I have yet to finish the whole book, but wanted to post in response to some of the bigger ideas and approaches that this text takes. Specifically the framing of the archive of the National Police as a body itself, that changes over time, and the direct links and applicability of Weld’s conceptualizations to archiving with the archive being constructed right now for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the Indian Residential School System here in Canada.
One of the salient points that Weld makes about the archive as a thing is that it exists in both cultural and political realms, and that the meaning we take from it exists in relation to how we not only conceptualize the archive as material and as a body in the intellectual sense, but also how we treat the archive as a political actor. The transition of a body of documents used in the systematic oppression of large populations into a body of documents used to uncover truths about a horrifying past and bring not only justice, but also some form of legitimation to the experiences and stories of survivors (and possibly closure if they are inclined toward it), is such a fascinating history to trace. Such a close attention to how an archive is read raised several questions and links in my mind to the TRC.
Later this semester, there will be a pole-raising ceremony at UBC to commemorate the opening of a digital archive of the TRC (which will access the National Research Centre in Manitoba). The fact that a digital archive of all things (not even the ‘real’ thing) will be honoured not only with such a powerful ceremony, but also marked by the pole itself shows that there is a profound connection to this archive. However, the question of how the archive will be used by researchers is still to be seen. At the centre of Weld’s connection to this archive of the National Police is this idea of somehow being “able to resurrect a paper cadaver in postwar Guatemala – to learn what become of a ‘desparecido’, or identify a ‘desparecido’s’ remains, or write and reveal new histories – is a gift of inestimable value, a temple’s treasure indeed.” (p.19) This approach to a historical topic is to me very noble, and such a useful guide when trying to conceptualize how I might approach work on Residential School and using the TRC archives (in Indigenous Studies/history, especially in Canada, this is always part of the story).
Some may see this view as biased, but she argues that archives are inherently political bodies, and should not be treated apolitically.
Another question that I would pose to the class is whether others had similar responses to this work? Whether you see/saw immediate connections to the people and places you’ll be studying? And how you responded to this approach of seeing her job as a historian/anthropologist as a political and personal imperative?
I find some of Weld’s historiographical questions somewhat problematic when turned to Early Modern and Medieval history. If archives are sites of struggle, and the power of interpretation over them is something not to be allowed easily, then the documents must have important and urgent meaning for those people in the present. I seriously doubt that my accessing medieval archives on Mongol events in the 13th or 14th centuries, however revolutionary they might be(and I indeed I do hope), the separation with current events is so distant, that there really is not much struggle to be had. For instance, if I had discovered a document from the Mongol Yuan court ceding the whole of Manchuria to the Koryo(Korean) court in gratitude for help in the Red Turban Rebellion (totally counterfactual),and records of the transfer of household registers which would give the Koryo Dynasty the bureaucratic means to control and tax the region, would that have larger geopolitical ramifications in the present? Most likely not, since the Yuan Empire does not so neatly correspond to the present Chinese nation-state and the Koryo Dynasty covered an area constituting both the Koreas and then some. Perhaps this adumbrates a further problem that issues in medieval history do not correspond neatly to the pervasive vision of the nation-state. That seems to be a key part of Weld’s view of the archives as a political body, since it is the site of contestation for different visions of the Guatemalan nation should be.
However, with that said Weld’s argument that engagement of the younger generations with the archive is one of social reconstruction, identity building and inter-generational exchange is for me quite salient. What struck me about this is that the experiences of young people who were working in the Project were building identity, memory, and relatedness that informed their ideas about their future careers, political involvement and more broadly where Guatemala should be headed. However, they were basing these ideas on a particular experience with a specific archive of documents, with specific former revolutionary colleagues at a specific time in Guatemalan history. Those restrictions seemed fundamental to how these people conceived of identity (inheritors of a certain tradition and political legacy etc..). Some outright said they wanted to work with social or political issues, or make a difference after identifying with the content of the archives and that this activism differentiated them from their peers. The power to determine what is in a particular archive then seems to be equal to or even more important than the power of access which is what Weld argues at the beginning of the book. For instance, in China the Manchu language archives from the Qing dynasty in the last twenty years have been/are being opened, digitized and published. This was an action that the Chinese government sanctioned through its various academic bodies. It has led to Manchus who had previously hid their identity following the ethnic iconoclasm of the Chinese revolution to become interested again in their own histories and resurrect memories of those bygone ancestors. Notably, these documents are all pre-1911, the majority from the 16th-19th centuries. Their support of a Manchu identity fits awkwardly, yet still adequately within the state’s multi-ethnic discourse, while being remote enough to avoid too much meditation on the popular level. Critically, much has not been translated into Chinese. Almost all Manchus cannot speak or read Manchu. In contrast, the government has not opened archives specifically pertaining to the Communist party and its inner workings, leaving these documents for the use of the government itself. These documents from the Communist takeover and how the state functioned thereafter have the ability to support narratives of nation, state and people that run counter to the Mao-centered metanarrative of salvation from the Japanese and the Nationalists. Indeed archives available now on that period seemed designed to include materials which support that position. Likewise this would support a version of modern Chinese identity separate from the official line. In this light, archives are indeed sites of contest in terms of identity, but I think some types of archives when designed by a state entity might be as restricting as they are empowering for those who access them. I am not sure what others think about this in terms of the archives they have encountered.
