Inês Ponte
Inês Ponte (1979, Lisbon) is an anthropologist, researcher on a CEEC contract.
She was a post-doctoral researcher with a Marie Curie Individual Grant (European Commission), where she coordinated the project Mobilizing Archives: photography in Southwest Angola (www.hisfotant.org). Combining archival work in Portugal and fieldwork in Angola, the project focused on the development of photography with ethnographic purposes through analysing such practices in the same region between the 1930s and 1990s.
Her research interests include material and visual culture, knowledge production and the history of anthropology, through ethnographic approaches (Brazil, Angola) and to institutional and private archives (Portugal, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium). She has specialized in combining anthropology and history to explore links between the local-regional-global from a post-colonial perspective in various geographies (Angola, India), as well as exploring the potential of visual methodologies in research, including film, photography and drawing. Since February 2023, she is the scientific coordinator of the Social History Archive (www.ahsocial.ics.ulisboa.pt), research infrastructure of ICS-ULisboa.
She has collaborated in trans-disciplinary teams, crossing anthropology with psychology, literature, art criticism, education and communication, in Portugal, India, Brazil, Angola and the United Kingdom. In 2022, together with Maria José Lobo Antunes, she curated the exhibition The War Kept: photography of Portuguese soldiers in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique (1961-74), at the Museu do Aljube (EGEAC), Lisbon. In 2015 she was co-curator of A Delicate Zone of Commitment (UDZC), temporary exhibition based on the oeuvre of anthropologist, filmmaker and writer Ruy Duarte de Carvalho (1941-2010), and in the process developed RDC Virtual, a repository of films by and about the author, with unrestricted access and an associated catalogue. In addition to her work in the digital world, she is the author of documentaries and visual essays, a museum catalogue, a booklet to support rural literacy in Olunyaneka (bantu language, Angola), and articles in peer-reviewed journals.
She has a PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media (2015, University of Manchester, UK, FCT scholarship), having defended a thesis on the local production and transnational collecting of handmade dolls in rural southwest Angola and a 63-minute version of the film Making a Living in the Dry Season. She has a postgraduate degree in Documentary Filmmaking (2006, Universidade Lusófona) and a 4-year bachelor degree in Anthropology (2003, ISCTE).
She has also lectured on material culture, visual anthropology, visual methodologies and fiction and documentary filmmaking (2022, 2019, ICS-ULisboa Summer School; 2017, International Summer School Ways of Seeing, Institute of African Studies, Institute of Anthropology & Institute of Cultural Studies, Leipzig University; 2017, Visual Anthropology Summer School, Institute of Slovenian Ethnology, Ljubljana; 2015-2016, Escola Superior de Comunicação Social-IPL, Lisbon; 2013-2015, University of Manchester, Granada Center for Visual Anthropology).
Keywords: Anthropology; Postcolonialism; Visual Culture; Material Culture; Archives; Angola.