Documenting Care: Labor and the Archive at MohenjoDaro

The Anthropology Department, with co-sponsorship from the Humanities Center, welcomes Uzma Z. Rizvi, professor of anthropology and urban studies at the Pratt Institute, to deliver her lecture “Documenting Care: Labor and the Archive at MohenjoDaro.”

Framing work at MohenjoDaro through the lens of care, Rizvi considers the ways work is documented and labor is managed in the archives. Thinking through the relationships between muster rolls, letters of self advocacy and museum accession cards, the documentation of archaeological labor provides a nuanced understanding of the roles of care work within the day-to-day experience of working on an archaeological site, in this case, specifically during the colonial time period in British India the decade just prior to Independence (1947). Amplifying the work of those who are rendered invisible in the record, this research provides an avenue for reparation through witnessing.