This week’s reading Paper Cadavers is fascinating to me and it makes a lot of sense to me because as I was reading it, my own country’s(China) history during the Cold War period constantly emerged in my head which represented the extreme opposite side of Guatemala politically(communism), however, shared the very similarities the people in Guatemala went through, even though maybe not as bloody so far as I know.
As the author put it, “his book has outlined a dialectical analysis of archival recovery in contexts of political transition. Records once used in the service of state terror are repurposed by surviving reformers as building blocks for the rule of law and tools of social reckoning” (237). This idea is very new and attracting to me. Since I almost have never read anything or had any knowledge about archives, I would never thought that archives would have such power for social reckoning, social change and movement. And I would never thought that the control of archives would mean a control of power: previously in the hand of the bloody government, now, in a sense, at least for the police archive case, at the hand of progressives.
The book, at the beginning, states that “this book not only details how the messy process of history-writing and rewriting functions but also makes an argument about why it matters”; and this makes me think about what we have discussed during the first week on the topic of “what is history” (7). And there is a point that what history really was matters less than how history works. I think this book adheres to this message in the sense that even though what really happened in the papers stored at the archives did matter to most people, it was really the process of being able to access them, of being able to go through this whole process really make sense, really make this program powerful and received so many attention. Because as the author states that most people working on the Police Archives already knew or at least had a sense of what had happened to their lost loved ones or to their fellow countrymen, they still work there partly try to find solid evidence to what really happened, but more importantly, to try to open a way, using this history as a powerful method, to a more free and democratic ideals.
Moreover, the chapter on how archives should be organized and utilized is very interesting to me: the need of provenance and original order. Probably because I have never been exposed to the knowledge of the science of archives, I felt that the methodology of archival science itself contains power, especially in the Guatemala case. Because both “provenance” and “original order” require people who work at the Police Archives to try to think, to imagine, to reconstruct the way the police used to think in the time period of those archives. By doing so, at least at that moment, the power kind of transferred to their hands in some way.
Also, maybe I am too naive to comment that, but it is still a shock to me to see U.S sending dictator as well as knowledge to control people in extreme methods just to prevent the potential spread of communism and just to protect US economic interests. In this part, I cannot prevent myself from seeing the context in the broader Cold War context where my own Country, used very brutal and inhumane methods to cleanse “internal enemies” who were just suspicious of being capitalism or not so “revolutionary”(called “counter-revolutionary” in my country). For me, I saw that even though China and Guatemala belonged to the very opposite camp of the cold war, they were so similar in their ways of treating their own people. And it was a very unpleasant moment for me to link Guatemala to my own country together as I read through this book.
Due to the limitation of space, I will just state one more point that I think is very interesting. I really appreciate the author’s effort to see the case presented by the Political Archives from both sides: from the old conservative power, and from the progressives. The author states later that after working together with each other for a long time, “nearly everyone I spoke with stressed the idea that the police were also victims of the war, and if this did not mitigate the PN’s abuses, it partly served to explain them” (176). Also, at the last of the book, the author tries to explain in some way the retaliation of the conservative power in more recent years because those legal cases used to accuse them in courts “prominently reiterated the army’s version of history, in which its cadres had loyally rescued the nation from the dangers of subversion” (244). This, I think it is very interesting and worth pondering. Sometimes what we saw as absolute truth might sounds very different in others opinion.
Lastly, I have a few questions. Throughout their initial work as amateur historians and archivists, those people tried to imagine and re-construct the tree of the police organization, since as we can see, the U.S has always been in very close contact with the Guatemala conservative government, and they introduced and taught the Guatemala government of everything they needed regarding to recording, archives and extreme methods of cleansing enemies, the U.S would definitely know how the secret police department worked back then. Why not just ask the U.S on that information since the U.S also helped with the archive work by sending archivist to assist them. Moreover, it is surprising for me to see that at later stage, when the archive works had to be more vertical than horizontal, it was the older people who support that and the young people were not so happy that being too professional than intimate. I thought it might be vice versa.
Anyways, I really like this book in the sense that it really makes me think a lot more archival-ly than before. Also, I have to say that I really admire those people who committed to do this work. Some people talked about the pressures and stresses when dealing those memories every day; I just read this book for this week and I sometimes would even dream about those things, not to speak people who had went through all of this.
