Stoler: Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance

Tags: papers, Problems and Methods - Archival Turn

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”
  • Similar to DiCapua - Gatekeepers of the Arab Past
• 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”
  • Who controls the iraqi archives
• 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