GS202 Lecture 8: Archival Research
Document Summary
Associated with the discipline of history but many other disciplines such as. Anthropology, global studies, sociology, and political science also draw on archival research. Many archives are read and interpreted in relation to the present. Archival research and the historical writing that has generally arisen from it have always been bound to the legitimization of state power (king 2012, 15) The maintenance (destruction and fabrication) of written historical records has allowed different groups to lay claim to their own version of the past and consolidate control over the present (king 2012, 15) Since the 1970s scholars have questioned the dominant modes of historical research and writing. They recognized that the acts of producing, organizing and classifying archives is a form of knowledge and power. Archival collections as whole constrain the types of histories made possible and impossible through them (king 2012, 17)
