities for observation are especially prominently discussed. Anxieties about whether the internet can be a field at all are also expressed. In my analysis, I place these issues and dilemmas facing the researcher in the context of the intellectual tradition of ethnography as applied to technology. The main themes found to subtend these discussions of ethnography’s ‘way of knowing’ are the notion of ‘field’, technology, intersubjectivity and capture. The paper ends with a reflection on the kind of knowledge about the internet that ethnography can be expected to produce, given these methodological prescriptions. (shrink)

I analyze how machi discourse and practice of gender and identity contribute to feminist debates about gendered indigenous Others, and the effects that Western notions of Self and Other and feminist rhetoric have on Mapuche women and machi: people who heal with herbal remedies and the help of spirits. Machi juggling of different worlds offers a particular understanding of the way identity and gender are constituted and of the relationship between Self and Other, theory and practice, subject and object, feminism (...) and Womanism. (shrink)

The ethical theories employed in health care today assume, in the main, a modern Western philosophical framework. Yet the diversity of cultural and religious assumptions regarding human nature, health and illness, life and death, and the status of the individual suggest that a cross-cultural study of health care ethics is needed. A Cross-Cultural Dialogue on Health Care Ethics provides this study. It shows that ethical questions can be resolved by examining the ethical principles present in each culture, critically assessing each (...) value, and identifying common values found within all traditions, It encourages the development of global awareness and sensitivity to and respect for the diversity of peoples and their values and will advance understanding as well as help to foster a greater balance and a fuller truth in consideration of the human condition and what makes for health and wholeness. (shrink)

I analyze how machi discourse and practice of gender and identity contribute to feminist debates about gendered indigenous Others, and the effects that Western notions of Self and Other and feminist rhetoric have on Mapuche women and machi: people who heal with herbal remedies and the help of spirits. Machi juggling of different worlds offers a particular understanding of the way identity and gender are constituted and of the relationship between Self and Other, theory and practice, subject and object, feminism (...) and Womanism. (shrink)

(1992). A historical ethnography of a scientific anniversary in molecular biology: The first protein X‐ray photograph (1984, 1934) Social Epistemology: Vol. 6, The Historical Ethnography of Scientific Rituals, pp. 323-354.

Intersemiotic translation (IT) was defined by Roman Jakobson (The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London, p. 114, 2000) as “transmutation of signs”—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Despite its theoretical relevance, and in spite of the frequency in which it is practiced, the phenomenon remains virtually unexplored in terms of conceptual modeling, especially from a semiotic perspective. Our approach is based on two premises: (i) IT is fundamentally a semiotic operation process (semiosis) and (ii) (...) IT is a deeply iconic-dependent process. We exemplify our approach by means of literature to dance IT and we explore some implications for the development of a general model of IT. (shrink)

The study of animal culture is a flourishing field, with culture being recorded in a wide range of taxa, including non-human primates, birds, cetaceans, and rodents. In spite of this research, however, the concept of culture itself remains elusive. There is no universally assented to concept of culture, and there is debate over the connection between culture and related concepts like tradition and social learning. Furthermore, it is not clear whether culture in humans and culture in non-human animals is really (...) the same thing, or merely loose analogues that go by the same name. The purpose of this paper is to explicate core desiderata for a concept of culture and then to construct a concept that meets these desiderata. The paper then applies this concept in both humans and non-human animals. (shrink)

Like some other human sciences, sociology has had a recurrent concern to clarify the ambivalent relationship between its professional accounts of social reality on the one hand and lay understandings of social reality on the other. Sociological ethnographers have claimed to accomplish this clarification by including in their accounts both direct representation and responsive interpretation of the vernacular voice of those human subjects whose actions and understandings comprise the focus of their inquiries. I briefly examine some of the practical and (...) textual strategies by which studies have accomplished this. I go on to note that the authenticity of ethnographic work has itself become a matter of dispute on the grounds of the ineradicable asymmetry between the professional voice of the researcher and the vernacular voice of research subjects. Drawing on work in literary theory, anthropology and feminist scholarship, a favoured solution to this problem has argued for the necessity of acknowledging the essentially dialogical character of the relationship between researchers and subjects and also of finding ways to make ethnographic texts reflect this character. This article draws attention to an alternative set of professional practices that prefer ‘co-construction’ to ‘dialogue’ as a term of art. Its use encourages and facilitates the close and detailed examination of the multiple ways in which subjects already speak of and for themselves and others within the local sites of their real-world activities. Studies of these matters accord the vernacular voice of human subjects renewed significance for sociological investigation as part of a radical ‘respecification’ of prior understandings of the proper relationship between vernacular and professional accounts of social reality. The article assesses the upshot of these claims for the current practice and future prospects of sociology as one of the human sciences. (shrink)

