“One archivist, upon hearing that my topic was on something that was, in his mind, mundane and everyday could not believe that I was doing a Ph.D. at Berkeley, an American institution that he held in high esteem; after some convincing that I was a “real” historian, he shook his head and concluded that Berkeley had once been a fine institution—implying that Berkeley’s perceived downfall in academic cir- cles was directly related to my outré topic. While I was busy reading the archives, I found the archives were reading me” (Ghosh 30).
Given the current dialogue about sexual harassment in academia, I wasn’t really surprised to read that Ghosh had this experience, but it did make me think more deeply about the authority that giants in certain fields can have, and how that adversely effects scholars attempting to change the field. The Rosenberg reading also referenced this when it talked about Renke and other historians who dictated some of the formative types of history that we use—which worked for a while, but makes it such that other types of history are seen as suspect as illegitimate. At least from these readings, it seems like the Venn diagram showing “giants in the field” and “narrow scopes of good research” overlaps a LOT. In special collections, Meghan and I talked for a while about “the archives” in history take on a completely different role than in anthropology. We talked about how it seems like historians are much less keen to permit the archive to take on a new role, and that can be detrimental. Mostly this just bums me out a lot because to me, it clearly eliminates any possibility for new, valid, and academically enlightening types of scholarship.
My question from this set of readings is what are some ways to prove that using the archive in this way or doing less traditional research can bring about something new and valid?
I think your point about the connection between Ghosh’s experience and the current dialogue about sexual harassment in academia (particularly humanistic disciplines) is a really vital one, Al. “While I was busy reading the archives, I found the archives were reading me” is a powerful line. I wonder how historians own lived experiences and backgrounds impact their experiences in archives. We’ve talked about ways in which archives represent power (or powerful structures) and it seems like they could be a prime place for certain institutions or people to hold power in destructive ways over, say, a young woman working on her dissertation.
“As the protections of private holdings changed along with
understandings of privacy, especially with respect to the state,
documents and materials considered the property of ruling political and
social elites fell subject to the public’s claims.” (Blouin & Rosenberg, 12)
I find the idea of private government archives to be very interesting. I think this article does a good of explaining the significance of archives and government power. For example, it talks about how prior to the French Revolution entrance to the archives was something that only the privileged few would have access to. The article links this privilege to divine right and says that access to the archives was restricted in order to control the state.
However, as the quotation says after the revolutions of Europe, specifically the French one, archives became more open to the public. Additionally, many of the old documents of the old regime became useless and lost their power as the regime fell. These documents were then placed in a newly created French archive “Archives Nationales in 1790.” A similar process was under taken in other countries after revolutions. I think this a good indicator of the power of the archives, because after a regime change one of the first things the new government does is update/ change the archives. This shows how central records/ history is to the government.
Question- Since archives are so important to governments, are there cases when archives should be off limits to the public? For example, security records or other secret documents?
“By incorporating our archival confrontations and encounters in our writing and research practices, we continue to interrogate and unsettle the ways in which history writing remains an important component of forming national affiliations” (Ghosh 40).
Ghosh does something really intriguing and special with her written “ethnography of the archive” (28). She explains that telling stories of historians’ experiences in the archives are not usually deemed a professional part of historical writing. But the people who create and maintain the archives are people, too, with strong opinions on what kinds of questions their documents should be used to answer and what kinds of topics they aren’t interested in their documents taking part in. Ghosh experiences this frustration first hand with her research on “local women who cohabited with or married European men in the long eighteenth century…that coincided with roughly the first century of British rule in India” (28). Not all archivists wanted to be helpful to her, and she constantly had to advocate on behalf of the importance of her research.
I find this especially important because it would seem that this could be a major problem for historians. Who gets to decide which histories are told, and how? Ghosh made a compelling argument for historians to include their own experiences with the research when making the results of that research public. After reading her chapter, I am surprised that more historians don’t take this route as well.
Is it feasible for the academy to insist on an “ethnography of the archive” from all historians making use of these spaces? How can we separate the history itself from the historian who is compiling it? Should we do so, or are the two forever intertwined?
