Early archival microhistories worked in archives but did not treat them as ethnographic subjects

Evidence

Both questioned “how people told stories, what they thought a good story was, how they accounted for motive.” In Davis’s notion of “fiction in the archives,” she worked through pardon tales to reveal both the “constraints of the law” and its popular manipulations, both the terms of argumentation and the broader set of literary forms invoked to support or undermine those claims. Still, these were not ethnographies of the archive, but in it. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 289

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 289
• XREF: connects to: The archive’s ethnographic content lives in gaps between state rules and practice.; Archival productions should be read as ethnography, not just normative taxonomies.; The archival turn in scholarship predates and is not caused by Derrida’s Archive Fever (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Current colonial scholars read archives as places and cultural spaces #responds-to (0.80)
• Colonial archives should be treated as ethnographic sites not extraction sources #responds-to (0.70)
• Feminist historians show male prowess shaped archival production and excluded women’s histories #complicates (0.40)