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The Archive as a “Collective Project”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2017

Nilay Özok-Gündoğan
Nilay Özok-Gündoğan*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Binghamton University, Binghamton, N.Y.: e-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

The history of the archive is the history of the state. Or so say conventional approaches to the archives. Until recently, the archive has been seen solely as a site, or rather a repository, of modern state power and governmentality, and a crucial medium for the making and preservation of national memory in the late 19th century. There is a truth to this state-centric perspective: the archive was conceived as a place where governments keep their records; they usually contain a term such as “state,” “government,” or “national” in their names; and they are often funded by and connected to a governmental body.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , August 2017 , pp. 529 - 533
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

NOTES

1 “Archive” is usually used in the plural. In the theoretical discussions on the “idea of records in an extended (metaphorical) sense following Foucault and Derrida,” it appears mostly as the archive. Following this line of thinking, I use it in the singular. Zeitlyn, David, “Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts: Archives as Anthropological Surrogates,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 462 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Featherstone, Mike, “Archive,” Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006): 592 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Ibid., 592.

4 Appadurai, Arjun, “Archive and Aspiration,” in Information Is Alive: Art and Theory on Archiving and Retrieving Data, ed. Brouwer, Joke, Mulder, Arjen, and Charlton, Susan (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2003), 16 Google Scholar.

5 Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 464.

6 Patrice Ladwig and Ricardo Roque, abstract for the mini workshop titled “Fieldwork between Folders: Theories of the Archive and the Historical Anthropology of Colonialism,” organized by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, accessed 1 April 2017, https://www.eth.mpg.de/3328094/miniworkshop_colonial_archives.pdf

7 van Bruinessen, Martin, “Ismail Beşikçi: Turkish Sociologist, Critic of Kemalism, and Kurdologist,” Journal of Kurdish Studies 5 (2005 [2003–4]): 19–34 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Neyzi, Leyla, “Oral History and Memory Studies in Turkey,” in Turkey's Engagement with Modernity: Conflict and Change in the Twentieth Century, ed. Celia Kerslake, Kerem Öktem, and Philip Robins (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 443–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Dirks, Nicholas B., “Annals of the Archive: Ethnographic Notes on the Sources of History,” in From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, ed. Axel, Brian Keith (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 48 Google Scholar.

10 Özok-Gündoğan, Nilay, “Ruling the Periphery, Governing the Land the Making of the Modern Ottoman State in Kurdistan, 1840–70,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34 (2014): 160–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Ibid. See also Özok-Gündoğan, Nilay, “A ‘Peripheral’ Approach to the 1908 Revolution in the Ottoman Empire: Land Disputes in Peasant Petitions in Post-Revolutionary Diyarbekir,” in Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1870–1915, ed. Jongerden, Joost and Verheij, Jelle (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 179–216 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Appadurai, “Archive and Aspiration,” 16.