This article argues that all knowledge is inherently local and that localness provides the basis for comparison between indigenous scientific traditions or knowledge production systems. As collective bodies of knowledge, many of the significant differences between knowledge production systems lie in the work involved in creating assemblages from differing practices. Much of the work can be seen in the social strategies and technical devices employed in creating equivalences and connections whereby otherwise heterogeneous and isolated knowledges are enabled to move in (...) space and time from the local site and moment of their production and application to other places and times. In this way contemporary technosciences are compared with the knowledge systems of the medieval mastermasons, the Anasazi, the Inca, the Australian Aborigines and the Pacific navigators. (shrink)

In this article, Thomas Kuhn’s theory of incommensurable paradigms learned through exemplars is discussed as a theory of acculturation akin to those of cultural anthropology. Yet his hermeneutic approach results in a classic problem, referred to here as the paradox of objective relativism. A solution, at least for observers of contemporary cultures, is drawn from Kuhn’s own writings: a fieldwork method of “going native.” It is argued that Kuhn’s views are as important a corrective for anthropologists studying native systems of (...) knowledge as they have been for philosophers and sociologists of science. The epistemological and disciplinary implications of such a methodology are discussed. (shrink)

When assumed by positions of dominance, the impersonal, analytical perspectives of scholar- narrators may serve to flatten, simplify, or render invisible the differences of constructed Others. Strategies of resistance necessarily correspond to where narrator-subjects enter relations of power. Without the presence of Others' narrations, dominance can neither value newly visible subjective agency nor confront the complicity in its own subjectivity. Intersubjectivity suggests a dialogical process that utilizes differences in lived experience to reconceive relationality.

Theories of discursive genres provide the philosophical and theoretical framework for the empirical examination of the ways in which immigrant women construct their cultural identities in contexts of violence. The claim of the paper is that the analytical genres of confessional and testimonial discourse enable the examination of the particular ways by which immigrant women both reproduce and resist power and violence.

In recent intervention campaigns sensitizing about harmful practices in eastern Africa, the beliefs and institutions of rural populations are marked out: culture is the culprit. This article concentrates on the most targeted region, Sukuma-speaking communities in Tanzania, to verify the stigmatizing impact of institutions: whether bridewealth treats women as commodities, whether children with nsebu disorder are stigmatized, and why children living with albinism are stigmatized. Complementing the situational analysis of power relations, cultural analysis approaches institutions as established practices in a (...) group and as generated from the palette of experiential frames constituting the cultural system prevailing in that group. The method’s sensitivity to intracultural diversity highlights the local capacity of applying cultural logics, ethically framing situations and creating new institutions, for instance by female healers protecting their clients against stigmatization. The method permits to conclude, for the cases studied, that institutions categorizing people prevent rather than cause the discreditable social status known as stigma. (shrink)

Crime scene investigation reports, like other kids of official bureaucratic documents, serve an important purpose in the functioning of modern states. This article examines crime scene investigation reports from a city in southeastern Mexico pseudonymously called La Ciudad. The article combines textual discourse analysis of police suicide investigation reports with ethnographic analysis of police investigative practices to ask, how do law enforcement documents showcase the interactions between law enforcement agents and citizens? In what way can ethnographic analysis highlight and supplement (...) the strengths and limitations of law enforcement documents as prisms of social reality? The complex and contested relationship between representatives of a Mexican law enforcement agency and the citizenry it claims to protect is visible in the documents it produces. The ethnographic material further deepens the reader's understanding of the ways in which law enforcement agents and common citizens form relationships based on negotiation and distrust. (shrink)

In the production of knowledge about social life, two social contexts come together: the context of investigation, consisting of the social world of the investigator, and the context of explanation, consisting of the social world of the actors who are the subject of study. The nature of, and relationship between, these contexts is imagined in philosophy; managed, rewarded, and sanctioned in graduate seminars, journal reviews, and tenure cases; and practiced in research. Positivism proposed to produce objective knowledge by suppressing the (...) nonlogical and nonobservational aspects of the contexts. Attacks on positivism disputed the effectiveness and rationality of this strategy. Thus " postpositivism " can be understood as a series of attempts to reconstitute the relation between the contexts as the basis for accurate social knowledge. Two of the most important of these attempts—grounded theory and postmodern anthropology—are considered, and a synthesis, which draws from the insights of cultural sociology, is proposed. (shrink)

