The archival turn in scholarship predates and is not caused by Derrida’s Archive Fever

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: Emphasis on dramatic reversals obscures muted archival disruptions; Early archival microhistories worked in archives but did not treat them as ethnographic subjects — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 289; the MOC “The Authority Apparatus: How Textual Orders Make and Unmake Power”

Related

• Early archival microhistories worked in archives but did not treat them as ethnographic subjects (similarity 0.89)
• The archival turn in scholarship preceded Derrida’s Archive Fever. (similarity 0.86)
• The archive’s ethnographic content lives in gaps between state rules and practice. (similarity 0.85)
• Archival productions should be read as ethnography, not just normative taxonomies. (similarity 0.84)
• Archive-based ethnography predates the recent archival turn in anthropology. (similarity 0.83)
• Historians and theorists treat the archive as distinct analytic objects that are nonetheless blurring (similarity 0.81)
• Critical history reconceived archives from passive source to active subject. (similarity 0.79)
• Archives are cultural spaces, not just document collections, shaped by colonial relations (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Early archival microhistories worked in archives but did not treat them as ethnographic subjects #corroborates (0.70) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 289
• Emphasis on dramatic reversals obscures muted archival disruptions #corroborates (0.60)