Slides from Monday, January 22
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Citing Primary Source Documents – Purdue
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Slides from Monday, January 22
Check out our course’s library guide!
Citation Resources:
Citing Primary Source Documents – Purdue
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“By August 2007, the team had grown to more than 200 strong, though it would later settle at a stable size of about 150; with equal representation from men and women, some 65 percent of its members were youths. These were individuals who came of age in the context of the war but never participated in it as insurgents, trade unionists, community organizers, or student activists as had many of their older counter- parts.”
This quote resonated with me because just this morning I was talking to my friend who is currently taking a class about German culture and tradition. I was surprised when he told me that the German citizens who actually took steps to articulate the realities of WWII and the Holocaust were actually from the younger, more distanced generation. I guess that makes sense in terms of being more distanced from the events themselves and being less directly effected. My comment yesterday somewhat applauded Germany for being so proactive about being honest with its history. However there were many Germans who apparently actively lied to their children and tried to cover up the events that transpired and their involvement. Much of the progress Germany has made was driven by the youth. Although it makes sense, as they have less direct shame, I must applaud later generations for taking the initiatives.
Question: How common is this trend of young people taking control over archiving history they did not experience. I am less referring to older historical events and more to the directly following generations of the events. Maybe they feel as if they are profoundly shaped by these events?
“This context—citizen disenfranchisement, a woefully lacking educational system, widespread illiteracy, and a long history of hermetic, antidemocratic rule—meant that the archival battleground was not necessarily of much interest or relevance to most Guatemalans. Rescuing warehouses full of moldering Spanish-language papers would not feed or house the country’s rural Maya majority, many of them living in abject poverty and desperately underserved by government. Neither would they translate directly into reparations payments, land redistribution, or bilingual schools. The fact of archives being publicly accessible in Guatemala City mattered little to those who infrequently visited the capital, could not read, or feared retribution if they were to come forward seeking information about a killed or disappeared family member” (219).
This quote is on the lengthier side, but there just didn’t seem to me to be a place to cut it. It leads in to a lively discussion on Weld’s part about the fact that “…access to information and archival politics was overwhelmingly an urban and elite conversation” (220). This is fascinating to me because it points to an important subject that we haven’t exactly talked much about: who cares? Who cares about what’s in the archives? Who is it that actually knows how to use them, has the time to use them, or the means to use them? The more I think about it, the more there seems to be a class divide in utilizing archives. It’s not as if archival thinking is a standard practice taught in public high schools. And to what extent are resources best put toward archival projects such as “The Project”? As Weld notes, it’s not like they were going to “…feed or house the country’s rural Maya majority.” Weld’s point feels vital to her book and the arguments within it. Perhaps discussions of the Guatemalan archives should force us to truly ask herself the questions Weld poses: “Transparency, access, declassification–whose priorities were these?” (220)
“Rosa, who fought in the EGP until demobilization
in 1996, felt she could not refuse the opportunity to volunteer in the
archives, even in tough economic times: “I decided that it was fine . . . because
I felt something there, like a hope, that this could contribute to Guatemala.
I feel like I am working toward the same goals, but now with different
conditions.” (Weld, 157)
This quote really struck me for a couple of reasons . First, I find it really interesting that an EGP member, which based on my limited research is a left-wing militia was allowed to work in this position. I think that says a lot about the reconciliation that took place after the peace deal of the late 1990s. It’s also interesting to note that this left wing, or communist group, was basically crushed with arms from the United States. This is very interesting to me, because I feel like I have learned very little about American anti-communist activities in South America. Especially compared to American anti-communist activities in Europe.
Secondly, and more importantly, this quote interests me because of how a solider could say that she felt volunteering in the archives was comparable to fighting. As a group that is currently studying archives I don’t think we could ask for a quote that shows the importance of archives more than this. Rosa is comparing risking her life for her beliefs to working in the archives. I think this is a real testimony to how important and how much sway the archives have for a country. The archives are supposed tell the history of the country and people are willing to do anything to make that a reality.
Question- can an archivist really put behind their past history and work in the archives for the sake of the truth?
