Brandon Chye

Archival research to locate and analyse primary source documents continues to be one of the fundamental methods for social science researchers and historians alike to attain understandings of the past. In comparison to alternative qualitative research methods such as
sampling surveys, ethnographies or interviews, the use of information stored in archives constitutes a relatively different means of understanding how societies function.
How can the field ethnographer conduct his work once past cultures and societies disappear into the mists of time or are irreversibly transformed?
 

Moreover, there are certain drawbacks to conducting research that risk intrusively comprising the accuracy and quality of information. Despite the lofty aspirations of classical ethnographers such as Bronislaw Malinowski for field researchers to reach a "harmony with his surroundings" and blend into the social milieu, modern social scientists would concede that attaining such a level of inconspicuousness is challenging, if not impossible (2014: 8). Documentary research from archives thus potentially allows researchers rich and socially unobtrusive insights into their chosen field regardless of challenges in temporal or spatial accessibility (Berg 2001: 189).

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Although social science researchers also use additional frameworks of analysis to look for trends and patterns in information, employing critical methods of analysing archival documents requires understanding the broader historiographical debate surrounding the epistemology of sources and written communication. I will thus outline the prominent methodological approaches that have been proposed towards reading archival documents and past materials in general. Subsequently, I will also examine how such analytical techniques can enter into dialogue with the broader methods of social science research. Employing only traditional methods of using archival documents as empirical markers results in a relatively limited reading of source information. Incorporating analyse of `form' such as linguistic and cultural critique adds new layers of understanding to archival documents. Nonetheless, attention to material consistency is still indispensable to authenticate source reliability to a certain degree.

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Ad Fontes: Empirical Perspectives on Source Content

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The employment of archival documents in research raises the epistemological issue of precisely how reliable such material is as recorded information on past events and historical cultures. The non-sequitur of this perennial historiographical debate is the ultimate question, how should archival documents be read? On one hand, conservative empiricists in the tradition of the German historian Leopold Von Ranke promulgate the belief that the researcher can employ archival documents to objectively show historical events. Here the researcher or itinerant historian is akin to a skilled craftsman cum treasure hunter who locates and pieces together hitherto undiscovered archival sources to faithfully reconstruct the past, wie es eigentlich gewesen (as it actually happened) (Munslow 2006: 20). Geoffrey Elton’s call for a “rational, independent and impartial investigation” of documentary sources echoes this conviction towards documents being imbued with historical objectivity. To prevent reading historical material with reduced analytical rigour due to cultural relativism, Elton advocates a “subjection of the (researcher’s self) to the object of his study” (1991: 67). From this school of thought, archival documents are able to reveal objective truths about the cultures and events they claim to represent. The British archivist Hilary Jenkins thus encapsulated the archival ethos as such in 1947: “His Creed, the Sanctity of Evidence; His Task, the Conservation of every scrap of Evidence attaching to Documents committed to his charge” (Eastwood 2010: 18).

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Yet maintaining a hardened empiricism raises the conundrum of how to choose between potentially contradictory sources of information. The ‘fact fetishism’ of traditional empirical historicism is by-and-large rejected. Few modern-day historians or researchers would completely advocate this style of reading archival material due to the relatively uncritical certitudes it relies upon. Nonetheless, there is still value in bringing in empirical mind-sets through what modern historians label as “practical realism” that help in judging authenticity if documentary content is consistent with larger bodies of commonly accepted information in the world (Appleby, Hunt and Jacob 1994: 283).

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It may not be possible for an archival document or a researcher to be completely objective and value-neutral. Nevertheless, personal subjectivities and ignorant misinterpretations can be minimized. By approaching subject-matter with a degree of sociocultural empathy, source material can be analysed with greater accuracy and nuance (Collingwood 1946: 215). As Gerda Lerner aptly notes, “We must enter past worlds with curiosity and with respect. When we do this, the rewards are considerable” (Lerner 1997: 201).

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Deconstructing Truth and Meaning

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On the opposite end of the spectrum, critics of the archives stem from the notion that the usage of primary documents is an inherently flawed method. If archival documents are windows into the past, anti-empiricists such as E. H. Carr would argue that they only offer obscured perspectives for several reasons. David Lowenthal has elaborated on the epistemological shortcomings of using historical methods to understand the past (1985: 214-219).

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Firstly, the original authors of documentary sources have limited ability to perceive and represent the complexity of unfolding situations that are “virtually infinite” (Lowenthal 1985: 214). Thus, no source or archival collection can capture the sum totality of factors constituting an event. Secondly, written works are not ontologically the past itself, but intermediated mediums relying upon the interpretive filters of their creators and those reading them. Objective readings of archival documents are thus considered impossible due to the relativistic myopia of cultural presentisms within an author and a researcher. Due to this, Carr is immensely sceptical of there being “a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently” of the researcher (2008: 10). Taken to the extreme, this disbelief in the possibility of finding historical truths verges into post-modernist denials in the existence of an ultimate truth.

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Drawing from philological developments in linguistics and anthropology, extreme post-modernists consider textual material to be unreliable due to the selective, manufactured nature of historical sources. Deconstructionist works such as Hayden White’s Metahistory have controversially proposed that critical literary approaches are necessary to unravel meaning in wholly subjective sources. Documents should be treated as literary artefacts and researchers must dissect how authors shape their written narratives and convey that to an intended audience. White’s tropological approach examines semantic structures and emplotments in texts to reveal the ideological predilections of their authors (Kansteiner 1993: 277-278).

