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This article reports on an effort to apply to an oral history archive design the findings of ethnographic research regarding the visualisation of space and the organisation of knowledge among contemporary Palikur speakers in Arukwa, in northern Brazil. Central to the project rationale was the observation that standard devices for organising such an archive - variously, chronologies, alphabets, taxonomies, cartographies, authorship, etc. - are the product of particular socio-cultural discourses about knowledge, with the consequence that such approaches would tend to authorise some forms of knowledge but displace and decentre knowledges that do not readily fit the given structures. Given the need to be able to mediate knowledge diversity in a global order, a pressing question for cultural heritage practitioners is to consider different ways of representing knowledge in relation to space. Could new media technologies be mobilised to reorganise the frames of knowledge? Reporting on the development of a prototype archive that sought to reflect the Palikur knowledge practice of locating epics in relation to specific places, this paper offers a critical appreciation of the technology, and reflects on the suitability of virtual environment technologies for similar applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Epistemological commitments shape notions of what constitutes an ethical presence in the field. The article examines the assumption of secularism, linked to objectivity, implicit in codes of ethics, It argues that in fieldwork, the secular position neither guarantees ethical behaviour nor improves data collection. Reflecting on research encounters among Palikur-speakers in Brazil. the article examines the ways in which objectivity unexpectedly forecloses some avenues of research. Drawing on the Palikur idiom of ‘minahwa’ (to draw one's canoe alongside), the paper posits a change in the relationship between the anthropologist and the subject of research to an I-Thou relationship of mutual presence in which the anthropological self is hospitable to the other. An ethics of facing is posited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Palikur historical knowledge is overwhelmingly recorded spatially in landscape, but given that the map-maker's vision of the world is a product of a discourse about space and time, is a map an appropriate medium on which to base an archive of historical knowledge? This article explores aspects of Palikur speakers' experiences of landscape and historical time in the region known as "Arukwa" along the Rio Urucau´a in the state of Amapá, Brazil, and contends that the canon of stories is organized spatially more than it is organized chronologically. Based on ethnographic data, several dimensions of Palikur spatial history are explored. These include the contentions that location and events may not be historically coterminous, although they may be used to imply one another; and that landscape may be considered to be agentive in the sense in which it constitutes a resource for memorializing societies, environmental skills and political capacities of people who have dwelt on it in times past. In addition, the article notes that landscape knowledge and orientation can be considered embodied knowledges; places in landscapes may be seen as animate and as extensions of human community; landscape is connected to upperworlds and underworlds, much as they are on the horizon; and time, in the Palikur language, is spatialized. The article contends that many of these issues would be elided by substituting a cartographic/spatial approach to the recording of a non-chronological history. The aim, then, is to establish a spatio-temporal understanding of heritage without resorting to cartographic understandings of space, in order to explore whether—and how—those might be represented in a multimedia archive that aims to work within a local historiographic idiom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]