Hi Noa,
I also found Ghosh’s argument really interesting when she spoke about including the archivist’s experience in their research. I would argue that in the context of this piece, the historian seems to be separated from the history itself. She seems to be neutral on both sides and therefore recognizes the dilemma in the national research. I think on another note, she proves that we need to separate the history itself from the historical research the archivist is undergoing by highlighting the actual process. This way, an archivist can reflect and possibly take notice to any oddities.
Quote: “Property rights, tax obligations, royal charters, and the like ceased to be the foundations of privilege and obligation.” Pg. 12 Blouin
I had never the power that comes and goes with records and archives. The new written and collected laws gave the citizens a platform and resources to actually stand up to elites and government. It is interesting that when the archives lost their power and were replaced. We think of archives as so sedimentary but their significance can be substituted.
Question: When new information, that contradicts the common history, how is that information dispersed? For significant alterations to history there will probably be news articles or other public announcements, but how many small things we take to be true have been proven incorrect?
Quote: “In short, power plays in the contemporary archives of Cuzco were anything but subtle. It became harder and harder to think of their colonial antecedents as windows on the past.”
Comment: “I find this quote interesting and important because it makes claims about the validity of using archival sources in an objective analysis of historical narratives. Burns uses the example of the power plays, in the archives of Cuzo, that he details in this excerpt to support this claim. The examples of power plays in the Cuzco archives that Burns writes about are important to show that archivists might not always be objective, and in fact might be purposively subjective to further some interest. The concept that archivists might imbue subjectivity in the documents, through strategies like forgery, is important to those using sources in an archive who are attempting to construct an objective historical narrative.
Question: How does a researcher using a source in an archive analyze the subjectivity of that source?
“Mabillon’s interest was specifically in setting out procedures for establishing whether legal claims and charters were true or false. These norms tied the perceptual and intellectual attributes of documents to both their forms and their origins. They also implicitly expanded the archival role from one simply as “keeper” of the documents to one that included some degree of responsibility for their authenticity.” Blouin p. 18
In our modern era, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish fact from fiction in the political realm. Some of this confusion has stemmed from the rise of technology and the ability for nearly anyone to post something online. Another source of this general uncertainty has been a trend of distrusted officials. With the break of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate the early 1970s to Bill Clinton’s impeachment in the 1990’s, the United States has plenty of reasons to find variability in the truth. Recently, however, our country has faced an unprecedented rise of incongruities. President Trump and his allies have created a climate where even the most educated scholar would have to do some serious digging to find the truth. For example, in the past week, various sources reported that Trump called a number of black and Hispanic countries “shitholes” in an Oval Office meeting. Even so, today, Senator David Perdue, an assumingly trusted civil servant, claimed that the President never said these words in the meeting. If our own media cannot determine what is actually going on in our world today, how will a historian come to tell our past? Will the internet be the ultimate archive? If so, what will be determined to be “fake” or “real” news?
“Most importantly, it looks to archives as condensed sites of epistemological and political anxiety rather than as skewed and biased sources.” (Stoler, page 20)
If there is one distinction that basically justifies most of the social sciences, it’s this one: The notion that a viewpoint is not unambiguously deficient for being “biased,” but instead only appears that way because it itself is the result of contested epistemologies that can and should be investigated further. Without this distinction, the social scientist–whether they err more on the side of positivism or of constructivism is irrelevant–would simply cast aside untold quantities of “biased” sources without recognizing the inherent plea for inquiry that such a “bias” holds. Obviously, this vein of thinking has been around for a long, long time (at least since Herodotus), but I still credit Stoler for explicitly referencing it in her book.
This summarization of Stoler’s methodology is especially pertinent in the context of archival research. Because this quote was literally taken from a book on archival research, I don’t expect anyone to be surprised by that statement. However, I feel that it nonetheless needs to be said that archives, unlike a journal article or a lone book, are anthologies and collections. An archive is under no obligation (or should be, at least–the one described by Stoler is an obvious exception) to preserve only materials that each buttress and support every other one. The Colbiana Collection that we saw on Thursday is an example: There are letters from the administration, and Echo articles against the administration.
