Archival Silences

Missing, Lost and, Uncreated Archives

Michael Moss, David Thomas, Michael Moss, David Thomas

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000385236
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Langues et linguistique
• Sous-sujet: Bibliothèques et sciences de l'information

Archival Silences demonstrates emphatically that archival absences exist all over the globe. The book questions whether benign 'silence' is an appropriate label for the variety of destructions, concealment and absences that can be identified within archival collections.

Including contributions from archivists and scholars working around the world, this truly international collection examines archives in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, England, India, Iceland, Jamaica, Malawi, The Philippines, Scotland, Turkey and the United States. Making a clear link between autocratic regimes and the failure to record often horrendous crimes against humanity, the volume demonstrates that the failure of governments to create records, or to allow access to records, appears to be universal. Arguing that this helps to establish a hegemonic narrative that excludes the 'other', this book showcases the actions historians and archivists have taken to ensure that gaps in archives are filled. Yet the book also claims that silences in archives are inevitable and argues not only that recordkeeping should be mandated by international courts and bodies, but that we need to develop other ways of reading archives broadly conceived to compensate for absences.

Archival Silences addresses fundamental issues of access to the written record around the world. It is directed at those with a concern for social justice, particularly scholars and students of archival studies, history, sociology, international relations, international law, business administration and information science.

1
Theorising the silences

Michael Moss and David Thomas

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who wrote on the liberation struggle of the slaves of Haiti, was the pioneering writer on archival silences. For Trouillot, silences were inherent in the writing of history and in the creation of archives. Sometimes, they were the things left out, not deliberately but because they were not seen as important at the time. He argued that silences are created at four central moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).¹

He used the example of the Haitian liberation struggle. There are very few sources in France describing the views of the revolutionaries because the European intelligentsia could not conceive of the idea of a black republic and believed that the revolt was caused by outside agitators. This disdain for the revolutionaries has continued almost to our day, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm scarcely mentions Haiti in his book The Age of Revolutions, 1789–1843. Trouillot said ‘What we are observing here is archival power at its strongest, the power to define what is and what is not a serious object of research and therefore of mention’.²

We fully accept Trouillot’s theorising of archival silences, but, in this chapter, we wish to add some glosses to it, which, while not taking away from his essential argument, offer a more in-depth view.

When we first began thinking about silences, we assumed that silences in archives are always present and that users are normally correct in asserting that evidence is missing. We also believed that the ending of silences – the discovery or release of previously silenced archives – would have a healing effect. We also accepted the common trope that the marginalised are most likely to suffer from silences. In fact, the situation is much more nuanced than we originally thought. Although all those statements are true, they are only true up to a point.

What we have discovered is just how visceral and political archival silences can be, but that the ending of silences does not always solve anything. Moreover, we are increasingly aware of the issues posed by the textuality of archives. The issue of which is the ‘original’ of a record that has long troubled manuscript and biblical scholars will surely come to trouble archive users in the digital age. Digitisation is silencing records because scholars at wealthy universities in the north have access to a diversity of material unavailable to scholars at poorer universities in the south. At the same time, digitisation programmes may mean that records that are non-western, non-canonical and non-quotidian are excluded, thus continuing to silence the poor and marginalised.

Finally, we are increasingly aware that silences mean silences. That archival practices have turned records that were intended to be spoken out loud – to be performed – into texts to be read silently and by so doing have robbed them of much of their meaning. This is particularly the case with evidence presented in courts of law that was either given by those involved or was in the form of depositions.

Silences only exist when researchers in the archives notice them

Silences only come into existence when researchers look for specific pieces of information in the archive. Until then, they are uncreated and potential rather than actual. When Richard W. Pollay, historian and paper and advertising collector, first began studying the archives of the advertising industry and marketing ephemera in the mid-1970s, he remarked on the archival silences. Apart from limited collections at the New York Public Library and the US Library of Congress, there was very little material available to researchers.³

It is important to be nuanced in thinking about silences and not jump to any conclusions without considering all possibilities. Many silences could be avoided by a more determined approach by creators and archivists and a more liberal attitude by governments. The availability of archives of advertising has been totally transformed since Pollay made his complaint in the 1970s. A combination of better catalogues, more digitisation, greater interest in the study of advertising and marketing and the donation of material to archives means both that more records are available and that there is greater awareness of their availability. Indeed, it seems that, even at the time he was writing, the situation was not as bad as Pollay described.⁴

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

While Pollay was quite reasonable in his expectations, the fact that a user believes that there is a gap or silence in the archives may not necessarily be true. It could be an example of confirmation bias. This form of cognitive bias was defined by Nickerson as the ‘seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis in hand’.⁵ Nickerson cites the example of the British expedition to West Africa in 1919 to take advantage of a solar eclipse to test Einstein’s theory that light would be bent by a gravitational field. The evidence taken by the expedition was noisy and its leader, Arthur Eddington, had to d...