Dead ends in and out of the archive: an ethnography of Dār al Wathā’iq al Qawmiyya, the Egyptian National Archive

Abstract

Only apparently a house, a domicile, an address, the Archive has never been a neutral place. As social theorists have argued at length, not only do archives dutifully collect and safeguard (certain fragments of) the past but they also produce what can be enunciated. They shape the historically thinkable and the politically utterable. But not all are welcome in such dwellings. In this article, I argue that Dār al Wathā’iq al Qawmiyya, the Egyptian National Archive, functions as a microcosm of today’s Egypt and circumscribes the questions that historians as well as the public are allowed to ask. In ethnographic form, I explore the practices that regulate who is allowed into Dār al Wathā’iq, what can be accessed once the researcher sets foot past its door, and how such archival experience unfolds. I claim that the archive itself can morph into a locale of every-day surveillance and arbitrariness. Archival fieldwork is not an impartial practice. It should be acknowledged as such given the peculiar challenges and possibilities with which it confronts researchers as they stumble along in and out of the archives.

Cite this

Lucia Carminati (2018). Dead ends in and out of the archive: an ethnography of Dār al Wathā’iq al Qawmiyya, the Egyptian National Archive. Rethinking History. https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2018.1494933

@article{lucia2018dead,
  title  = {Dead ends in and out of the archive: an ethnography of Dār al Wathā’iq al Qawmiyya, the Egyptian National Archive},
  author = {Carminati, Lucia},
  year   = {2018},
  journal = {Rethinking History},
  doi    = {10.1080/13642529.2018.1494933}
}

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