Anthropology Archives & Libraries w/Celia Emmelhainz

Mar 20

On the latest episode of AnthroPuzzled, we sit down with Celia Emmelhainz, an anthropologist, librarian, and archivist whose work focuses on preserving, managing, and ethically sharing anthropological knowledge. With graduate training in anthropology and library science, Celia has worked at institutions including UC Berkeley, Harvard, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, supporting researchers, communities, and collections across libraries, archives, and museums.

Celia’s work bridges qualitative research data management and anthropological archiving, from helping scholars securely organize and describe their digital field materials to stewarding paper records, photographs, audio, and film from earlier generations of anthropologists. A central part of her approach is ensuring that descendant and Indigenous communities can access their own cultural materials in respectful, community-driven ways, while navigating issues of digitization, data sovereignty, and emerging technologies like AI.

She also reflects on how anthropological training shapes archival practice, bringing attention to complexity, ethics, power, and absence in systems that often demand neat categorization.

Listen now to learn how anthropology lives on through archives, and why preservation, access, and care matter for the future of the discipline.