Weld writes that “[at] the PN archives, relatively few ‘smoking gun’ documents were ever unearthed. Rather, most case investigation rested upon complex processes of triangulation among multiple sources…these records’ legal proof value depended on how effectively the Project workers ‘constructed an archives,’ and maintained the documents’ archival bonds, in the midst of the chaos of their discovery site” (168-169).
This quote strikes me because the readings thus far have emphasized understanding sources in context—in relation to the author’s background, other texts, audiences, and documentary media. Likewise, Weld’s idea is that the PN documents had to be systematized, or “constructed as archives,” in order to have epistemic (and political) utility. So my question is this: what would a “smoking gun” document actually look like? Do such things actually exist in isolation from a broader context? What can historians do with a single document?
Second, I think the temporality of the narrative is also something that is fundamental to Weld’s book, which Aaron’s already noted. Access to the PN archives could only have been permitted (to the extent that it was) in the post-war era. Its political salience, meanwhile, derived largely from the fact that those affected by PN crimes and indeed many of the perpetrators of those crimes were still alive at the time. On a deeper level, I think we can also historicize such things as the phrasing of grievances in terms of human rights, as historian Samuel Moyn has done in his work, for example. All this is to say that perhaps the political function of the archive, or on a broader level the power/knowledge relation, is something that demands detailed historical treatment.
I really enjoyed this book! Basically there are three reasons for this:
First, it is not only an interesting and for me quite new topic but it is also written in a way that I wanted read further. It was quite suspenseful and I was a bit disappointed at the end that the author could not tell me if Montt was convicted of his crimes. By the way, just yesterday brought my favourite German newspaper an article about the way the current Guatemalan society commemorates the years of dictatorship. Compared to Weld’s book it looks a bit better nowadays, even when the judgement of Montt was overturned and the new suit has not begun yet.
Second, I think Weld gives a good example why history still should be involved in politics. Even if we can’t transfer this one-to-one to other counties, it reminds us what importance doing history can have for current and future societies.
Third, Weld brings to my mind that archives are constructed and organised for a purpose. The story of the PN archive tells this two times, first the original organising of the police itself and second by the Project to reconstruct the actions of the PN. We as historians should keep in mind that every archive was somehow constructed. None saved everything and therefore historians won’t find the whole past’s reality in any archive. This is true even for archives which a far less dramatic history than the PN archive.
So in general this book made a positive impression on me. Nevertheless I am not sure what I should think of Weld’s usage of theory (for example Foucualt). At the very end of some of her chapters she mentions Foucault like she wanted to say “hey, look, he was right!” Is this the way we should use theories? I am not sure and would like to discuss this question tomorrow morning in class.
Paper Cadavers speaks to a lot of what I envision doing in my future research. My goal is to work in the British National Archives in Kew and to exhume recently declassified documents relating to British actions in Kenya during the 1950s/60s—i.e., the Mau Mau Crisis. Moreover, at some point farther down the line, I would like to visit the Kenya National Archives in Nairobi and potentially interview Mau Mau survivors. In a way, then, there are obvious parallels between what Weld’s research entailed, and what I would like to pursue. Kenya, like Guatemala, continues to grapple with its postcolonial(?) legacy and it has had some similar political experiences. And particularly noteworthy is that “million-dollar question” that Weld tries to answer in Chapter Three: “Why did the police, or the military, not destroy the files while they had the chance?” (86) A similar question often strikes me when I think about the declassified documents relating to Kenya, or really when I think about colonial archives in general. Why did the colonial masters and their descendants not destroy these damning records? I think a common response to this question would be shortsightedness—something that Weld notes many of her colleagues suggested. She also mentions that some people think it is because humans have “a need to keep records, to leave traces.” Weld’s attempt at forming an answer, though, is wrapped up in the Foucauldian knowledge/power nexus, and it relates to what Weld calls a “culture of impunity” on the part of the original archive keepers. The records remained necessary to the hegemonic group right up until the very end of the civil war, because they not only represented, but actually were the means of control, for those in power in Guatemala. Only after that power was taken away did the previous knowledge controllers actively try to erase evidence, fearing that that which they used to control could now be used similarly against them.
I think Weld’s argument is a step in the right direction when examined alongside the other sources that I am presenting tomorrow—Steedman’s “Something She Called a Fever,” Stoler’s Along the Archival Grain, and a book called For the Record by Anjali Arondekar. In my presentation I will clarify and further this position, but for now I would like to pose an open-ended question that I have been considering, and that I do not think Weld’s research could fully engage with because of the nature of her sources and their context: Why, even after the demarcated end of colonialism, after those old colonial administrators largely responsible for the atrocities in Kenya had passed away, would the British administration put so much effort into restricting access to these records? Why did they desperately try to keep the archives closed or secret even into the twenty-first century? I can immediately think of two practical reasons why they would do this. The first is contemporary politics: no administration wants to unleash these sorts of records and potential truth claims while it is in office. The second is economic: when the high court in London deemed that Mau Mau survivors could file a claim against the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office for 60-year-old atrocities a couple of years ago, it opened up a very expensive proverbial can of worms, one that over 40,000 Kenyans (and perhaps hundreds of thousands of other colonial survivors?) now feel they are entitled to. These two practical reasons raise a whole bunch of very important questions about how contemporary governments could and should handle situations like these, which seem to be becoming more common.
