The Library That Watches Back

This post is part of the series "Nemboro. The Power of Fictions", where I explore how a set of so-called "nemboro" woven masks I encountered in Panama —marketed as ritual artifacts from the Embera Indigenous people— led me from enchantment to rupture, and from personal encounter to broader questions about metadata, ontology, and the ethics of classification. Each installment stands on its own, but together they trace a progression: from the seduction of objects to the recognition that even fictions —especially fictions— shape knowledge systems. Check all the posts in this section's index.

In the previous post, I described how my search for the word nemboro ended in silence: no trace in ethnographies, no presence in archives, only glossy design blogs and tourist catalogues. What I had taken as ritual truth revealed itself as a carefully constructed fiction. But that realization didn't just unsettle me as a researcher — it forced me to look at my own profession. What happens when librarianship itself absorbs and legitimizes such inventions?

Eventually, I did not hang a ritual object on my wall.

I hang a beautiful fiction. One made of vegetal fibers and colors, yes — but also of aspirational mythology, symbolic invention, and curated exoticism. Still, even as fiction, it carried metadata. And metadata, regardless of truth-value, have power: to circulate, to legitimize, to canonize.

What I welcomed into my home was not a nemboro rooted in Embera ritual use, but a document fabricated to fulfill the expectations of a market seeking aestheticized authenticity. A narrative tailored for consumers —often Western, often well-meaning— who yearn for "ceremonial objects" with just enough mystique to feel meaningful, and just enough silence to avoid resistance.

This had implications far beyond my wall. As a librarian and memory worker, I was trained to treat documents —even unconventional ones— as vehicles of knowledge. But what happened when the metadata were invented, at least partially? When provenance was projection, at least partially? When "tradition" was constructed, at least partially, precisely to be legible within colonial structures of value?

And how "partial" were all those "partially"?

(Rupture, contradiction, absence, and uncertainty are not failures of documentation — they are data. And librarians, archivists, and researchers have ethical responsibility not only to describe, but to interrogate.)

What I had catalogued and analyzed was not just an object, but a projection of desire —the consumer's, the collector's, the librarian's— wrapped in a descriptive structure that masked its invented nature. And yet, had I worked in a museum or library collection, my mistaken description might have passed into official metadata, reinforcing a fiction with the legitimizing force of classification.

(As a matter of fact, a number of Panamanian official webpages are quoting the nemboro as authentic ritual artifacts, based on contents create by commercial firms online. Unverified information expands quickly and unchecked.)

Mine wouldn't have been a simple error: it could have been a case study in cataloging ethics, where epistemic responsibility demanded more than neutral description — it required scrutiny, positionality, and accountability.

This is why critical cataloging efforts —especially in Indigenous contexts— call for community-led, multilingual metadata infrastructures. It's not enough to correct the record. We must change the epistemic terms of recording. Decolonial LIS scholarship has shown how traditional cataloging embeds colonial imaginaries —often unintentionally— through vocabulary, authority control, and descriptive priorities. What we describe is shaped by what we expect to see.

What I encountered was not an isolated event. It was a systemic possibility: the ease with which mythographic storytelling —cloaked in the language of heritage, powered by the engines of business— might enter collections, databases, exhibitions, and archives. Not necessarily through malice, but through enchantment. And through our eagerness to believe that beauty means belonging. That ritual means legitimacy. That Indigenous means always-already sacred.

And that librarianship, if neutral enough, would not participate in any of it.

This experience did not invalidate the object I bought — or my reflections around it. It reframed them. It forced a shift in gaze — from the item to the infrastructure. To the circuits of desire, commodification, and symbolic violence that brought a fictional "mask" from Darién into my hands, wrapped in a story designed to resist scrutiny.

This rupture was not incidental — eventually, it became a method. A process of ethical unlearning that demanded I narrated from the fracture, not above it.

It also demanded sharper questions. Not just how do we catalog objects like this one, but how do we critically catalog cultural artifacts designed for external consumption? How do we surface invention, rupture, or absence as metadata themselves? What does ethical documentation look like when the object resists being described truthfully — or when its truth lies precisely in its artifice?

And also: how much of the current Embera way of life is encoded in this artifact? What kind of real stories —about Indigenous survival, identity, and struggle in the Darién— are trapped inside its fibers?

This is not a call to doubt everything we see. But it is a call to interrogate everything we think we know — especially when that knowledge serves our own comfort.

To document is to choose. To classify is to enshrine. And to describe is to intervene.

If documentation is intervention, then the challenge is clear: how do we build systems that can hold rupture, absence, and contradiction as data in their own right? That is where decolonial cataloging begins.