“Reencountering the war through the Other’s eyes blurred comfortable distinctions between present and past, memory and history. In Esperanza’s words, the archives were ‘a space where we all return to the past, and we all come to relive the pain or to awaken what’s asleep inside each and every one of us, and to face the reality of what we lived’” (Weld 163).
This quote brought me back to what James and I touched on in our online discussion for Monday. However, this reading made me think more about what counts as history than have other readings. Not in the sense that what happened in Guatemala itself wasn’t a history, but I guess I wonder when something becomes history. I will admit to purposefully shying away from this issue in my own work by maintaining only a bare minimum interest level for any events that happened post-1800, but I do have an appreciation for modern historians. In this case, I feel more apprehensive than comforted by the archivists’ personal investment in the history. I felt like this is the first time I really understood why some records are sealed: I worry about how close people are to the history they interpret.
Question: We’ve talked before about how research in the archives represents the values of current society as much as it does the values of the society one is studying. Is there any difference in the amount of contemporary reflection if one studies something 100 days ago versus 100 years ago?
Quote: “…that what matters most about such archives is not their supposedly depersonalized, abstracted exercise of panoptical control but rather their use-value by real humans, whether police officers or peacemakers, engaged in real political struggles” (Weld, 238)
Comment: I agree with Weld’s critique of the idea that an archive is a panopticon. The metaphor of a panopticon insinuates that an archive is omniscient when really an archive is omnipotent. The archive is not just a tool for Big Brother to constantly surveil citizens, but rather the archive is an explicit weapon for exerting power and social control. The metaphor of a panopticon deemphasizes the important role that the archive plays (or played) in the lives of Guatemalans both during the era of Cold War terror as well as now.
Question: What do prominent Maya activists in Guatemala think about the Project? Are any similar efforts being pursued to identify rural Maya desaparecidos?
Quote: “…that what matters most about such archives is not their supposedly depersonalized, abstracted exercise of panoptical control but rather their use-value by real humans, whether police officers or peacemakers, engaged in real political struggles” (Weld, 238)
Comment: I agree with Weld’s critique of the idea that an archive is a panopticon. The metaphor of a panopticon insinuates that an archive is omniscient when really an archive is omnipotent. The archive is not just a tool for Big Brother to constantly surveil citizens, but rather the archive is an explicit weapon for exerting power and social control. The metaphor of a panopticon deemphasizes the important role that the archive plays (or played) in the lives of Guatemalans both during the era of Cold War terror as well as now.
Question: What do prominent Maya activists in Guatemala think about the Project? Are any similar efforts being pursued to identify rural Maya desaparecidos?
Quote: “In conjunction with the pdh, whose influence lay more in overall
strategy than in the nuts and bolts of project management, the coordinación
established the priorities for the months to come. The Project would orient
its work toward three fundamental and familiar goals: clarifying the history of the war, rescuing historical memory, and promoting justice. The investigation
would focus on the period from 1975 through 1985, on the well-founded hypothesis that it would yield the bulk of the evidence on human rights abuses;
a later statistical sampling of the documents would bear out this decision.”
Comment: I think this quote is significant because it acknowledges the purpose of the archival research. I find it especially interesting as they had a hypothesis about what the research would reveal. To me, this signifies that archival research is really an empirical study that might attempt to reduce the subjective nature of the data.
Question: How is archival research structured?
“But the oral transmission of history took various forms. Intergenerational collaboration was key to the interpretation of the documents; if a young worker came across a photograph of an early-1980s demonstration, for example, she would ask the older members of her team whether they remembered the march, if they had participated, and what the political climate was like at the time.” (Weld, 200)
I am reminded, for obvious reasons, of our prior discussions of oral history in class. More specifically, of the the subjectivity, potential volatility, and historiographical inadequacies of oral history. Much like a game of telephone, oral history morphs along with the zeitgeist of the time in which those who tell it live. But something I haven’t really ever thought about is how oral history can be used not as a source in and of itself, but as a corroboration. It really does make perfect sense: If a document can’t say enough about a social climate, series of events, or other historical societal concerns, then ask someone, ask their children, or ask their children’s children. Though Weld talks of oral history as a very direct process here (I can’t find what I need to know, so I’ll just ask this older person), it should theoretically be entirely possible to use, for example, thousand year-old unwritten stories to gain more insight into the discursive implications of the Magna Carta’s diction. I’m almost embarrassed to say that I’ve never thought of oral history in this light before: I’ve never even considered that an oral history could be coupled with a written source.