If Weld were so inclined, I think she would—and, I expect, I will—argue that there is something much more important at stake here, though. We have to keep in mind that the British desire to keep these files under lock and key is cross-generational. There must be something long-lasting about the archive aside from its physical structure or its contents that truly frightens people who know their grip on that archive is being loosened. It must be related to this power/knowledge nexus, and it must be wrapped up in notions of memory, identity, and control. I won’t pretend that I have precise answers to these questions, but I do think these themes are directly related to some of the core takeaways from Paper Cadavers. On page 10, for instance, Weld notes that although an archive’s contents, taken as a whole, represent “one physical set of papers, those papers have at different historical moments represented two distinct archival logics.” Those logics are (a) “a Cold War-inflected logic that used archives as a weapon against enemies of the state” and (b) “one of democratic opening, historical memory, and the pursuit of justice for war crimes.” Again, there are some differences here between Guatemala and Kenya, but the similarities are striking. Perhaps, when considering postcolonial/decolonized states, we need to add a third archival logic: that of the psychically embattled colonial descendant, for whom letting go of the knowledge/power of the archive would present a presumably catastrophic knowable but unknown rupture.
The most salient feature of our reading for this week for me was its demonstration of how history and memory can be used outside of the academy. In our discussions in this class we have debated about the epistemological foundations of history, encountering daunting problems about what we can actually say in the face of issues around interpretation and the nature of sources which developed during the Cultural and Linguistic turns. Weld’s book was a refreshing example of a case where historical work actually had an effect in the real world, the Project not only providing closure for some older workers who discovered the fate of disappeared family members, but also opening the road for reforms in Guatemala, which while modest in scope, were still an important step forward in a country ruled by a government which still bears many of the markings of the oppressive totalitarian regime that ruled during its civil war.
Another interesting aspect of Weld’s book is that its publication, itself, may very well have a pragmatic effect on the world. Weld continually mentions that the continuation of the project is largely contingent on foreign funding that may dry up if another human rights crisis catches the attention of those donors and leads them to divert their funds. The compelling story that Weld presents in her book will serve as an excellent companion to official reports published by the Project, reminding donors of what is at stake in the Project’s work as well as humanizing the efforts of the “amateur historians” who work there.
My questions for this week are this:
1. Oftentimes historians have shied away from discussing current events or events in the recent past because they are either considered to be the purview of journalists or are not far gone enough to allow for reflective investigation. Should we as historians continue to avoid the present?
2. For me at least, much of the power of Weld’s account comes from her use of ethnography. Her discussion of how the people working on the Project reacted to encountering the files of dead relatives and slogged through despite terrible working conditions made her account of the atrocities committed during the civil war seem much more immediate. In what other ways could ethnography be employed to enrich the practice of history?
I enjoyed this book very much, and found the story of the effort to unearth the former records of the Guatemalan National Police inspiring. But as much as I admire these efforts and would always champion their intentions and importance, I couldn’t help but look at this events in the context of the failure of the Latin American Left that of course is the subject of much discussion nowadays. At the risk of sounding overly cynical or even callous, one can view such projects as a case of progressive forces, having abandoned the hope of victory, now devoting their energy to chronicling the horrific details of their defeat. The fact that the same western powers that once packed the creation of the archive as a tool of counter-insurgency, now back it in the name of buzz words like “peace,” “truth” and “reconciliation,” speaks to the fact that such agendas prove compatible with current neo-liberal world order, and do, to an extant, reflect the desire to make post-conflict states like Guatemala safe and comfortable for multi-national capital. Weld of course raises these issues repeatedly throughout the last chapter, and gives the impression that she is struggling to reconcile her own attachment to the project with her own nagging doubts. For historians like ourselves it raises the question if we can be guilty of prioritizing or fetishizing activities, processes, projects etc because they appear important from our privileged vantage points, and/or suit our own interests as academics.
I thought this work was brilliant, though I am a sucker for taking up archives critically. I thought Weld did a great job at discussing the archive as filling in silences which haunted Guatemala, and that this idea of “haunting” (though she doesn’t use the term) that is alluded to is extremely important as a framework of analysis.
