Documents, Papers, Photographs: Archival Traces & the Production of Memory
Organizer: Lee Elizabeth Douglas (New York University & CCHS-CSIC)
Invited Speaker:
Paul Basu, University College London
Panelist:
Lee Elizabeth Douglas (PhD Candidate in sociocultural anthropology at New York University)
Stephanie Sadre-Orafai (Assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Cincinnati)
Pwyll ap Stifin (PhD Candidate at the Anthropology Department at the University College London)
Panel description:
For historians, archives are an important source of data. They are home to the raw material that documents and describes the past. From this standpoint, archival objects are key sources for the production of historical knowledge. However, as scholars have often pointed out, the space of the archive can also be a place of oblivion and silence (Abercrombie 1998; Stoler 2010; Trouillot 1997). Furthermore, the processes of interpreting these archival traces can be potentially violent. Despite the increasing use of digital technologies for making archival materials more accessible, institutional concerns over who has rights over these documentary traces often prohibit archival objects and the knowledge they contain from freely circulating. This panel seeks to examine shared notions about what archives should ideally do while also considering contemporary archival practices and uses. Approaching archives as both repositories of knowledge and potential spaces of restriction, we will discuss the important role that archives play in thinking through the tensions and relationships between remembering and forgetting. Taking on the space of the archive as an analytic object, what kinds of archival practices lend themselves to the production of meaning about violent pasts? What kinds of silences exist within the archival space? How can archival objects be activated through narrative practices? What kinds of imaginary futures does the space of the archive promise in light of the entangled and unformed narratives that it offers?
Abstracts:
From Archive to Memoryscape: Sites of Memory and Conflict in Sierra Leone
Paul Basu, paul.basu@ucl.ac.uk
As David Lowenthal has observed, ‘the locus of memory lies more readily in place than in time’. From Halbwachs’ foundational work on the ‘spatial frameworks’ of collective memory, through Yates’ explorations of the architectural ‘arts of memory’, to Nora’s highly influential project charting the ‘lieux de mémoire’ of the French nation, the relationship between ‘mental spaces’ of memory and the ‘material milieu that surrounds us’ has been a dominant theme in memory studies. Indeed, après Nora, the concept of the site of memory has become the dominant metaphor for exploring cultural memory, just as the archive has become the archetypal site of memory. In this paper I explore the relationship between the archive and the wider cultural memoryscape in the context of Sierra Leone, drawing on historical as well as more recent conflicts. Drawing on multi-sited methodologies, I stress the importance of following the mnemonic trace across the different ‘archival’ locations in which they are inscribed, performed and embodied.
For historians, archives are an important source of data. They are home to the raw material that documents and describes the past. From this standpoint, archival objects are key sources for the production of historical knowledge. However, as scholars have often pointed out, the space of the archive can also be a place of oblivion and silence (Abercrombie 1998; Stoler 2010; Trouillot 1997). Furthermore, the processes of interpreting these archival traces can be potentially violent. Despite the increasing use of digital technologies for making archival materials more accessible, institutional concerns over who has rights over these documentary traces often prohibit archival objects and the knowledge they contain from freely circulating. This panel seeks to examine shared notions about what archives should ideally do while also considering contemporary archival practices and uses. Approaching archives as both repositories of knowledge and potential spaces of restriction, we will discuss the important role that archives play in thinking through the tensions and relationships between remembering and forgetting. Taking on the space of the archive as an analytic object, what kinds of archival practices lend themselves to the production of meaning about violent pasts? What kinds of silences exist within the archival space? How can archival objects be activated through narrative practices? What kinds of imaginary futures does the space of the archive promise in light of the entangled and unformed narratives that it offers?
Abstracts:
From Archive to Memoryscape: Sites of Memory and Conflict in Sierra Leone
Paul Basu, paul.basu@ucl.ac.uk
As David Lowenthal has observed, ‘the locus of memory lies more readily in place than in time’. From Halbwachs’ foundational work on the ‘spatial frameworks’ of collective memory, through Yates’ explorations of the architectural ‘arts of memory’, to Nora’s highly influential project charting the ‘lieux de mémoire’ of the French nation, the relationship between ‘mental spaces’ of memory and the ‘material milieu that surrounds us’ has been a dominant theme in memory studies. Indeed, après Nora, the concept of the site of memory has become the dominant metaphor for exploring cultural memory, just as the archive has become the archetypal site of memory. In this paper I explore the relationship between the archive and the wider cultural memoryscape in the context of Sierra Leone, drawing on historical as well as more recent conflicts. Drawing on multi-sited methodologies, I stress the importance of following the mnemonic trace across the different ‘archival’ locations in which they are inscribed, performed and embodied.