It is because of this lack of need to formulate a concise and consistent narrative or argument that archives can be centers of “epistemological and political anxiety” (Stoler, 20). A journal article (any article likely to get past peer-review, at least) has to have an argument and evidence supporting it. When there is evidence present that is contrary to the thesis, it must be debunked. But being collections of both agreement and dissent, archives encapsulate disagreements as opposed to playing out on only one sideline. Stoler didn’t say this explicitly, so I did. I felt like this was all the logical conclusion of her argument, anyways.
Question: Is it merely because they are gigantic anthologies that archives are uniquely poised to be sites of contestation, or are there political and social factors that make the very idea of an “archive” a threat to epistemic confidence (which I assume to be the opposite of “epistemic modesty”)?
“Indian distaste for the notion of colonial concubinage might be seen as reinstating Indians into the role of the colonized…” (Ghosh 33).
Ghosh develops a strong argument that when a national history is being studied it needs to be inspected from multiple perspectives in order to encompass a comprehensive history. She is highlighting the push the Indians exhibit against their unclear history surrounding the time when Britian colonized India. This reaction to the history is exponentially different from those in Britain where people express their pride for having an Indian ancestor. In this quote, she is saying that the Indians’ push against this history is their way of reinstating their power and ultimately boosting their confidence. On the contrary, Britain residents use this story as a way to represent their genealogical prestige and their national pride. Both of these stories confirm and reassure the nations’ residents and further their nationalistic attitudes. Ghosh argues both of these responses to the history are essential in taking another step to understanding what really happened during this time.
Question: How are archivists able to recognize when they have these biases and are they able to catch them most of the time? To what extent does the author believe we need to go in order to develop a comprehensible history? How much information in a national archive needs to be validated by other nations’ archives?
“Instead, they wove messages into textiles in abstract, colorful bands (tocapu), inscribed them on ceremonial cups (queros), and knotted them into massed cords (quipus)” (Burns).
I choose this line because it reminded me of an experience I had recently. When I visited the Inca Museum in Cusco I did not find any tocapu, the bands that was used as a communication system, but the following week on a visit to the Museum of Natural History in NYC I found some. This line in Burns’ piece made me think of not just what documents the archives are made up of, and how they are made, but where they are held, by what institutions?
Is there some geographical importance? Is there importance of what institutions hold the power through the archives they have? Should modern establishments pay for their potentially questionable pasts and methods of securing such archives? Who has access to these records then, especially in the case of geographic position?
Whose research are we supporting? What public is being informed?
Is the centralization of archives more helpful than harmful? Or can this centralization, say at the Museum of Natural History in New York, be belittling by grouping all things?
I understand that museums and archives aren’t the same thing, but they may suggest the existence of similar items in an archive.
Burns borrows the idea of colonization of memory stating:
“By such means the friars and priests assailed knowledge systems that had taken centuries to refine, reducing Mesoamerican archives to ashes. This destruction was a vital part of what Walter Mignolo has called the ‘‘colonization of memory’’—a project that would extend throughout the Americas and beyond. ”
I wonder if this if the existence of archives in certain places and not others is an example of the ongoing colonization of memory, or if this colonization of memory is a completed action, something that happened centuries ago.
“Until this eighteenth-century turn toward archives as sources of authoritative history, archives generally referred to records relating to governing and administration and the places in which they were stored.”
“ ‘Authority’ in the archives thus migrated toward the politics of administration, rather than toward accuracy.”
“…This led to the perception of the archivist as a custodian—an inactive participant in the process of records generation and retention.”