Weld discusses in her conclusion that we are both fascinated by and fear archives. The fear arises from their structural power as well as the fact that they outlive us. There seems to be a heavy focus on the archive being recovered for the sake of posterity, which seems to indicate that we are more aware of our own role in the production of history. I think that Devin and Aaron address this, and I think that is important to acknowledge when understanding history. I think that, in a way, any involvement with an archive acknowledges and recognizes that the producers of the archives in the moment are historical actors shaping a history to be consumed by posterity. I think the Guatemalan state even acknowledges this because they never completely destroyed their documents even though they were kept secret. I do not think that archival thinking is just historical thinking, but I also think it is thinking of the future and the consumption of histories in the future.
To me, Weld’s definition of archive seems to be almost a little limiting. I find that she heavily discusses institutional archives, and large “formal” archives without heavily addressing smaller “grassroots” archives and more radical notions of archives, such as cityscapes. Do more radical notions of archives fit within Weld’s definition of “the archive”? What is the effect of leaving them out of her work?
I am captivated by Weld’s idea of “archival thinking.” In a Duke Press interview, Weld explains it is “a mode of analysis that puts archives—their histories, their silences, their distortions, their politics—at the center of the story.” Whereas the historian typically relegates references to archival documents and archives to endnotes/footnotes, when thinking archivally the historian explicitly addresses the archives, recognizing them as both a collection of documents and the place (institution) where archival documents are kept. This becomes a method for historical analysis (that includes the production of the document), as well as a frame for political analysis, wherein the documents are considered “as instruments of political action, implements of state formation, institutions of liberal democratization, enablers of gaze and desire, and sites of social struggle” (13). In this way, archival thinking expands and makes more dynamic the historian’s interpretation.
Weld enriches archival thinking when describing the process through which Project workers, as amateur historians, needed to learn to “see archiving-as-process rather than archives-as-things” (48). In order to organize the piles of documents and begin to reconstruct the archives according to the principle of archival provenance, the workers needed to figure out the structure of the organization behind the archives and, more significantly, to be able to imagine the thinking of the National Police. Although I have thought about the use of historical empathy in the past, I found the image of the Project workers being willing to engage with their enemies in such an in-depth way moving and compelling. Weld writes that this “affected the way that workers understood themselves, the history of the war, and their relationships with one another. Archival thinking was a tool, but it was not without its own powerful effects – it mediated identity as well, hailing workers as archival subjects in a new and different way from that intended by the police in the first place” (83). As one worker explains: “[Working in the archives] offered the possibility that, for the first time, we could come to see ourselves from a distant point of view, from the perspective of the Other—to learn what the Other thought…” (154-5). Archival thinking allows Weld’s analysis to examine not only at Guatemala’s history, but also Guatemalan’s construction of the past.
As I read Paper Cadavers, I found myself reflecting anew on my own research in private (religious) archives – archives that are institutions, not open to the public, which contain “histories, silences, distortions, and politics” – and the need for me as a historian to not only understand the structure of these organizations, but to walk in their shoes and get inside the thoughts of the archives’ creators. Documents related to residential schools have been sent from these archives to new archives at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba. I wonder about the process of the Centre workers’ creation and reconstruction (this has just begun), transforming documents into knowledge as Craig Robertson describes, and if these archives will have a heart (178).
One thing that struck me about Paper Cadavers as I read through its first chapters was how much banality (seemingly inconsequential at that) Weld serves up amid such heavy issues. Because here is an injustice of huge proportions – the wrongs committed daily, year after year, by Guatemala’s state apparatus against its own citizens. So after raising questions about reckoning with the atrocities of the past and seeking justice in light of previously unaccessible material, Weld spends dozens of pages on her everyday activities during her involvement with the Project. One has to assume she does that on purpose, but I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it yet (and I’ll sleep on that). But tonight I want to focus on the heavy stuff and contemplate this notion of “reckoning” with the past.
A “reckoning“ implies unfinished business, debts unsettled. This is obviously the case for post-war Guatemala. My meditation here concerns the difficulties of making this reckoning come about, and what it can realistically hope to yield for survivors of state violence, victims’ families, and the state itself.
Governments and courts do not seem to be the keenest to extend apologies for past crimes (or even minor mistakes for that matter) – let alone act on such apologies. This is essentially an inertia that is built into modern legal mechanisms, I think; they were simply not designed to put themselves to trial. Even the best international courts take years to do ascribe guilt to individuals that were obviously mass-murderers. (I’m thinking of the men that are still being persecuted in The Hague for committing crimes against humanity more than twenty years ago during the Bosnian War.)
Simply “knowing the truth” can be one considered a form of redemption for those who have been wronged. Dialogues with documents may well help these people (and their descendants and friends, along with younger generations) in the process of forming their identities and, in doing so, sharpening their politics. Weld also suggests that by “resurrecting paper cadavers – demonstrating with the state’s own records the extent of its repressive security structures”, a sense of “comfort” can be brought “to those who had upended their lives for political change” (168).