Sound and the Affective Archive: The Materiality of Post-9/11 Oral Histories
The capacities of the traditional archive, its ability to produce memory in a particular way, is intimately tied to the material register of the paper document or photograph. A very specific form of encounter with the past is generated through handling such materials in an archival space, and indeed, the architectonic space of the archive as an enclosure housing the traces of the past is produced through this encounter. In this paper I will describe a rather different archival encounter: an oral history recording, recounting an experience of bereavement heard on the radio while traveling in a taxi in New York, a few days after the killing of Osama Bin Laden in May 2011. I will argue that a novel, sonic archival space congeals around this event; a space that is short-lived and ephemeral, conforming more to the kinds of materialities associated with the work of Alfred North Whitehead and Bruno Latour than that of the traditional archive. The space produced is, however, quite tangible, and it is through understanding its specific qualities that the nature of the particular form of memory being configured here can be understood.
The Evidentiary Regimes of Science & Sight: Forensic Science as Archival Practice Lee Elizabeth Douglas, lee.douglas@nyu.edu
On April 15, 2011, Judge Mario Carroza filed a judicial order demanding the re-exhumation of former Chilean President Salvador Allende. The call to reappear the resting corpse of the fallen head of state was a juridical, forensic response to a series of petitions made by Allende’s surviving kin to clarify the much-disputed cause of the ex-President’s death, an emblematic event that marked the beginning of Augusto Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship while also foreshadowing the repressive violence that would quickly envelop the country. The 2011 judicial order to re-exhume Allende’s body invoked science and law as tools for clarifying, defining, and re-narrating the former President’s corporal demise through the collection, analysis, and public circulation of biological evidence. It suggested that science could in fact determine a particular historical truth. However, despite the definitive nature of the forensic evidence recovered during the exhumation and autopsy that followed it, debates about Allende’s death continue to circulate in Chilean public culture. In this paper, I argue that forensic science is not simply a mode of biological and osteological analysis, but rather a mode of resurfacing multiple, often contradictory, historical narratives. By analyzing the ways in which forensic technologies emphasize the relationships between seeing and knowing–between visual evidence and scientific fact–I will demonstrate how forensic practices are closely linked to archival ones that seek to re-animate documents and photographs, in order to spark new public debates about national and local histories. To what extent can forensic science be understood as an archival practice? How can we make sense of biological evidence alongside different re-narrations of key historical events? Can forensic science be valued for its ability to resurface archival traces that might not otherwise circulate?
Mugging the Archive: Traces of Encounters, Spaces of Imagination
Stephanie Sadre-Orafai, sadreose@ucmail.uc.edu
This paper examines the online archive and image after-lives of 'mug shots,' or post-arrest booking photographs, in the contemporary US. As traces of encounters with law enforcement and corrections officers, these images are organized into networked institutional and state archives that simultaneously record individual identities while aggregating them to create offender types and pools. While expansive, the logic of these archives is neither totalizing nor complete. The uneven framing of the images it contains reveals both the decentralization and range of non-standard practices that populate them. This offers a provocative challenge to how we think about the organizational memory of the state—not only what is recorded and what is forgotten, but also how the spatial politics of the archive and the encounters that create it, shape our relationship to its contents.
Working through the trope of 'mugging,' foregrounding its multivalent meanings—contorted facial posing for the camera; an often violent, but more importantly, public altercation that leads to dispossession; and cramming—I explore how the state creates and maintains this archive as a site of memory, but one that is compressed and signified by quick capture, quick categorization, but a lack of total recall. Extending this move, I investigate how these images circulate beyond their official state trajectories. Specifically, I analyze so-called 'shame rags,' like Busted!, that repackage publicly available mug shots into inexpensive weekly tabloids featuring local arrests. How can we make sense of these ephemeral publications alongside these networked databases and digital archives? Do these papers represent an extension of the state's memory into public spaces, or do they, instead, dispossess this memory of its explanatory power?