In response to recent scholarship on the need for universal professional values, a call that has intensified in the post-9/11 world, this article reports how journalists in Asia and the Middle East conceptualize universal professional values and the possible impact of a universal ethics code. In general, the journalists interviewed for this study were suspicious of a Western-imposed set of values or a code. However, they agreed on a core set of values, ones that de-emphasized truth telling in relation to (...) respect and the need to maintain a community. They also emphasized that different political systems make the implementation of a universal code problematic. However, there was great agreement on the need for such discussion within the profession and on the commonalities such discussion reveals. (shrink)

RACINE L and PERRON A. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 190–201 Unmasking the predicament of cultural voyeurism: a postcolonial analysis of international nursing placementsThe growing interest in international nursing placements cannot be left unnoticed. After 11 years into this twenty‐first century, violations of human rights and freedom of speech, environmental disasters, and armed conflicts still create dire living conditions for men and women around the world. Nurses have an ethical duty to address issues of social justice and global health as a (...) means to fulfil nursing’s social mandate. However, international placements raise some concerns. Drawing on the works of postcolonial theorists in nursing and social sciences, we examine the risk of replicating colonialist practices and discourses of health in international clinical placements. Referring to Bakhtin’s notions of dialogism and unfinalizability, we envision a culturally safe nursing practice arising from dialogical encounters between the Self as an Other and with the Other as an Other. We suggest that exploring the intricacies of cultural and race relations in everyday nursing practice are the premises upon which nurses can understand the broader historic, racial, gendered, political and economic contexts of global health issues. Finally, we make suggestions for developing culturally safe learning opportunities at the international level without minimizing the impact of dialogical cultural encounters occurring at the local and community levels. (shrink)

This article excavates a discussion on the mediations that informed the making of the film Aaj Kaal by Asian elders, in a project directed by Avtar Brah and coordinated by Jasbir Panesar with the film trainer Vipin Kumar. It brings this largely unknown and inventive film to the foreground of current developments in participative media research practices. The discussion explores the coming together of the ethnographic imagination and performative pedagogies during the course of an adult education community project centred on (...) South Asian elders making a film. Collaborative dialogic encounters illuminate post-war British front rooms, the seaside and public spheres from what is usually an unlikely vantage point of view in public accounts. (shrink)

The impact of postmodernism on research methodology: implications for nursingThis article considers what have been referred to as die two major crises in research methodology: (i) the crisis of legitimation (to what extent are the notions of reliability and validity still meaningful in the light of a posture that is said to approach an ’anything goes’ standpoint); and (ii) the crisis of representation (to what extent is it possible to represent the world view of ‘the odier’ without it being merely (...) a construction of the researcher). These are discussed in order to identify aspects of a continuing debate that is of relevance to nurses for they are integral to graduate research and the ongoing application of research in hospital or community contexts. Educating nurses in research requires that they learn a repertoire of research skills such as literature critiques, developing research questions, interviewing, analysing techniques and computer‐assisted analysis. However, postmodern debates can also be beneficial by facilitating their understanding of contemporary research issues so that they can critically integrate such reflexive thinking into dieir own research practices and go on to explore new ways to undertake research. (shrink)

Claims by minority groups to use their own languages in different social contexts are often presented as claims for “linguistic justice”, that is, justice as between speakers of different languages. This article considers how the language of international law can be used to advance such claims, by exploring how international law, as a discourse, approaches questions of language policy. This analysis reveals that international legal texts structure their engagement with “linguistic justice” around two key concepts: equality and culture. Through a (...) close examination of the way in which these concepts function within international legal discourse, the article suggests that this conceptual framework may sometimes constrain, as well as enlarge, the possibilities for justice for minority language speakers. Thus while international law may provide a language for challenging injustices in the linguistic sphere, limitations inherent in this discourse may also restrict its emancipatory potential. (shrink)

