Guest Lecture by Walther Maradiegue: “Performing the Sound Archive: Ethnographies of Listening in the Andes”

On the 4th of June we met Peruvian Anthropologist Walther Maradiegue for a workshop in which we discussed two of his texts. Later he gave the lecture “Performing the Sound Archive: Ethnographies of Listening in the Andes”, organized in cooperation with the Junior professorship for Ibero-Roman Cultural Studies with a focus on Latin America (Jasmin Wrobel).

Event announcement:

This presentation argues that the reactivation of an ethnographic sound archive demonstrates performative and aural relations between body and memory, while inscribing historical recordings into contemporary soundscapes. Based on ethnographic research developed in the Northern Peruvian Andes during the last three years, this presentation explores the diverse appropriations and interactions that local dancers, activists, researchers, and musicians make in an ethnographic collection that after 35 years returns to a small town in this region. Sessions of elicitation and collaborative curatorship show that sound archives, while arising from unequal and often colonial conditions of production, can also be sites where unexpected mediations take shape. These mediations speak of the performative character of sound recordings, based on modes of listening that often challenge academic authority and institutions, and suggest collaborative futures for the ethnographic archive.

Walther Maradiegue is an anthropologist ad holds a PhD in Latin American literature and cultural studies (Northwestern University; Dissertation Title: Geographies of Indigeneity: Space and Power in the Andes 1880-1930). Since 2021, he works as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin as part of the project „Shared Soundscapes: Musical Revitalizations and Identity Politics in Peru,“ funded by the DFG. He is currently working, together with Dr. Gisela Cánepa Koch, on a book manuscript on the relationship between sound archives and cultural politics and the development of collaborative methodologies for the restitution of ethnographic sound archives in the Andes.

He is also interested in contemporary Indigenous literature in Latin America, focusing on Quechua literatures from the Andes and its diasporas. He is working on a book project on modes of writing on/along the land in the Andes during the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, and has compiled a book on Quechua Cañaris Literature together with Indigenous writers from the Northern Peruvian Andes.