The archive takes its name from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, which insisted that “the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” Berger was writing about oil painting and advertising, but his premise runs through everything gathered here: an image is never simply a record of what was in front of the lens. It carries the position of the one who made it, and the purposes of those who circulate and keep it. This essay sets out the scholarship that shapes how I read and organize the collection. It moves through six conversations, most of which appear as strands in the Readings.
Indigenous media and the question of sovereignty
Faye Ginsburg’s early work framed the dilemma that Indigenous media still carries. In “Indigenous Media: Faustian Contract or Global Village?” (1991), drawing on Aboriginal media groups in Central Australia, she asked whether the camera and the broadcast signal would erode Indigenous cultures or become tools for sustaining them. Her answer was neither naive nor fatalistic. In “Embedded Aesthetics” (1994) she argued that such work could not be judged by the textual standards of film criticism alone, because its value lay in how it was embedded in community relations: who made it, with whose permission, and for whom.
Jolene Rickard gave that argument its political name. In “Sovereignty: A Line in the Sand” (1995) she read Native photography as a record of political and spiritual sovereignty, moving the frame from victimization to resistance and self-determination. Michelle Raheja developed the idea as visual sovereignty in “Reading Nanook’s Smile” (2007), showing how Indigenous filmmakers such as Zacharias Kunuk take up the conventions of ethnographic film and revise them from inside. The collection Media Worlds (2002) placed these projects within a wider anthropology of media, alongside state broadcasting and the transnational travel of film and television.
I hold this lineage close because the films in the Screening Room, including my own, sit uneasily inside it. A film I direct in an Adivasi village is not Indigenous media in Rickard’s or Raheja’s sense, however participatory the process. The archive keeps that distinction visible: my own work is marked as the curator’s, and the collectives that make media on their own terms — among them AKHRA in Ranchi, Vídeo nas Aldeias in Brazil, and Isuma in Igloolik — are catalogued as the primary makers they are.
Community media in India
In India the history of self-representation runs as much through sound as through image. Vinod Pavarala and Kanchan Malik’s Other Voices (2007), the first systematic study of community radio in the country, includes the Alternative for India Development project in Daltonganj, Jharkhand, whose programme Chala Ho Gaon Mein was made in Magahi with its listeners. Their later edited volume, Community Radio in South Asia (2020), follows the form across policy, spectrum, gender, and conflict. The archive’s audio records — CGNet Swara’s voice portal, reachable from any mobile phone, and Asur Adivasi Mobile Radio, broadcasting in an endangered language in the weekly markets around Netarhat — are here because of this history: community media in central India is often built for the phone in the hand, not the screen.
Akash Poyam’s “A Resurgent Adivasi Media Is Setting Its Own Terms” (2021) describes the present of that history: independent platforms created and run by Adivasi journalists in response to the mainstream press’s exclusions. Alpa Shah’s ethnography of Jharkhand, In the Shadows of the State (2010), is the necessary counterweight. She shows how indigenous-rights activism and environmental conservation, however well meant, can reproduce the class divisions that marginalize the poorest people they claim to speak for. Any archive that gathers “Adivasi voices” has to ask which voices, gathered by whom, and at whose expense.
AKHRA’s own account of its work complicates any tidy line between protest and development. In a 2012 interview for a Leipzig exhibition catalogue, Meghnath describes filmmaking as an extension of social work, and sets the collective’s protest films, such as Development Flows from the Barrel of the Gun, beside what he calls “constructive” films. Ek Ropa Dhaan, a film on rice intensification made for the NGO PRADAN, is one of these. The same hands made both, for different audiences and under different terms of access, and the archive keeps them side by side rather than sorting one into activism and the other into extension work.