Degeneracy is a poorly understood process, essential to natural selection. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the concept of degeneracy was commandeered by the colonial imagination. A rigid understanding of species, race, and culture grew to dominate the normative thinking that persisted well into the burgeoning new industrial age. A 20th-century reconfiguration of the concept by George Gamow highlighted a form of intraorganismic variation that is still underexplored. Degeneracy exists in a population of variants where structurally different components perform a (...) similar, but not necessarily identical, function with respect to context. The presence of degeneracy increases a system’s complexity and robustness against perturbations. The loss of a genetic component in biological systems, for example, can be compensated by redundant elements , or by degenerate elements . A historical survey of the use of the term “degeneracy” reveals how and why the processes it once designated, and the mechanisms it now represents, have largely escaped the purview of contemporary science. Despite confusion and general oversight, degeneracy has been characterized by select researchers at the molecular, genetic, and neuronal levels. The concept is a potent analytical tool to understand selection, variation, and transmission. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to compare traditional multiculturalist political theory with a new paradigm in which the usual strategies for dealing with cultural diversities are replaced by the tools provided by inferential semantics as developed by Robert Brandom. The upshot is the transition from a landscape which is highly demanding with respect to the common assumptions among different views of the world to a dialogical context in which contrasting beliefs can come to light more freely.

: The regulation of Native identity has been central to the colonization process in both Canada and the United States. Systems of classification and control enable settler governments to define who is "Indian," and control access to Native land. These regulatory systems have forcibly supplanted traditional Indigenous ways of identifying the self in relation to land and community, functioning discursively to naturalize colonial worldviews. Decolonization, then, must involve deconstructing and reshaping how we understand Indigenous identity.

The regulation of Native identity has been central to the colonization process in both Canada and the United States. Systems of classification and control enable settler governments to define who is "Indian," and control access to Native land. These regulatory systems have forcibly supplanted traditional Indigenous ways of identifying the self in relation to land and community, functioning discursively to naturalize colonial worldviews. Decolonization, then, must involve deconstructing and reshaping how we understand Indigenous identity.

This paper interrogates the relationship between place and identity among Filipinos in Hawai'i. In the paper, I analyze Pag-ibig sa Tinubuang Lupa, one of numerous events and productions in Hawai'i and elsewhere in the United States that celebrated the centennial anniversary of Philippine independence from Spain in 1998. I argue that Pag-ibig sa Tinubuang Lupa illustrates one of the ways in which recent immigrants, particularly young Filipinos perform narratives which produce and distribute ideas and ideologies about community, culture and identity. (...) Borrowing from Myerhoff, I understand cultural productions like Pag-ibig sa Tinubuang Lupa as types of “definitional ceremonies” which dramatize cultural and ethnic identity claims, constructing and enacting what it means to be “Filipino” and at the same time addressing issues of power, voice and visibility. (shrink)

This article focuses on the philosophy underpinning the non-mainstream body modification practices of `Modern Primitives'. This subculture seeks inspiration in the body modification techniques and bodily rituals of so-called `primitive societies'. Establishing their prioritization of body, sexuality, community and spirituality as analytical links, the author shows that these self-perceived radical opponents of Western modernity nonetheless remain captured in its foundational discursive assumptions. The author argues that the movement's enthusiastic turn towards `primitivism' represents a particular identity strategy within the late modern (...) condition. Drawing on colonial discourse analysis, the author argues that the primitivist discourse originated as an ideology within colonialism and has informed the construction of the Western self-image. Modern Primitives' notion of `primitivism' is seen as a postcolonial legacy of this tradition of `othering', which inevitably reproduces stereotypes of racialized people. (shrink)

It is by now well known that the modern category of religion has evolved as part of a certain trajectory of Western history. Among its many aspects, this trajectory is about how religion became part of a definitive relationship with the category of the secular – a relationship that implies an understanding of religion as something distinct – and ideally # – from other categories such as science, politics, and law. The place of the category of religion as part of (...) this semantic as well as institutional landscape of separations makes it relevant to probe the possible consequences for sociology, if we are, as some scholars have argued, living in contexts which are increasingly post-secular. What happens, then, to the object – as well as the self-identity – of the study of religion? This article discusses some of the possible epistemological shifts inherent in the idea of a movement from secular to post-secular and it will reflect upon the possible avenues they open up for the sociological study of religion. (shrink)

That objects of knowledge get moved across boundaries is well known. But how they get moved often goes unexamined. Modes of movement cannot be ignored when considering objects’ historical signi?cance. Put differently, how geographies are negotiated is central to the constitution of knowledge objects. This essay offers a brief assessment of the competing agencies at work in the global collections of the Enlightenment naturalist Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753). While discussing broadly the relationship between collecting and power in Sloane’s career, the (...) essay stresses the passivity and strategic weakness of the collector, and suggests how the meanings of speci?c curiosities varied according to asymmetries in their mode of transfer. (shrink)