Comment: I thought this article was really interesting in how it detailed the history of historical interpretation and the link between historical understanding and political administration. As this article explains, archives expanded with bureaucracy. With a mass of paperwork being done, more questions had to be asked about the preserving/discarding of completed paperwork. This by nature left administrations with the archives in their hands, but of course these documents were not just recordings of the administration’s past, but of the people they were administering. In this way people’s history would be recorded, selected, and stored by those in power. Administrative institutions serving as archives is problematic, but the two are very intertwined. Still, the power dynamic can be seen in Blouin and Rosenberg’s consideration of “the perception of the archivist as a custodian—an inactive participant in the process of records generation and retention.” To think about that explanation with an eye towards potential political agenda, that seems to serve two purposes, one of creating an idea of an impartial and therefore true authority over history, while two in fact maintaining administrative control over that archivist. With bureaucracy being one of the ways that administrations exercised control, the connection between bureaucracy and archives also helps explain the over-allotment of importance to written documents in the West.
Question: What does the way that we consider history today show about our relationship to politics/administrations/institutions?
“I ask what insights into the social imaginaries
of colonial rule might be gained from attending not only to colonialism’s
archival content, but to the principles and practices of governance
lodged in particular archival forms.”
The point here is somewhat similar to that of Trouillot. This individual is saying that one must look beyond the obvious murkiness that can cloud a time era. However, it is critical is look at the era as a whole. To be understood, any given information must be taken within context or else the entire point can be misconstrued.
Question: What in today’ society is overlooked as a general context?
Quote: “When the archive… seems easily to give access to what one expects of it, the work is all the more demanding. One has to patiently give up one’s natural “sympathy” for it and consider it an adversary to fight, a piece of knowledge that isn’t to annex but disrupt. It is not simply a matter of undoing something whose meaning is too easy to find; to be able to know it, you have to unlearn and not think you know it from a first reading” (Stoler 23)
Comment: The author of this quotation seems to be warning scholars about the same bias that misled scholars of the Haitian Revolution. This is a bias towards one’s own conception of how the world works. In order to interpret archival documents, one must constantly be “unlearning.” That is to say, one must be willing to suspend their own worldviews and narratives. In doing so, scholars will be better able to interpret primary documents in the most objective way possible. This will allow scholars to truly find the meaning behind a document which at first may seem to simply reinforce the dominant narrative.
Question: Stoler argues that “archival productions should be treated in more registers as ethnography.” What exactly is Stoler referring to when she says “ethnography?”
“One archivist, upon hearing that my topic was on something that was, in his mind, mundane and everyday could not believe that I was doing a Ph.D. at Berkeley, an American institution that he held in high esteem; after some convincing that I was a “real” historian, he shook his head and concluded that Berkeley had once been a fine institution—implying that Berkeley’s perceived downfall in academic cir- cles was directly related to my outré topic. While I was busy reading the archives, I found the archives were reading me” (Ghosh 30).
Given the current dialogue about sexual harassment in academia, I wasn’t really surprised to read that Ghosh had this experience, but it did make me think more deeply about the authority that giants in certain fields can have, and how that adversely effects scholars attempting to change the field. The Rosenberg reading also referenced this when it talked about Renke and other historians who dictated some of the formative types of history that we use—which worked for a while, but makes it such that other types of history are seen as suspect as illegitimate. At least from these readings, it seems like the Venn diagram showing “giants in the field” and “narrow scopes of good research” overlaps a LOT. In special collections, Meghan and I talked for a while about “the archives” in history take on a completely different role than in anthropology. We talked about how it seems like historians are much less keen to permit the archive to take on a new role, and that can be detrimental. Mostly this just bums me out a lot because to me, it clearly eliminates any possibility for new, valid, and academically enlightening types of scholarship.
My question from this set of readings is what are some ways to prove that using the archive in this way or doing less traditional research can bring about something new and valid?
I think your point about the connection between Ghosh’s experience and the current dialogue about sexual harassment in academia (particularly humanistic disciplines) is a really vital one, Al. “While I was busy reading the archives, I found the archives were reading me” is a powerful line. I wonder how historians own lived experiences and backgrounds impact their experiences in archives. We’ve talked about ways in which archives represent power (or powerful structures) and it seems like they could be a prime place for certain institutions or people to hold power in destructive ways over, say, a young woman working on her dissertation.