But is this a satisfactory reckoning for those who are owed these truths? A cynic like me is tempted to assert that it is not. Important questions remain unanswered, leaving one feeling nothing if not uncomfortable, impotent and powerless. For instance: whom exactly do we hold responsible for atrocities? Weld identifies death squads and generals in the case of Guatemala – but is that the extent of it? Then, if we come to some conclusion to that question – and that is a big “if” – what do we expect will happen then? The guilty perpetrators will be punished, sure, but what will the state do? Issue public apologies? Provide material compensation to the orphan whose mother was killed? If these questions are then extended to involve transnational injustices (like the Kenyan atrocities of the 1950s) or taken further into the past (slavery in the United States comes to mind), they become even more impossible to answer.
As I hinted in an earlier paragraph, it is wishful thinking to assume that judicial systems will restore justice. What we are left with, it seems, is this pursuit of internal peace that Weld stresses so much – a psychological antidote to an ugly political disease. Playing and watching soccer may be a momentary stress-reliever (as Weld writes about her co-workers, 75) – and alcohol and drugs are of course even more potent in the stress-relieving department – but I’m still not persuaded that peace genuinely comes when you “find out the truth”.
The surest way to achieve peace on the individual level, as I see it – and I’ve thought about this a whole lot, and for a long time – is to forgive the sick, corrupt society that violated you in ways that are beyond words. It is indeed difficult to ask this of anyone, and I’m in no position to offer it as advice to any survivor of state violence in Guatemala. But shallow wounds start bleeding again in states of emergencies, the best example of which are the 1990s genocidal episodes in the Balkans, whose seeds were sown already in the 1940s. When neighbours simply bury their guns but not their enmities, the risk of further violence will always be around the corner.
Now here is a book I really enjoyed. This was an enthralling study which was a unique mixture of historiographical themes and styles; part personal memoir, archival study, study of archives (archives as repositories of power, archives as contested political spaces, archives as dismally neglected spaces which belie their significance, etc.), consideration of historical/social memory, and investigation of political/social trauma.
I also noted what Tryggvi mentioned: there is a sometimes bracing dichotomy between anecdotes of Weld’s which might be banal or seem trivial and the gravely serious subject matter underlying it all. Personally, though, I liked it and did not think it trivialized the seriousness of the atrocities described. One area where I thought the collision of the quotidian and the dramatic intersected particularly nicely was in Weld’s attempt to highlight the disconnect between the significance of the documents and the utter neglect they often experienced. Both the Police Archives and the National Archives were in ruinous states which Weld underlines by recounting Guatemalan’s habit of urinating on the National Archives building (50-51). Indeed, she tells us the archives were referred to as, in addition to being treated like, a dump (51). Yet, just a few pages before, Weld relates that when activists and researchers began to comb through dilapidated archives, violent episodes of intimidation were frequent (44-45). Is it paradoxical that such passion would arise over archives that were so plainly uncared-for? Weld asks us directly what the meaning of Guatemalan’s view of the archives as garbage said about their politics/state (51)? Though unsaid, I thought she was pushing us to probe the dissonance between the heated political battle over access to the archives, the violence recorded within the documents, and the almost-comically disrespected and deteriorated state of the archives.
Also, let us not forget that this is personal history, to some extent. I thought that Weld also wanted to show us what the experience of archival research was like in the unique environment of post-civil war Guatemala. It was tense, it was dramatic, it was mundane, it was occasionally surreal.
One last thing I’d like to mention: Weld mentions on p. 15 that “archives, in Guatemala and elsewhere, were another front in the global Cold War.” Indeed. There is a tendency to focus on military materiel/training or financial aid when considering America’s role in propping up anti-Communist regimes during the Cold War, but Weld is convincing in arguing that the export of archival technologies to police/military forces was also a key technology of power and control. I thought perhaps we should reflect on the information collection which occurs in our own society, which is no doubt quite a bit more extensive, efficient, and potentially ephemeral with the many benefits bestowed by digitization. I just found myself pondering the power inherent in possessing the tools of information collection and storage, along with the lack of transparency enforced by restricted-access archives. Indeed, Weld’s meditation on state secrecy and information control and collection in the Guatemalan context raises issues which I think are relevant worldwide.
I’ll hold my best adjectives for another day because I would be embarrassed if my first contribution to this blog was to throw flowers —but I really enjoyed Weld’s book, the writing of which, in addition to her work with the archive, is commendable, and completely succeeded in raising my pulse. Instead, I’d like to invite you to follow me down a tangent. It could be of no worth, but at the very least perhaps one of you could help me sort it out.
Borrowing from a fellow named Michel-Rolf Trouillot, who appears to be a Haitian anthropologist at the University of Chicago, Weld introduces two mutually-dependent definitions of history: that which happened and that which is said to have happened. One of her overarching ambitions is to explore these meanings and their interrelation. You can see the potential for conflict —such conflict seems anyhow to be the suggestion.