I wish to discuss the constitutive conditions ‐ and aporias ‐ of the representations of the other in philosophy, sociology and cultural studies. In so doing, I show that crucial to the problem of ‘tolerance’ is the answer to such questions as: How do we represent the stranger and the other? How does this representation come into being? How can it ‐ in given instances ‐ be changed? I shall suggest that the arts may play a decisive role in this (...) process.In this paper I shall attempt to outline a double thesis: (a) the philosophical theory of the experience of something other requires the challenge of ethnology as the science of the stranger; and (b) conversely, however, ethnology itself requires a theory of cultural strangeness, which although always presupposed is never developed. I shall pursue this thesis in three stages. In the first section, I shall say something about the philosophical study of the other and its latent affinity with ethnology. In the second section, I shall take some key terms from the current dispute within ethnology over methodology, and attempt to show that the experience of something other (alien) requires a medium to express, or rather to describe, this experience. This problem of ethnographic depiction and description, lying between science and art; and the suggested solutions to this problem, developed particularly by postmodern American cultural‐anthropology, namely an aesthetisization without art, leads to the third section of this paper. This provokes the following question: what does art ‐ that moment which remains hidden within the contemporary ethnological discussion ‐ have to offer to our understanding of the (cultural) other? Further, we may ask, as paradoxical as it may at first sound, whether it is precisely from art, perhaps indeed only from art, that the way is to be found leading towards that which hasn't yet been problematized in all these contemporary intercultural debates: an ethic of intercultural understanding as the most important precondition for intercultural tolerance or toleration. (shrink)

The processes of post-socialist transformation, especially large-scale migration from Eastern Europe to the Western hemisphere, are creating an ‘expansion of space’ from the local to the supra-loca...

The article defines a new referential problem of ethnographic description: the verbalization of the “silent” dimension of the social. As a documentary procedure, description has been devalued by more advanced recording techniques that set a naturalistic standard concerning the reification of qualitative “data.” I discuss this standard from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge and replace it by a challenge unknown to all empirical procedures relying on primary verbalizations of informants. Descriptions have to solve the problems of the voiceless, (...) the silent, the unspeakable, the pre-linguistic, and the indescribable. Ethnography puts something into words, which did not exist in language before. To respond to this task, descriptions have to turn away from the logic of recording and develop into a theory-oriented research practice. (shrink)

The article defines a new referential problem of ethnographic description: the verbalization of the "silent" dimension of the social. As a documentary procedure, description has been devalued by more advanced recording techniques that set a naturalistic standard concerning the reification of qualitative "data." I discuss this standard from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge and replace it by a challenge unknown to all empirical procedures relying on primary verbalizations of informants. Descriptions have to solve the problems of the voiceless, (...) the silent, the unspeakable, the pre-linguistic, and the indescribable. Ethnography puts something into words, which did not exist in language before. To respond to this task, descriptions have to turn away from the logic of recording and develop into a theory-oriented research practice. (shrink)

(1992). The rituals of science: Comments on Abir‐Am (with response) Social Epistemology: Vol. 6, The Historical Ethnography of Scientific Rituals, pp. 373-387.

The purpose of this article is to construct a critique of some works by the French artist Lucy Schwob, better known as Claude Cahun, who was active between 1910 and 1950. A writer and photographer, Cahun was at first very close to symbolist positions; later she was closer to the surrealist movement. Her work and her life, continually suspended between genders, and between ‘normality’ and ‘deviance’, have so far been analysed mainly through gender studies. This article attempts to restore the (...) inherent complexity of her poetic work and aesthetic. It tries to widen the field of study to deal with the representation of alterity, through reversing the stereotypical representation. (shrink)

As museums begin to revisit their definition of ‘‘expert’’ in light of theories about the local character of knowledge, questions emerge about how museums can reconsider their documentation of knowledge about objects. How can a museum present different and possibly conflicting perspectives in such a way that the tension between them is preserved? This article expands upon a collaborative research project between the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Cambridge University, University of California, Los Angeles, and the A:shiwi A:wan Museum (...) and Heritage Center to compare descriptions of museum objects by multiple expert communities. We found that narratives and objects in use are key omissions in traditional museum documentation, offering us several possibilities to expand our concept of digital objects. Digital objects will allow members of indigenous source communities to contribute descriptive information about objects to support local cultural revitalization efforts and also to influence how objects are represented in distant cultural institutions. (shrink)