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Stoler: Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance [b617d525]

Tags: papers, Problems and Methods - Archival Turn

1. Colonial Archives and the Arts of Goverance - Ann Stoler

  • Complains that the archival studies remain more extractive than ethnographic
  • Focus on "archive as a process" rather than things

  • "Archives as epistemological experiments rather than as sources, to colonial archives as cross-sections of contested knowledge"

  • EE Evans Prtichard's warning that "anthropology would have to choose between being history and being nothing"

    • E.E. Evans-Pritchard "Social Antropology: Past and Present. The Marett Lecture, 1950"
  • "Archive fever" has grasped modern anthropology

  • Students reject the content of colonial archives but rather attend to the form or context

    • We reject the information in the archives
    • But who is interviewed? Why are they interviewed

  • Identifying bias:

    • Shaped:

      • What could be written
      • What warrented repetition
      • What competensies were rewarded in archival writing
      • What stories could not be told
      • What could not be said

  • Derrida's "there is no political power without control of the archive"

  • Colonial archives reproduced the power of the state

    • Modern readings of colonial archives are read against the grain

  • Pause at, rather than bypass the unspoken practices

    • How are things organized? Why are they collected together?

  • Archives also keep secrets

    • What secrets are worth keeping?

    • What secrets are kept because of disagreements?

      • Dutch colonial archives classified documents beacuse they could not agree, or sometimes because of the magnitude of the problem