Imperfect tense: an ethnography of the archive

Abstract

In this article, ethnographic archives and their doubles, personal archives, are analyzed as cultural constructions whose comprehension is essential to understanding the ways in which professional narratives are produced and how their invention results from an intense dialogue involving imagination and intellectual authority. Taking the Ruth Landes Papers held by the National Anthropological Archives (Smithsonian Institution) as its object of analysis, the text examines the various logics informing the institution of thematic limits to the archives, their criteria for legitimacy and inclusion, the transformation of their author's work instruments into 'artefacts', 'documents' and 'sources'; their conceptions of 'documentary value,' their internal economy and their uses in the continual (if shifting) reification of the authority of their 'authors' as key figures within anthropology's different histories.

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