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As Munslow has noted, the implications of this relativistic approach are that documents lose their a priori factual meaning and depend on the lenses of their writers (2006: 33). Radical post-modern approaches towards archival material are largely eschewed by most archival researchers. Such an analytical methodology leaves little space for engaging and extrapolating information with the hypotheticals, models and paradigms of other social science research methods. Nonetheless, these critical approaches towards documents have engendered moderated methodologies that utilise similar cultural lenses.

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Reading Along the Grain: Filtering Archival Material through Discourse

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While empirical and post-modern methods of interpreting documents differ in many respects, these two approaches do not necessarily preclude each other. Newer post-modern approaches towards reading material move beyond attention to historical narrative and literary form to also consider larger social cultural contexts in which documents are produced and read. This often employs a synthesis of looking at empirical documentary content, with attention to the subjectivity of discourse. As the South African archivist Verne Harris summarises: “If archival records reflect reality, they do so complicity and in a deeply fractured and shifting way” (1997: 135). This analytical method positions archives not only as socially-created sites of knowledge retrieval but also as loci of knowledge production (Stoler 2002: 90).

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By considering the archive as an area of study as much as the documents within them, Ann Stoler argues that archival research involves not only reading for information but critically questioning how documents are ordered and classified within the collection. Moreover, this archival turn recognises that considering what information is not chosen to be documented reveals as much as that which is (Hill 1993: 66). On one hand, these interpretations hold ethnographic value for understanding the governmentalities and cultures of the individuals and institutions collating archives. On the otherhand, having the self-reflexivity that archival discourses are likely to be elite-centric also allows researchers to also engage in a reading of documents from below.

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The reorientation in how researchers reinterpret archival documents’ contents through cultural form creates opportunities for what many historians consider a form of social justice giving greater historical voice to Social Other as conceptualised in ‘subaltern classes’. In an approach pioneered by Subaltern Studies proponents such as Ranajit Guha, archival material and the discourses they embody are scrutinized for inconsistencies to reveal new understandings about the historical lives of lower social classes (1988). In fact, modern archival scholars such as Ann Stoler (2002) and Nicholas Dirks (2002) have blended these methods to read “along the grains” of colonial archives to highlight various tensions and ambiguities that were created through the clash of elite and popular discourses. As Terry Cook notes, the postmodern reconfigurations in approaches to archives and their cultural contexts has seen a paradigm shift from examining characteristics of individual documents to also considering the institutional cultures of knowledge production and employment (2001: 21).

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Engaging Archival Processes rather than Archival Products

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In an era of “Alternative Facts” and other such relativistic parlance seeking to obfuscate…, the task of interpreting and writing rigorous historical research through archival material is made all the more important. The epistemological limitations of archival documents need to be adequately recognised before this versatile body of data can engage with alternative methods of social science research.

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It is true that documentary sources are unable to offer a comprehensive account of the past res gestae. Nonetheless, the limitations of these materials do not necessarily invalidate the ontological existence of historical facts that can be corroborated with external information. Documents should be critically judged and interpreted for authenticity – that they are what they claim to be – rather than by empirical notions of objective truth. Content analyses of documents do still have a merit, yet these approaches should not be conducted inflexibly. By also considering contexts both “inside and outside the archive”, primary source documents can be interpreted through multiple filters of sociohistorical discourse (Dirks 2015: 42).

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I would thus consider critically inquiry into archival documents’ cultural forms to be important approaches that bring archival research into dialogue with other disciplines. These methods of reading along the grain of archives focus on both visible content and the subtler aspects of form. While there have been distinct interpretive approaches opting for each, neglecting one above the another diminishes the depth of analyses that can be made into the material.  These methodologies are not necessarily antithetical to each other; although post-modernist methodologies insert degrees of uncertainty and subjectivity into readings of archives, these subtler methods of interpreting documents can also add more nuanced layers of value. Nevertheless, interpretations of form and aesthetic should engage with Appleby and Hunt’s concept of practical realism to understand how archival documents fit into broader patterns of information. To do otherwise risks a relativistic fictionalization of sources that lacks the ability to persuasively engage with the wider corpus of social science paradigms.

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Bibliography

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Berg, Bruce L. Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2001.

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Carr, Edward H. What is History? London: Penguin Books, 2008.

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Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946.

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Cook, Terry. "Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts." Archival Science 1, 2001: 3-24.

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Dirks, Nicholas. Autobiography of an Archive: A Scholar's Passage to India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

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—. Castes of the Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

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Eastwood, Terry. "A Contested Realm: The Nature of Archives and the Orientation of Archival Science." In Currents of Archival Thinking, by Heather MacNeil, & Terry Eaastwood, 3-24. Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited, 2010.

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Elton, Geoffrey R. Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

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Guha, Ranajit. "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency." In Selected Subaltern Studies, by Ranajit Guha, & Gayatri Spivak, 45-88. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

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Harris, Verne. "Claiming Less, Delivering More: A Critique of Positivist Formulations on Archives in South Africa." Archivaria 44, 1997: 132-141.

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Kansteiner, Wulf. "Hayden White's Critique on the Writing of History." History and Theory 32 no.3, 1993: 273-295.

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Lerner, Gerda. Why History Matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

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Lowenthal, David. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

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Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge, 2014.

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Munslow, Alun. Deconstructing History. London: Routledge, 2006.

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Stoler, Ann. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

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

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