She makes a convincing case that the battle for the archives was propelled by the need to reconcile these two definitions. Obviously the regime myths were fragile, and she provides a harrowing account of how the scene was set — in the run up to the big discovery — by a handful of persistent activists who refused to let their histories die. But what really struck me was her framing of this process as a dialectic. I thought this was masterfully argued and, not to be overly sentimental, reassuring.
At first I misunderstood the components, due to my own neglect —believing the synthesis to be the weaponization of the archive on behalf of the victims of the crimes that it detailed. Following this misapprehension, I had intended in my response to take issue with the fact that to call the process by which the role of the archive evolved a dialectic was misleading or inaccurate. Though I wonder now, after some careful re-reading, if that initial self-abuse hasn’t lead me somewhere.
As I understand it (or butcher it) a dialectic has three components: a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis — the thesis and antithesis are opposing, incompatible ideas/practices etc., with the synthesis being the result of their inevitable clashing. Weld seems to be using this formation. And as I understand her broad argument about the role of the archive in Guatemalan society, the two forces are play here are “two [distinct] archival logics” —namely, the use of records for state-terror and subsequently to prosecute that terror — with their synthesis rendering the archive as “[a building block for the rule of law and tool of social reckoning.]” I think it’s tempting to say to oneself, “sounds like progress to me”. And frankly, it does sound like progress to me. The language of dialectics necessarily invokes a progress narrative. But if we’re to take Weld seriously when she frames the story in such a way, I think it’s worth asking whether this language helps to give us an accurate account of events and their significance; if it is, in fact, indicative of tangible progress in the world of ideas and, if so, how that might transform the material world. Is the methodology useful, faithful, justifiable? I’m inclined to think so, but I had my doubts at first and I’m not entirely able to rid myself of them.
Paper Cadavers – Week 3
I have yet to finish the whole book, but wanted to post in response to some of the bigger ideas and approaches that this text takes. Specifically the framing of the archive of the National Police as a body itself, that changes over time, and the direct links and applicability of Weld’s conceptualizations to archiving with the archive being constructed right now for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the Indian Residential School System here in Canada.
One of the salient points that Weld makes about the archive as a thing is that it exists in both cultural and political realms, and that the meaning we take from it exists in relation to how we not only conceptualize the archive as material and as a body in the intellectual sense, but also how we treat the archive as a political actor. The transition of a body of documents used in the systematic oppression of large populations into a body of documents used to uncover truths about a horrifying past and bring not only justice, but also some form of legitimation to the experiences and stories of survivors (and possibly closure if they are inclined toward it), is such a fascinating history to trace. Such a close attention to how an archive is read raised several questions and links in my mind to the TRC.
Later this semester, there will be a pole-raising ceremony at UBC to commemorate the opening of a digital archive of the TRC (which will access the National Research Centre in Manitoba). The fact that a digital archive of all things (not even the ‘real’ thing) will be honoured not only with such a powerful ceremony, but also marked by the pole itself shows that there is a profound connection to this archive. However, the question of how the archive will be used by researchers is still to be seen. At the centre of Weld’s connection to this archive of the National Police is this idea of somehow being “able to resurrect a paper cadaver in postwar Guatemala – to learn what become of a ‘desparecido’, or identify a ‘desparecido’s’ remains, or write and reveal new histories – is a gift of inestimable value, a temple’s treasure indeed.” (p.19) This approach to a historical topic is to me very noble, and such a useful guide when trying to conceptualize how I might approach work on Residential School and using the TRC archives (in Indigenous Studies/history, especially in Canada, this is always part of the story).
Some may see this view as biased, but she argues that archives are inherently political bodies, and should not be treated apolitically.
Another question that I would pose to the class is whether others had similar responses to this work? Whether you see/saw immediate connections to the people and places you’ll be studying? And how you responded to this approach of seeing her job as a historian/anthropologist as a political and personal imperative?
I find some of Weld’s historiographical questions somewhat problematic when turned to Early Modern and Medieval history. If archives are sites of struggle, and the power of interpretation over them is something not to be allowed easily, then the documents must have important and urgent meaning for those people in the present. I seriously doubt that my accessing medieval archives on Mongol events in the 13th or 14th centuries, however revolutionary they might be(and I indeed I do hope), the separation with current events is so distant, that there really is not much struggle to be had. For instance, if I had discovered a document from the Mongol Yuan court ceding the whole of Manchuria to the Koryo(Korean) court in gratitude for help in the Red Turban Rebellion (totally counterfactual),and records of the transfer of household registers which would give the Koryo Dynasty the bureaucratic means to control and tax the region, would that have larger geopolitical ramifications in the present? Most likely not, since the Yuan Empire does not so neatly correspond to the present Chinese nation-state and the Koryo Dynasty covered an area constituting both the Koreas and then some. Perhaps this adumbrates a further problem that issues in medieval history do not correspond neatly to the pervasive vision of the nation-state. That seems to be a key part of Weld’s view of the archives as a political body, since it is the site of contestation for different visions of the Guatemalan nation should be.