Biju Toppo has also written about the collective’s practice. In “To Walk Is to Dance, to Speak Is to Sing” (2025), Biju Toppo and Aparna Sharma read AKHRA’s films of Adivasi dance, where walking, speaking, dancing, and singing are continuous. The range of that practice runs from festival films such as Sohrai and Karama, to animated Munda creation stories told by Ramdayal Munda (Srishtikatha), to Rupesh Kr Sahu’s Rat Trap on the rat-hole coal miners of Jharkhand.
The state’s record
Community archives define themselves against something, and in Jharkhand that something has a name and an address. The Tribal Welfare Research Institute in Ranchi, now named for Ramdayal Munda, has published ethnographies of the state’s communities since the 1950s, and makes many of them freely available. Read in sequence, they are a record of how the state has looked. The Chero (1973) frames its subject through “acculturation”; The Asur: Ethno-Biological Profile (1976) measures named Asur men for racial classification; later journal issues (2008, 2018) turn to livelihoods, schemes, and the Institute’s own role in documenting folk literature. I catalog these as documents rather than as scholarship, with notes on their framing, and next to the media communities make about themselves. The Asur of the 1976 monograph are also the Asur who broadcast in their own language on Asur Adivasi Mobile Radio.
Community archives: absence or saturation?
The second half of the archive’s question — who keeps the record — belongs to archival studies. Michelle Caswell’s “‘The Archive’ Is Not an Archives” (2016) is a useful warning to anyone arriving, as I did, from the humanities: the “archive” of critical theory is a metaphor, while archives are institutions with practitioners, standards, and a scholarship of their own. Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepherd’s “Whose Memories, Whose Archives?” (2009) studied grassroots archives in Britain and the value their makers placed on autonomy from mainstream heritage institutions.
Caswell, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez’s “To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing” (2016), based on interviews about the South Asian American Digital Archive, argues that community archives counter the “symbolic annihilation” of marginalized groups — George Gerbner’s term, developed by Gaye Tuchman, for the ways mainstream media ignore, misrepresent, or malign them — and produce what the authors call representational belonging.
This is the argument I most need, and the one that fits Jharkhand least. Symbolic annihilation is the harm of being missing from the record. Adivasi representation runs the other way, toward saturation: the communities in this archive have been documented by survey, census, welfare administration, and philanthropic reporting for more than a century, as the state’s own publications show. The archive is too full of the wrong image. The remedy for absence is collection; the remedy for saturation is not more collection but control over description, circulation, and the terms on which people appear. That shift, from gathering to governing, is what the First Principles try to make operational. Pad.ma, the Public Access Digital Media Archive, offers a practical model from closer to home: footage kept whole and densely annotated, in an archive that calls itself non-state.
Openness, protocol, and data governance
Digital archives tend to assume that more access is always better. Kimberly Christen’s “Does Information Really Want to be Free?” (2012) contests that assumption by bringing the history of collecting, and the politics of how Indigenous knowledge circulates, into debates about open access and intellectual property. Her “Why the ‘s’ Matters” (2015) argues that copyright and Creative Commons licences cannot express Indigenous conditions of use, and presents Traditional Knowledge Labels as a complement. Those Labels are now maintained by Local Contexts, and the same commitments are built into Mukurtu, the platform Christen developed with Warumungu community members. Jennifer Wemigwans’s A Digital Bundle (2018) extends the argument from within Indigenous knowledge practice, treating online knowledge as a bundle carried under cultural protocol and responsibility.
The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (Carroll et al. 2020) turn these arguments into commitments: Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, and Ethics, designed to sit alongside the technical FAIR principles. They are the reason this archive links rather than copies, honours makers’ restrictions, and applies no Labels of its own. Those rules are set out under First Principles.
Critical media literacy
The archive began as teaching material, and it remains one. Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share’s The Critical Media Literacy Guide (2019) links the politics of representation to critical pedagogy: learners analyse how media construct the world, and then make media that construct it differently. That is the use I intend for this collection. The through-lines, records, and readings are meant to be taught with, so that a student meeting an AKHRA documentary on mining in Jharkhand also meets the questions of authorship, access, and custody that surround it.