Abstract

STOLER, ANN LAURA. ARCHIVES AND THE ARTS OF GOVERNANCE. Rev. colomb. antropol. [online]. 2010, vol.46, n.2, pp.465-496. ISSN 0486-6525.

Anthropologists engaged in postcolonial studies are increasingly adopting an historical perspective and using archives. Yet their archival activity tends to remain more extractive than ethnographic. Documents are thus still invoked piecemeal to confirm the colonial invention of certain practices or to underscore cultural claims, silent. Yet such mining of the content of government commissions, reports, and other archival sources rarely pays attention to their peculiar placement and form. Scholars need to move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject. This article, argues that scholars should view archives not as sites of knowledge retrieval, but of knowledge production, as monuments of states as well as sites of state ethnography. This requires a sustained engagement with archives as cultural agents of "fact" production, of taxonomies in the making, and of state authority. What constitutes the archive, what form it takes, and what systems of classification and epistemology signal at specific times are (and reflect) critical features of colonial politics and state power.

Keywords : archives; archiving; bureaucracy; colonial archives; ethnography; knowledge.

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