Archive Stories was an interesting collection of essays about researcher’s various experiences in the archives of nations around the world. One theme seemed to be constant in each essay, the archive is socially and politically regulated source of social power for maintaining social hierarchies. I am reminded of Bruno Latour’s book Laboratory Life in which he analyzed lab culture to discover the way scientist go about procuring funding and legitimizing themselves as professionals, I read this book in a course on Social Constructivism. This is not to suggest that archives are all social constructions, even censored history tells a true story about the past (much like the old saying that even a broken clock is right twice a day.) However, the ways in which we restrict and allow access and the interactions these researchers had with native archivists (whether through research cooperation or simply passports and visas) are telling of the larger cultural issues at hand.
For instance, in Durba Ghosh’s essay “National Narratives and the Politics of Miscengenation” it became apparent that although the British seemed more anxious to provide links to a multicultural past, a lot of their searches came up empty. Why? Because, even though the UK is now interested in multicultural heritage as a balm to cool its past national sins of racism, the nation’s sins are logged in the archives by the ways in which the evidence which the community knows to have been there was not recorded due to concerns of national purity. The same goes for the account of the German archives; basically the author concedes that to use these archives like they aren’t broken by result of the Nazi party’s reign is ignoring the truth.
Another prominent theme in this book of how archives reflect social constructions such as the boundaries of a Nation is found in the topic of political censorship, particularly in the Uzbekistan article “Without the Past There is To Future.” Basically, archives are places where international scholars come and throw themselves at the mercy of the government, and the social standards of the archivists. Trying to work on preserving a politically dangerous history is something suited more for soldiers than for mild mannered intellectuals.
I found Jennifer Milligan’s insight in her article “What is an Archive?” into the works of Foucault and Derrida were incisive and telling of all of the “Archive Stories.” Institutions that regulate knowledge regulate the power of the state, the knowledge-power relationship can be seen throughout the professionalization of academic institutions as the sources of cultivated, properly informed citizens. Of course what it means to be properly informed will be defined by what the state desires from its citizens, whether it is to forget the past or simply to remember it in a certain light. Archives are the raw datum with which these institutions function, and the keepers of this information (censored or not) are important regulators of the social hierarchy, even if they are resistors of the established state, (as was the case in Uzbekistan.)
Your comment on the "broken" aspect of archives due to past political conflicts interested me most. The unwillingness of these periods to admit their racism, or power trips at the expense of others, has led to a mangling of the archival record. We know these things happened, there are other sources, but archives are official, and consistent sources of that "raw datum" that may or may not accurately represent the events in full. Even though we may want to reorganize the way an archive was put together in the past, those decisions have been made, and the opportunity has passed.
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