“As the protections of private holdings changed along with
understandings of privacy, especially with respect to the state,
documents and materials considered the property of ruling political and
social elites fell subject to the public’s claims.” (Blouin & Rosenberg, 12)
I find the idea of private government archives to be very interesting. I think this article does a good of explaining the significance of archives and government power. For example, it talks about how prior to the French Revolution entrance to the archives was something that only the privileged few would have access to. The article links this privilege to divine right and says that access to the archives was restricted in order to control the state.
However, as the quotation says after the revolutions of Europe, specifically the French one, archives became more open to the public. Additionally, many of the old documents of the old regime became useless and lost their power as the regime fell. These documents were then placed in a newly created French archive “Archives Nationales in 1790.” A similar process was under taken in other countries after revolutions. I think this a good indicator of the power of the archives, because after a regime change one of the first things the new government does is update/ change the archives. This shows how central records/ history is to the government.
Question- Since archives are so important to governments, are there cases when archives should be off limits to the public? For example, security records or other secret documents?
“By incorporating our archival confrontations and encounters in our writing and research practices, we continue to interrogate and unsettle the ways in which history writing remains an important component of forming national affiliations” (Ghosh 40).
Ghosh does something really intriguing and special with her written “ethnography of the archive” (28). She explains that telling stories of historians’ experiences in the archives are not usually deemed a professional part of historical writing. But the people who create and maintain the archives are people, too, with strong opinions on what kinds of questions their documents should be used to answer and what kinds of topics they aren’t interested in their documents taking part in. Ghosh experiences this frustration first hand with her research on “local women who cohabited with or married European men in the long eighteenth century…that coincided with roughly the first century of British rule in India” (28). Not all archivists wanted to be helpful to her, and she constantly had to advocate on behalf of the importance of her research.
I find this especially important because it would seem that this could be a major problem for historians. Who gets to decide which histories are told, and how? Ghosh made a compelling argument for historians to include their own experiences with the research when making the results of that research public. After reading her chapter, I am surprised that more historians don’t take this route as well.
Is it feasible for the academy to insist on an “ethnography of the archive” from all historians making use of these spaces? How can we separate the history itself from the historian who is compiling it? Should we do so, or are the two forever intertwined?
Hi Noa,
I also found Ghosh’s argument really interesting when she spoke about including the archivist’s experience in their research. I would argue that in the context of this piece, the historian seems to be separated from the history itself. She seems to be neutral on both sides and therefore recognizes the dilemma in the national research. I think on another note, she proves that we need to separate the history itself from the historical research the archivist is undergoing by highlighting the actual process. This way, an archivist can reflect and possibly take notice to any oddities.
Quote: “Property rights, tax obligations, royal charters, and the like ceased to be the foundations of privilege and obligation.” Pg. 12 Blouin
I had never the power that comes and goes with records and archives. The new written and collected laws gave the citizens a platform and resources to actually stand up to elites and government. It is interesting that when the archives lost their power and were replaced. We think of archives as so sedimentary but their significance can be substituted.
Question: When new information, that contradicts the common history, how is that information dispersed? For significant alterations to history there will probably be news articles or other public announcements, but how many small things we take to be true have been proven incorrect?
Quote: “In short, power plays in the contemporary archives of Cuzco were anything but subtle. It became harder and harder to think of their colonial antecedents as windows on the past.”
Comment: “I find this quote interesting and important because it makes claims about the validity of using archival sources in an objective analysis of historical narratives. Burns uses the example of the power plays, in the archives of Cuzo, that he details in this excerpt to support this claim. The examples of power plays in the Cuzco archives that Burns writes about are important to show that archivists might not always be objective, and in fact might be purposively subjective to further some interest. The concept that archivists might imbue subjectivity in the documents, through strategies like forgery, is important to those using sources in an archive who are attempting to construct an objective historical narrative.
Question: How does a researcher using a source in an archive analyze the subjectivity of that source?
