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

Archival Science

Volumn 2, Issue 3-4, 2002, Pages 209-220

  Kaplan, Elisabeth ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

Author keywords

Anthropology; Archivists; Representation; Social reality

Indexed keywords

EID: 18844416735     PISSN: 13890166     EISSN: 15737519     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/BF02435622     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. This scrutiny is sometimes characterized here as "postmodernism, " although I recognize that the definition of that term can be as fraught with complications as the debate over postmodernism itself. A first version of this essay was presented, along with papers by Joan M. Schwartz and Tom Nesmith, at the session, "Premises, Promises, Problems: Practising Archives with a Postmodern Perspective," at the 1999 Society of American Archivists conference in Pittsburgh. A later version was presented as part of the 2000-2001 Sawyer Seminar, "Archives, Documentation, and the Institutions of Social Memory" at the University of Michigan. I thank Terry Cook and Joan Schwartz for inviting me to contribute to this project; Bob Horton for his unflagging patience and editing; and Lucille N. Kaplan, Martha Kaplan, John D. Kelly and Helen W. Samuels for their comments and encouragement.
2. George E. Marcus and Michael M.J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 6.
3. George E. Marcus and Michael M.J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences Ibid., p. vii.
4. While the writings from anthropology that are examined here are seminal, there is no assertion being made or implied that they are representative, balanced, or typical of the literature, and certainly they are not current. They are the selections of a curious nonanthropologist struck by their resonances with archives. This essay is an exploration of the implications of some suggestive anthropological ideas for archival theory and practice, not an attempt to reflect all major schools of anthropological thinking in the twentieth century.
5. Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture", The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 5.
6. This extraordinarily knowledgeable and nuanced article appears in Archivaria 43 (Spring 1997). With its explicit concern for postmodernist allegations, it provides a useful touchstone for this analysis.
7. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 23.
8. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1932), pp. 2-3.
9. Melville J. Herskovits, Man and His Works: The Science of Cultural Anthropology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), p. 64.
10. Melville J. Herskovits, Man and His Works: The Science of Cultural Anthropology Ibid., p. 93.
11. Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique;
12. James E. Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
13. The epistemological issues were not the only ones that were problematic for the more politically engaged anthropologists, whose stance was that postmodernism is often insufficiently aware of any political context.
14. See, for example, P. Steven Sangren, "Rhetoric and the Authority of Ethnography: 'Postmodernism' and the Social Reproduction of Texts", Current Anthropology 29 (June 1988).
15. Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping, p. 28.
16. Hilary Jenkinson, A Manual of Archival Administration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), p. 106.
17. Jenkinson, quoted in Cook, "What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift", Archivaria 43 (Spring 1997): 23.
18. Jenkinson, quoted in Cook, Archivaria Ibid., p. 26.
19. Norton, quoted in Archivaria ibid., p. 26.
20. See Note 14 of Terry Cook, "Fashionable Nonsense or Professional Rebirth: Postmodernism and the Practice of Archives", Archivaria 51 (Spring 2001): 14-35.
21. On resistance and other archival responses to postmodernism, see Cook, in Archivaria ibid.;
22. as well as Brien Brothman, "Declining Derrida: Integrity, Tensegrity, and the Preservation of Archives from Deconstruction", Archivaria 48 (Fall 1999);
23. Terry Cook, "Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts", Archival Science: International Journal on Recorded Information 1(1) (2001), especially his critique of traditional archival "science".
24. As Richard Cox has written, "many of these studies stretch their definition of archives far beyond how we have approached our work (either stimulating us to rethink how we define the term and our work, or burying a more literal sense and the importance of archives so far into postmodernist jargon as to give us little to compare with or relate to our work and mission)." As examples, Cox cites Derrida's Archive Fever
25. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive.
26. "No matter what insights these works provide (and they provide many), one must still work hard to capture the precise meaning of 'archive' or 'archives' as utilized by these authors," The American Archivist 64 (Fall/Winter 2001): 400.
27. On the relationship between theory and practice as complementary rather than opposites, see Terry Cook, " 'The Imperative of Challenging Absolutes' in Graduate Archival Education Programs: Issues for Educators and the Profession", American Archivist 63 (Fall/Winter 2000), where he demonstrates that the opposite of practical is impractical, not theoretical (pp. 389-390).
28. Cook, "Fashionable Nonsense or Professional Rebirth", 30.
29. Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, x.
30. Ruth Bunzel, Chichicastenango: A Guatemalan Village (Gluckstadt, Germany: J.J. Augustin, 1952), pp. xiii-xiv.