Question: Is there a point at which a document simply cannot be corroborated, analyzed, or contextualized using oral history? In other words, is there a document sitting in an archive somewhere that is simply irrelevant with respect to oral history, or can word-of-mouth help researchers look into *every single* document that they find?
“Moreover, we are uncomfortable because we know that their flat, bureaucratic representations of our rich, full lives will outlive us, and outlive the memory of us. We know all the things the archives can never record, and we know that being archived does not guarantee that we will be remembered” (Weld 236).
As historians and the study of history turn toward focusing more on the lives of the public, slowly rewriting history as a field individual, important men’s history. And as Weld suggests, we need our archives to catch up. How do we archive history of the common things without archiving all things? What balance should be struck between archiving the banal, daily life for future historical context, and archiving the more typically “historic” (showing the institutions and the individuals who run them)? This reminds me of the archival folder of alumni we saw in the archives at Colby. We will all have a folder, but why is it that we assume the bigger the folder the more impactful or important the individual? I would venture to say that there is a human obsession with being remembered and remembering.
Noa’s post lays out a really important question: who cares? How do we use archives, difficult as their materials may be, to make impactful change, rather than just knowledge of history? How can they help us feed people, right institutional racism, educate the next generation? For me, education is the missing component. How will Guatemala educate about the dictatorship, abuses of power, human rights abuses, and the archive itself? If left up to the institution of the government, will they have the foresight to educate about it?
“While the historians worked to decipher pn structures, the activists, who
had not yet come around to seeing the use-value of seemingly abstract archival
principles, set about cleaning documents and organizing them the way that
seemed most natural to them: chronologically”
In many professions, the process underlying the occupation has some root in the human nature. For example, doctors swear an oath to medically aid anyone in need of it. This quote is interesting on the level that many archives may be collected and ordered according to human nature, as opposed to a more logical process. This can result in bias or the preservation of legacy in a skewed manner. It appears as if it takes time and experience to fully understand the roles, duties, and boundaries that an archivist has.
Question: Are there any famous archivists? Anyone who stood out for how good their work was?
Best explanation “Documents both represent power and are power – not in some deracinated, postmodern sense but all too concretely in their creation, keeping, and use by political actors” pg. 87
When reading all the separate explanations for why the Police Archives were not destroyed years ago, this quotation above was said to be the most likely answer. The two other plausible ideas were thought of by the Guatemalan workers on the project and the historians. The Guatemalans had decided that the archives were never destroyed because those in charge never thought that they would lose their power. The historians believed in the thought that humans have an innate need to leave their trace behind. Both of these explanations make a lot of more sense to me than the “best explanation” stated above. If these documents represent so much power then would it not simply add more claim to the Guatemalan’s idea that the police the left them behind because they never thought they would be defeated and they wouldn’t want to lose the power that the documents hold? It would also make more sense to me that the PN had an innate need to leave their trace with these documents because they held so much power, supporting what the historians had thought. The fact that they were left simply because they had power, in my opinion, does not have enough backing to stand alone. What do you think about this explanation? Do you think that it’s sufficient to answer the “Big Question?” Or is it just so vague that it doesn’t hold enough value to explain something so mysterious and complex?
Quote: “They [young workers at the Project] were the very people who would have been targeted for assassination had they been alive thirty years earlier.” (185)
Comment: This sentence, while brutally recognizing the arbitrariness and power of time, acknowledges the rather obvious reality that the people who formed a generation in one decade are not just vanished with the appearance of the next, but are exerting their influences under other appearances. For some reason, this seems like a revelation to me, as I often unwittingly ignore this when considering history–as though, for example, the cohort of children in the Great Depression were not the same people as the adults of the 50s, 60s…
Questions: What insights could a personal, generational view of history provide? Would examining a period/event/social atmosphere by looking at the group history of an age cohort’s childhood be meaningfully revealing or accurately so? Thinking about the above quote more specifically, what group history altered the generation now allowing the behavior previously deemed worthy of assassination? Would that be an appropriate question to ask, or would that investigation be potentially misleading?