​​Archives are contested spaces. They are the domain not solely of historians, but also of anthropologists, for whom archives transcend mere historical repositories. They are politicised realms of power where societies grapple with ethical dilemmas and negotiate cultural values in the process of shaping collective memory. Archives, at their core, can serve to legitimise or delegitimise certain groups, they can be used to monitor or control others, and they may be (mis)used to claim specific rights over land, nation, species, culture, or history. This interpretation of the archive underscores its profound social and political significance in shaping criteria for credibility, structuring knowledge, and grounding claims to authority (Foucault 1972; Derrida 1996).

Both in their material form as repositories and metaphorically as, for instance, Said’s (1993) ‘cultural archive’ or Cvetkovich’s (2003) ‘archive of feelings’, archives wield significant power and have long been subject to fundamental critique. Although archival power enables the preservation of public records and historical documents, scholars have called attention to how it simultaneously functions as a ‘cartography of silences’ (Rich 1978) – a system that obscures, omits, distorts and erases, mapping absences as much as presences. One way of addressing this is reading archives against the grain, disrupting dominant narratives to uncover information their creators may have deliberately or inadvertently excluded (Hartman 2019). However, others have argued that this practice of reading against the grain should not be undertaken in isolation, focusing solely on ‘what’s not there’ (Stoler 2002; Hartman 2008).

Indeed, by avoiding the thick complexities that archives equally collect, we might risk overlooking the power embedded in the very production of the archive itself (Stoler 2008). This critique calls for a deeper interrogation of how archives are physically and symbolically constructed, curated, and legitimised, both in their content and as metaphors for authority and knowledge, while advocating for an approach that also reads along the archival grain. An anthropology of archives, in this sense, is not only about deconstructing and analysing existing information that archives have gathered, but also involves tracing and unpacking the intricate histories, voices, existences, or assemblages that have been omitted and left unmentioned over time. Reading and interpreting archives, then, also necessitates constructing new ones that challenge static pasts and presents.

For the upcoming issue of Etnofoor on Archives, we welcome contributions that employ ways of thinking with archives ethnographically, and critically examine them not as a fixed and pre-existing entities, but rather as dynamic and powerful spaces that are continually shaped by social, historical, political, temporal, or spatial dynamics (Sharpe 2016). How, for example, can anthropological engagements with archival work confront the structures and historical conventions that dictate the (im)possibilities of the present (Hochberg 2021)? How have archives historically silenced more-than-human voices (Lorimer and Whatmore 2009) or perpetuated narratives and temporalities that shape multispecies entanglements in the present (e.g., Ogden 2021)? How can we explore the biographical or genealogical connections between landscape archives and ongoing extractivist practices that continue to shape them? What are possible methods of ‘reading the silences’ in the archives (Carter 2006)? How may the archival impulses of marginalised groups represent techniques of self-representation? Or how do we understand groups that choose silence as a strategy against archival impulses of the powerful, and decide that ‘this is not a story to pass on’ (Morrison 1987)?

We invite authors who engage with material or metaphorical archives in their research, either through ethnographic fieldwork or theoretical analysis, to submit an abstract of no more than 200 words to editors@etnofoor.nl by March 3, 2025. We also welcome book reviews, methodological reflections, and creative contributions such as photo essays, semi-fictionalised ethnographies, or graphic narratives. The deadline for authors of accepted abstracts to submit their full paper is June 1, 2025. The issue is scheduled for publication in the winter of 2025.

References

Carter, Rodney G.S.
2006     Of things said and unsaid: Power, archival silences, and power in silence. Archivaria 61: 215-233.

Cvetkovich, Ann
2003     An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press.

Derrida, Jacques
1996     Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Foucault, Michel
1972     The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. New York: Pantheon.

Hartman, Saidiya
2008     Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe 26(12:2): 1-14.

2019        Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W. W. Norton.

Hochberg, Gil, Z.
2021     Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future. London: Duke University Press.

Lorimer Jamie and Sarah Whatmore
2009     After the ‘King of Beasts’: Samuel Baker and the Embodied Historical Geographies of Elephant Hunting in Mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon. Journal of Historical Geography 35(4): 668-689.

Morrison, Toni
1987     Beloved: A Novel. New York: Knopf.

Ogden, Laura A.
2021     Loss & Wonder at the World’s End. Durham: Duke University Press.

Rich, Adrienne
1978     The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977. New York: Norton & Co Inc.

Said, Edward
1993     Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus.

Sharpe, Christina
2016     In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press.

Stoler, Ann Laura
2002     Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance. Archival Science 2: 87-109

2008     Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Durham: Duke University Press.