“Mabillon’s interest was specifically in setting out procedures for establishing whether legal claims and charters were true or false. These norms tied the perceptual and intellectual attributes of documents to both their forms and their origins. They also implicitly expanded the archival role from one simply as “keeper” of the documents to one that included some degree of responsibility for their authenticity.” Blouin p. 18
In our modern era, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish fact from fiction in the political realm. Some of this confusion has stemmed from the rise of technology and the ability for nearly anyone to post something online. Another source of this general uncertainty has been a trend of distrusted officials. With the break of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate the early 1970s to Bill Clinton’s impeachment in the 1990’s, the United States has plenty of reasons to find variability in the truth. Recently, however, our country has faced an unprecedented rise of incongruities. President Trump and his allies have created a climate where even the most educated scholar would have to do some serious digging to find the truth. For example, in the past week, various sources reported that Trump called a number of black and Hispanic countries “shitholes” in an Oval Office meeting. Even so, today, Senator David Perdue, an assumingly trusted civil servant, claimed that the President never said these words in the meeting. If our own media cannot determine what is actually going on in our world today, how will a historian come to tell our past? Will the internet be the ultimate archive? If so, what will be determined to be “fake” or “real” news?
“Most importantly, it looks to archives as condensed sites of epistemological and political anxiety rather than as skewed and biased sources.” (Stoler, page 20)
If there is one distinction that basically justifies most of the social sciences, it’s this one: The notion that a viewpoint is not unambiguously deficient for being “biased,” but instead only appears that way because it itself is the result of contested epistemologies that can and should be investigated further. Without this distinction, the social scientist–whether they err more on the side of positivism or of constructivism is irrelevant–would simply cast aside untold quantities of “biased” sources without recognizing the inherent plea for inquiry that such a “bias” holds. Obviously, this vein of thinking has been around for a long, long time (at least since Herodotus), but I still credit Stoler for explicitly referencing it in her book.
This summarization of Stoler’s methodology is especially pertinent in the context of archival research. Because this quote was literally taken from a book on archival research, I don’t expect anyone to be surprised by that statement. However, I feel that it nonetheless needs to be said that archives, unlike a journal article or a lone book, are anthologies and collections. An archive is under no obligation (or should be, at least–the one described by Stoler is an obvious exception) to preserve only materials that each buttress and support every other one. The Colbiana Collection that we saw on Thursday is an example: There are letters from the administration, and Echo articles against the administration.
It is because of this lack of need to formulate a concise and consistent narrative or argument that archives can be centers of “epistemological and political anxiety” (Stoler, 20). A journal article (any article likely to get past peer-review, at least) has to have an argument and evidence supporting it. When there is evidence present that is contrary to the thesis, it must be debunked. But being collections of both agreement and dissent, archives encapsulate disagreements as opposed to playing out on only one sideline. Stoler didn’t say this explicitly, so I did. I felt like this was all the logical conclusion of her argument, anyways.
Question: Is it merely because they are gigantic anthologies that archives are uniquely poised to be sites of contestation, or are there political and social factors that make the very idea of an “archive” a threat to epistemic confidence (which I assume to be the opposite of “epistemic modesty”)?
“Indian distaste for the notion of colonial concubinage might be seen as reinstating Indians into the role of the colonized…” (Ghosh 33).
Ghosh develops a strong argument that when a national history is being studied it needs to be inspected from multiple perspectives in order to encompass a comprehensive history. She is highlighting the push the Indians exhibit against their unclear history surrounding the time when Britian colonized India. This reaction to the history is exponentially different from those in Britain where people express their pride for having an Indian ancestor. In this quote, she is saying that the Indians’ push against this history is their way of reinstating their power and ultimately boosting their confidence. On the contrary, Britain residents use this story as a way to represent their genealogical prestige and their national pride. Both of these stories confirm and reassure the nations’ residents and further their nationalistic attitudes. Ghosh argues both of these responses to the history are essential in taking another step to understanding what really happened during this time.
Question: How are archivists able to recognize when they have these biases and are they able to catch them most of the time? To what extent does the author believe we need to go in order to develop a comprehensible history? How much information in a national archive needs to be validated by other nations’ archives?
“Instead, they wove messages into textiles in abstract, colorful bands (tocapu), inscribed them on ceremonial cups (queros), and knotted them into massed cords (quipus)” (Burns).
