Ferias internacionales de libros.Trabajo de campo, archivo y arqueología reflexiva

International book fairs (IBF) are the most dynamic events for observing the agents, practices, ideas and powers that define the books available in the publishing markets in certain coordinates of space, time and language. The article presents a reflexive return to research experiences on IBF, which...

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Main Author: Gustavo Sorá
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Centro Científico y Tecnológico-CONICET, Mendoza & Universidad Nacional de La Pampa 2021-12-01
Series:Corpus: Archivos Virtuales de la Alteridad Americana
Subjects:
Online Access:http://journals.openedition.org/corpusarchivos/5057
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author Gustavo Sorá
author_facet Gustavo Sorá
author_sort Gustavo Sorá
collection DOAJ
description International book fairs (IBF) are the most dynamic events for observing the agents, practices, ideas and powers that define the books available in the publishing markets in certain coordinates of space, time and language. The article presents a reflexive return to research experiences on IBF, which began thirty years ago. It aims to contribute to a topic that has only very recently gained interest from colleagues of multiple national and disciplinary backgrounds; in other words, an object of knowledge in the process of being legitimised. The impetus for this exercise was the experience of arranging the archives generated over a dozen ethnographies in various fairs in Latin America and Europe for public consultation. The transformation of the archive, its passage from a private reservoir to a public one, was the product of two demands: one institutional and the other from colleagues from six different national origins who asked to review the documentation generated in my fieldwork. The theme is open with an analogy between the visible face of publishing production in general and in the social and human sciences in particular (what we can communicate in articles and other productions) as opposed to the face in shadows: the actions of intermediaries in that market of symbolic goods (publishers, booksellers, translators, etc.), on the one hand, and the work of knowledge production which precedes the publication of results (fieldwork, classification of materials, composition of archives, institutional conditioning, etc.), on the other. To enliven this set of experiences, the text then transcribes fragments of a field notebook (written in Liber-Madrid '97) and moves on to an analysis of the evidence, where I select some of the most productive conceptual axes in my work, such as the relations between professionalisation and internationalisation, between nation and globalisation. The documentary and analytical ensemble provides a substrate for problematising field archives and ethnography of archives, with a view to an epistemological proposal that enhances the dialectic between both poles or means of knowledge production. At the crossroads between personal forms of making ethnography with a certain archaeological imprint and the response to hypotheses by authors such as Foucault and Bourdieu on the powers and structures, spaces and times of the production of science, this article is ultimately oriented towards an analysis of the conditions under which subjects, areas of research and disciplines are legitimised in the contemporary social and human sciences.
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spelling doaj.art-a93bd4c50afd4494b781271f789c63062022-12-21T19:24:21ZengCentro Científico y Tecnológico-CONICET, Mendoza & Universidad Nacional de La PampaCorpus: Archivos Virtuales de la Alteridad Americana1853-80372021-12-0111210.4000/corpusarchivos.5057Ferias internacionales de libros.Trabajo de campo, archivo y arqueología reflexivaGustavo SoráInternational book fairs (IBF) are the most dynamic events for observing the agents, practices, ideas and powers that define the books available in the publishing markets in certain coordinates of space, time and language. The article presents a reflexive return to research experiences on IBF, which began thirty years ago. It aims to contribute to a topic that has only very recently gained interest from colleagues of multiple national and disciplinary backgrounds; in other words, an object of knowledge in the process of being legitimised. The impetus for this exercise was the experience of arranging the archives generated over a dozen ethnographies in various fairs in Latin America and Europe for public consultation. The transformation of the archive, its passage from a private reservoir to a public one, was the product of two demands: one institutional and the other from colleagues from six different national origins who asked to review the documentation generated in my fieldwork. The theme is open with an analogy between the visible face of publishing production in general and in the social and human sciences in particular (what we can communicate in articles and other productions) as opposed to the face in shadows: the actions of intermediaries in that market of symbolic goods (publishers, booksellers, translators, etc.), on the one hand, and the work of knowledge production which precedes the publication of results (fieldwork, classification of materials, composition of archives, institutional conditioning, etc.), on the other. To enliven this set of experiences, the text then transcribes fragments of a field notebook (written in Liber-Madrid '97) and moves on to an analysis of the evidence, where I select some of the most productive conceptual axes in my work, such as the relations between professionalisation and internationalisation, between nation and globalisation. The documentary and analytical ensemble provides a substrate for problematising field archives and ethnography of archives, with a view to an epistemological proposal that enhances the dialectic between both poles or means of knowledge production. At the crossroads between personal forms of making ethnography with a certain archaeological imprint and the response to hypotheses by authors such as Foucault and Bourdieu on the powers and structures, spaces and times of the production of science, this article is ultimately oriented towards an analysis of the conditions under which subjects, areas of research and disciplines are legitimised in the contemporary social and human sciences.http://journals.openedition.org/corpusarchivos/5057Publishinginternational book fairsscientific fieldreflexivityethnographyarchives
spellingShingle Gustavo Sorá
Ferias internacionales de libros.Trabajo de campo, archivo y arqueología reflexiva
Corpus: Archivos Virtuales de la Alteridad Americana
Publishing
international book fairs
scientific field
reflexivity
ethnography
archives
title Ferias internacionales de libros.Trabajo de campo, archivo y arqueología reflexiva
title_full Ferias internacionales de libros.Trabajo de campo, archivo y arqueología reflexiva
title_fullStr Ferias internacionales de libros.Trabajo de campo, archivo y arqueología reflexiva
title_full_unstemmed Ferias internacionales de libros.Trabajo de campo, archivo y arqueología reflexiva
title_short Ferias internacionales de libros.Trabajo de campo, archivo y arqueología reflexiva
title_sort ferias internacionales de libros trabajo de campo archivo y arqueologia reflexiva
topic Publishing
international book fairs
scientific field
reflexivity
ethnography
archives
url http://journals.openedition.org/corpusarchivos/5057
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