- Due to illness, please note that the workshop element of this event has been postponed until Semester 2. Katherine Verdery's talk will continue as scheduled but will be an online only event. Please note that the Zoom for this presentation has been amended (https://zoom.us/j/98592709524).
This event, organised by Professor Stefan Hanß, explores the emotional resonance of archives for the fieldwork of researchers. What does the physical encounter with archival materials mean? How does it affect the stories that researchers tell in their work? How can we come to understand emotions as part of archive encounters? Unpacking the personal, emotional stories that make up researchers’ experiences in the archive, we will discuss archival research as a kind of anthropological fieldwork, situating emotions key within the field of the production of knowledge. This event will comprise a discussion and reading session, as well as a keynote.
2-4pm: Workshop (in-person)
Please read (some of) the following texts:
• Natalie Zemon Davis, Passion For History: Conversations with Denis Crouzet (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2021), 1–29, https://www.librarysearch.manchester.ac.uk/permalink/44MAN_INST/bofker/alma992985651807601631
• Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995): 9–63, https://www.jstor.org/stable/465144
• Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives (New Haven: Yales University Press, 2013), 1–17, https://www.librarysearch.manchester.ac.uk/permalink/44MAN_INST/1r887gn/alma992984372493401631
• Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” The Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (2001): 129–44, https://www.librarysearch.manchester.ac.uk/permalink/44MAN_INST/1rfd42k/cdi_proquest_journals_224900690
• Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 17–53, https://www.librarysearch.manchester.ac.uk/permalink/44MAN_INST/1r887gn/alma992984086924701631
4-5pm: Keynote Lecture (hybrid)
Katherine Verdery (New York), ‘An Ethnographer Encounters Her Secret Police File: The Place of Emotions in Creating Anthropological Knowledge’
https://zoom.us/j/93089379928 (Meeting-ID: 930 8937 9928)
Short bio: Professor Katherine Verdery is Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of numerous books, including My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File (Duke University Press, 2018)—winner of the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing 2018 and the 2020 ASEEES Distinguished Contributions to Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Award.
Abstract: For many decades, anthropologists didn’t much do archives, except to acquire a bit of “historical information” to contextualize their field data. Their resort to history might be summary, or it might be more extensive, as in work done by the Manchester School so as to understand, for example, the development of a labor market for work in Africa’s gold mines. While many anthropologists obtained historical information for their field sites, that was based not necessarily on extensive archival research but on reading government reports and secondary sources. In a word, the prevailing functionalist paradigm required relatively little time spent in archives.
The turn to an anthropology informed by historical materialism, among other things, encouraged greater attention to historical process. This, in turn, fostered excursions into archives of many kinds. The work of American anthropologists Ann Stoler and Valentine Daniel, for example, has shown how archival research can enhance both ethnographic understanding and the further development of anthropological theory concerning (for example) affect and emotions.
Verdery’s lecture concerns archival encounters of yet another kind: her confrontation with the archive of Secret Police reports about her during her sixteen years (1973–1989) of ethnographic research under Romania’s communist regime. This encounter produced months of struggle with the emotions it produced, which form the material of her lecture.
Archive Fever is co-funded by CIDRAL as part of its 2023-2024 Archives series, and by the John Rylands Research Institute.
Image © Stefan Hanß
