Dead ends in and out of the archive: an ethnography of Dār al Wathā’iq al Qawmiyya, the Egyptian National Archive

Archival ethnography and ethnography of archiving: Towards an anthropology of riot inquiry commission reports in postcolonial India

“…The critique of riot reports does not negate the potential for 'archival ethnography'. This idea gains its strength from the relationship between history and anthropology, whose conventional separation, now being challenged, was a consequence of 'positive empiricism' in Western academia (Asad 2002;Axel 2002;Carminati 2019;Cohn 1987;Dirks 1987). Many decades ago, Bernard Cohn (1987, 2) called for researchers to 'treat the materials of history the way an anthropologist treats his field notes' and asserted that it is not disciplinary differences but theoretical considerations that should determine the nature of social science inquiry.…”

“…Archival ethnography can fill in some of these gaps, offering rich, historical anthropology. Thus, researchers must not view archives merely as the material of another discipline, and must overcome the tendency to see archival labour as a mere extractive enterprise (Carminati 2019;Marcus 1984). In other words, the use of archives demands a conscious effort and creative dialogue with their data to facilitate accurate anthropological readings.…”

“…The knowledge contained in archives must be understood as systems of personal statements, partial truths and historically and culturally formed interpretations subject to rereading and new explanations (Bennett 2014;Camaroff and Camaroff 1992;Cunha 2006). This conscious exercise will transform an archive, seen as an entity invested with power, into a site of ethnography where the researcher can enter into a mindful relationship with the ideas within (Carminati 2019;Osterweil 2013). In this sense, ethnography is continually interpretative, irrespective of the field it informs, interrogating and disrupting 'established' truths in archival materials (Cunha 2006;Korom 2001).…”

“…As Ranajit Guha (1987) rightly highlighted, 'sources' do not have real meaning in themselves and do not represent the truth. Whether documents are trustworthy is always a pertinent question, but attention to the social and political conditions that produced them would yield a more reflective account of the event under investigation (Bennett 2014;Carminati 2019;Trundle and Kaplonski 2011). Since the colonial era, the production of archives, especially commission reports, has been a powerful aid in ruling the population (Burton and Carlen 1967;Foucault 1977;Herbert 1960).…”

“…The complex relationship between archives and ethnography has been a central concern of social science for the past few decades, and there is now an exciting body of literature, especially from historians and anthropologists, that addresses the limits, possibilities and necessities of using them together to study a range of issues across times and locations (e.g. Axel 2002;Bennett 2014;Camaroff and Camaroff 1992;Carminati 2019;Cohn 1987;Cunha 2006;van der Veer 2001;Zeitlyn 2012). This paper examines the possibilities and challenges of such a creative synthesis in the field of what is often termed 'communal violence', where it has been little used so far.…”