Special Topics in MENA (490-0-1)
Topic
Ethnography in the Archives
Overview of class
The defining research method of ethnography is participant observation with living interlocutors. Ethnographic understanding emerges through human exchange and collaborative meaning making, both between the anthropologist and research participants (participation) and between individuals in the field of investigation or fieldsite (observation). What does it mean, then, to do ethnography in the archives? Archives -- inscribed traces of lived worlds left by people - seeming cannot speak back to the reader. Without this lived exchange, what can we learn from documents created historically for administrative purposes of states or colonial empires? In this graduate seminar, we consider both narratives of state domination through text creation and possible stories about actions of individuals in non-dominant social groups, especially women, children, the poor, and ethnic minorities. Rather than adopting purely an anti-empirical approach to archived texts, we consider ways in which the bureaucratic scribe's record is both situated fact and angled purpose, and how documents' potential stories exceed their intended purposes. Theoretical and conceptual readings frame case studies from the MENA region including Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Egypt, and Morocco. Students write and workshop original research papers from an archival corpus of their choice.
Class Materials (Required)
Scans and pdfs of most materials will be provided. Course materials (partial and required) -Farge, Arlette. 2013. The Allure of the Archive. To p. 46 -Zeitlyn, David. 2012. Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates. ARA 41: 461-480 -Hull, Matthew. 2012. Documents and Bureaucracy. ARA 41: 25-67. -Meehan, Jennifer. 2009. Making the Leap from Parts to Whole: Evidence and Inference in Archival Arrangement and Description. American Archivist, 72(1): 72-90. -Trace, Ciaran. 2002. What is Recorded is Never Simply 'What Happened': Record Keeping in Modern Organizational Culture. Archival Science 2: 137-159 -Messick, Brinkley. Shari`a Scripts: A Historical Anthropology. 2018. Columbia. Intro pp 1-54; ch 6-8 pp 217 -320 -Stoler, Ann. Along the archival grain : epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. (Princeton, 2009, ISBN 9780691146362) Chapter 1 -Bsheer, Rosie. 2020. Archive Wars. Stanford -Chakrabarty, Dipesh 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton. Introduction and Chapter 4 -Feldman, Ilana. Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917-1967. (Duke UP, 2008, ISBN 978-0-8223-4240-3). -El Guabli, Brahim. 2023. Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship after State Violence (Fordham, 2023, ISBN 9781531501457)