‘Many paths to partial truths’: Archives, anthropology, and the power of representation

Abstract

Abstract. This essay compares thinking about anthropology and archives, in light of recent postmodem analysis. While many in the social sciences and humanities have been considering issues of representation, objectivity, and power, archival thinking has remained largely isolated from this broader intellectual landscape, and archival practice has remained curiously bound up in modes of thought and practice distinctly rooted in nineteenth-century positivism. Archivists have even resisted the efforts of those within their own ranks to challenge this isolation and re-situate the premises of archival identity in this newer and larger intellectual context. This essay suggests that archivists can draw meaningful comparisons by reading outside their field in disciplines, such as anthropology, with which archives shares key features, such as concern with issues of representation, description, and culture. In this essay, select anthropological writings throughout the last century are examined against a backdrop of trends in archival thinking, contrasting the tumultuous epistemological debate within anthropology with the relative calm in the archival profession. This contrast is strikingly embodied by the coincidence of the publication, in 1922, and both in London, of leading theorists from both fields: Bronislaw Malinowski and Hilary Jenkinson. The essay suggests that, in order to remain relevant and conversant with their partners and stakeholders, archivists must take the matter of their isolation seriously, exercise more comparative self-reflection, and devise practical ways to do archival work without the positivist blinders of the past.

Contexts built and found: a pilot study on the process of archival meaning-making

“…In this way, the act or acts of archiving are understood to ''create new frames of reference and meaning […] and in doing so predispose some users of certain modes of understanding rather than others'' (MacNeil 2008, p. 22). These processes frame, shape (Kaplan 2002), and ''mold collections'' (Light and Hyry 2002); create value (Brothman 1991); and construct new narratives (Duff and Harris 2002;Dodge 2002).…”

Examining User-Created Description in the Archival Profession

“…But unlike other disciplines, archivists were slow to analyze professional practice through a postmodern lens. 3 Literature on the topic did not appear until the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Critics noted that archival theory remained rooted in Enlightenment and nineteenth-century positivism, a philosophy which viewed archives as organic constructions, records as objective communications, and archivists as unobtrusive keepers.…”

‘Play mas’: carnival in the archives and the archives in carnival: records and community identity in the US Virgin Islands

“…Their success may depend on the availability of evidence, but their success may also depend on the ability of archivists to recognize and accept this evidence into the archives, for the stuff of minor narratives may not always be perceived as archival. If the archive is to be a place where all stories can be found, then archivists must expand their own horizons, extending traditional boundaries of recordness to embrace a larger and more inclusive vision of the records that communities create (Schwartz 2006;Kaplan 2002;Bastian 2006).…”