Archive-based ethnography predates the recent archival turn in anthropology.

Evidence

One could argue that “the archive” for historians and “the Archive” for cultural theorists have been wholly different analytic objects: for the former, a body of documents and the institutions that house them, for the latter a metaphoric invocation for any corpus of selective collections and the longings that the acquisitive quests for the primary, originary, and untouched entail. Those differences might suggest sharply defined domains, but the blurring that is so common today is hardly a recent intervention. For, indeed, something resembling the broader social life of an archive, what might be called “ethnography in an archival mode,” has been around for some time. Carlo Ginzburg’s microhistory of a sixteenth-century miller, like Natalie Davis’s use of pardon tales, drew on “hostile” documents to reveal “the gap between the image underlying the interrogations of judges and the actual testimony of the accused.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 288

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to Ginzburg’s microhistory and Natalie Davis’s ‘fiction in the archives’ — methodological touchstones for how hostile documents reveal subaltern voices.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the historian’s ‘archive’ vs. cultural theorist’s ‘Archive’, a key conceptual distinction in the field.

Related

• Historians and theorists treat the archive as distinct analytic objects that are nonetheless blurring (similarity 0.89)
• The archive’s ethnographic content lives in gaps between state rules and practice. (similarity 0.86)
• Early archival microhistories worked in archives but did not treat them as ethnographic subjects (similarity 0.86)
• Archival productions should be read as ethnography, not just normative taxonomies. (similarity 0.84)
• The archival turn in scholarship predates and is not caused by Derrida’s Archive Fever (similarity 0.84)