Colonial archives and the arts of governance
Colonial archives and the arts of governance
复制标题
殖民地档案与治理艺术
DOI：
--
复制
发表时间：
2002
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
A. Stoler
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
A. Stoler
从事后殖民研究的人类学家越来越多地采用历史视角并使用档案。然而，他们的档案活动倾向于更多地是一种提取，而不是一种民族志。因此，文件仍然被零零碎碎地引用，以确认殖民地发明的某些做法，或强调文化要求，沉默。然而，这种对政府委员会、报告和其他档案来源内容的挖掘很少注意到它们的特殊位置和形式。学者们需要从档案来源转向档案作为主题。本文以荷属东印度群岛的文献生产为例，认为学者不应将档案馆视为知识检索的场所，而应将其视为知识生产的场所，将其视为国家的纪念碑以及国家民族志的场所。这就需要持续地将档案作为“事实”生产的文化媒介、正在形成的分类法和国家权威的媒介。档案的构成、形式、分类和认识论体系在特定时期发出的信号，都是（并反映了）殖民政治和国家权力的关键特征。档案是19世纪晚期帝国国家的最高技术，是汇集（并见证）秘密、法律和权力之间联系的编纂信仰的储存库。
Anthropologists engaged in post-colonial studies are increasingly adopting an historical perspective and using archives. Yet their archival activity tends to remain more an extractive than an ethnographic one. Documents are thus still invoked piecemeal to confirm the colonial invention of certain practices or to underscore cultural claims, silent. Yet such mining of thecontent of government commissions, reports, and other archival sources rarely pays attention to their peculiar placement andform. Scholars need to move from archive-assource to archive-as-subject. This article, using document production in the Dutch East Indies as an illustration, argues that scholars should view archives not as sites of knowledge retrieval, but of knowledge production, as monuments of states as well as sites of state ethnography. This requires a sustained engagement with archives as cultural agents of “fact” production, of taxonomies in the making, and of state authority. What constitutes the archive, what form it takes, and what systems of classification and epistemology signal at specific times are (and reflect) critical features of colonial politics and state power. The archive was the supreme technology of the late nineteenth-century imperial state, a repository of codified beliefs that clustered (and bore witness to) connections between secrecy, the law, and power.