Corpus as corpses
Just finished Johannes Fabian’s short but stellar Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive, which, as I suspected, also had some useful comments for those of us who are not anthropologists, such as this one on page 121: “Playing games of classification is one thing, letting what we classify disturb our peace of mind is another. A disturbed mind is a mind alive. Likewise the purpose of commenting on text is to show that it is alive. In anthropology, to extract explanations from texts or use them for analytical exercises, the business of scientific inquiry, should not depend on treating them as corpses.” [He didn't make the obvious pun above, so I'm treating that as my commentary on his text, though I'm not sure it works in Dutch.... probably not.]
However, his comparison of the conceptualization of virtual archives as opposed to that of databases a few pages later is very “disturbing” in terms of digital collections, and I will definitely think about that more seriously now.