I choose this line because it reminded me of an experience I had recently. When I visited the Inca Museum in Cusco I did not find any tocapu, the bands that was used as a communication system, but the following week on a visit to the Museum of Natural History in NYC I found some. This line in Burns’ piece made me think of not just what documents the archives are made up of, and how they are made, but where they are held, by what institutions?
Is there some geographical importance? Is there importance of what institutions hold the power through the archives they have? Should modern establishments pay for their potentially questionable pasts and methods of securing such archives? Who has access to these records then, especially in the case of geographic position?
Whose research are we supporting? What public is being informed?
Is the centralization of archives more helpful than harmful? Or can this centralization, say at the Museum of Natural History in New York, be belittling by grouping all things?
I understand that museums and archives aren’t the same thing, but they may suggest the existence of similar items in an archive.
Burns borrows the idea of colonization of memory stating:
“By such means the friars and priests assailed knowledge systems that had taken centuries to refine, reducing Mesoamerican archives to ashes. This destruction was a vital part of what Walter Mignolo has called the ‘‘colonization of memory’’—a project that would extend throughout the Americas and beyond. ”
I wonder if this if the existence of archives in certain places and not others is an example of the ongoing colonization of memory, or if this colonization of memory is a completed action, something that happened centuries ago.
Quotes: From Blouin and Rosenberg:
“Until this eighteenth-century turn toward archives as sources of authoritative history, archives generally referred to records relating to governing and administration and the places in which they were stored.”
“ ‘Authority’ in the archives thus migrated toward the politics of administration, rather than toward accuracy.”
“…This led to the perception of the archivist as a custodian—an inactive participant in the process of records generation and retention.”
Comment: I thought this article was really interesting in how it detailed the history of historical interpretation and the link between historical understanding and political administration. As this article explains, archives expanded with bureaucracy. With a mass of paperwork being done, more questions had to be asked about the preserving/discarding of completed paperwork. This by nature left administrations with the archives in their hands, but of course these documents were not just recordings of the administration’s past, but of the people they were administering. In this way people’s history would be recorded, selected, and stored by those in power. Administrative institutions serving as archives is problematic, but the two are very intertwined. Still, the power dynamic can be seen in Blouin and Rosenberg’s consideration of “the perception of the archivist as a custodian—an inactive participant in the process of records generation and retention.” To think about that explanation with an eye towards potential political agenda, that seems to serve two purposes, one of creating an idea of an impartial and therefore true authority over history, while two in fact maintaining administrative control over that archivist. With bureaucracy being one of the ways that administrations exercised control, the connection between bureaucracy and archives also helps explain the over-allotment of importance to written documents in the West.
Question: What does the way that we consider history today show about our relationship to politics/administrations/institutions?
“I ask what insights into the social imaginaries
of colonial rule might be gained from attending not only to colonialism’s
archival content, but to the principles and practices of governance
lodged in particular archival forms.”
The point here is somewhat similar to that of Trouillot. This individual is saying that one must look beyond the obvious murkiness that can cloud a time era. However, it is critical is look at the era as a whole. To be understood, any given information must be taken within context or else the entire point can be misconstrued.
Question: What in today’ society is overlooked as a general context?
Quote: “When the archive… seems easily to give access to what one expects of it, the work is all the more demanding. One has to patiently give up one’s natural “sympathy” for it and consider it an adversary to fight, a piece of knowledge that isn’t to annex but disrupt. It is not simply a matter of undoing something whose meaning is too easy to find; to be able to know it, you have to unlearn and not think you know it from a first reading” (Stoler 23)
Comment: The author of this quotation seems to be warning scholars about the same bias that misled scholars of the Haitian Revolution. This is a bias towards one’s own conception of how the world works. In order to interpret archival documents, one must constantly be “unlearning.” That is to say, one must be willing to suspend their own worldviews and narratives. In doing so, scholars will be better able to interpret primary documents in the most objective way possible. This will allow scholars to truly find the meaning behind a document which at first may seem to simply reinforce the dominant narrative.
Question: Stoler argues that “archival productions should be treated in more registers as ethnography.” What exactly is Stoler referring to when she says “ethnography?”