However, with that said Weld’s argument that engagement of the younger generations with the archive is one of social reconstruction, identity building and inter-generational exchange is for me quite salient. What struck me about this is that the experiences of young people who were working in the Project were building identity, memory, and relatedness that informed their ideas about their future careers, political involvement and more broadly where Guatemala should be headed. However, they were basing these ideas on a particular experience with a specific archive of documents, with specific former revolutionary colleagues at a specific time in Guatemalan history. Those restrictions seemed fundamental to how these people conceived of identity (inheritors of a certain tradition and political legacy etc..). Some outright said they wanted to work with social or political issues, or make a difference after identifying with the content of the archives and that this activism differentiated them from their peers. The power to determine what is in a particular archive then seems to be equal to or even more important than the power of access which is what Weld argues at the beginning of the book. For instance, in China the Manchu language archives from the Qing dynasty in the last twenty years have been/are being opened, digitized and published. This was an action that the Chinese government sanctioned through its various academic bodies. It has led to Manchus who had previously hid their identity following the ethnic iconoclasm of the Chinese revolution to become interested again in their own histories and resurrect memories of those bygone ancestors. Notably, these documents are all pre-1911, the majority from the 16th-19th centuries. Their support of a Manchu identity fits awkwardly, yet still adequately within the state’s multi-ethnic discourse, while being remote enough to avoid too much meditation on the popular level. Critically, much has not been translated into Chinese. Almost all Manchus cannot speak or read Manchu. In contrast, the government has not opened archives specifically pertaining to the Communist party and its inner workings, leaving these documents for the use of the government itself. These documents from the Communist takeover and how the state functioned thereafter have the ability to support narratives of nation, state and people that run counter to the Mao-centered metanarrative of salvation from the Japanese and the Nationalists. Indeed archives available now on that period seemed designed to include materials which support that position. Likewise this would support a version of modern Chinese identity separate from the official line. In this light, archives are indeed sites of contest in terms of identity, but I think some types of archives when designed by a state entity might be as restricting as they are empowering for those who access them. I am not sure what others think about this in terms of the archives they have encountered.
This week’s reading Paper Cadavers is fascinating to me and it makes a lot of sense to me because as I was reading it, my own country’s(China) history during the Cold War period constantly emerged in my head which represented the extreme opposite side of Guatemala politically(communism), however, shared the very similarities the people in Guatemala went through, even though maybe not as bloody so far as I know.
As the author put it, “his book has outlined a dialectical analysis of archival recovery in contexts of political transition. Records once used in the service of state terror are repurposed by surviving reformers as building blocks for the rule of law and tools of social reckoning” (237). This idea is very new and attracting to me. Since I almost have never read anything or had any knowledge about archives, I would never thought that archives would have such power for social reckoning, social change and movement. And I would never thought that the control of archives would mean a control of power: previously in the hand of the bloody government, now, in a sense, at least for the police archive case, at the hand of progressives.
The book, at the beginning, states that “this book not only details how the messy process of history-writing and rewriting functions but also makes an argument about why it matters”; and this makes me think about what we have discussed during the first week on the topic of “what is history” (7). And there is a point that what history really was matters less than how history works. I think this book adheres to this message in the sense that even though what really happened in the papers stored at the archives did matter to most people, it was really the process of being able to access them, of being able to go through this whole process really make sense, really make this program powerful and received so many attention. Because as the author states that most people working on the Police Archives already knew or at least had a sense of what had happened to their lost loved ones or to their fellow countrymen, they still work there partly try to find solid evidence to what really happened, but more importantly, to try to open a way, using this history as a powerful method, to a more free and democratic ideals.
Moreover, the chapter on how archives should be organized and utilized is very interesting to me: the need of provenance and original order. Probably because I have never been exposed to the knowledge of the science of archives, I felt that the methodology of archival science itself contains power, especially in the Guatemala case. Because both “provenance” and “original order” require people who work at the Police Archives to try to think, to imagine, to reconstruct the way the police used to think in the time period of those archives. By doing so, at least at that moment, the power kind of transferred to their hands in some way.
Also, maybe I am too naive to comment that, but it is still a shock to me to see U.S sending dictator as well as knowledge to control people in extreme methods just to prevent the potential spread of communism and just to protect US economic interests. In this part, I cannot prevent myself from seeing the context in the broader Cold War context where my own Country, used very brutal and inhumane methods to cleanse “internal enemies” who were just suspicious of being capitalism or not so “revolutionary”(called “counter-revolutionary” in my country). For me, I saw that even though China and Guatemala belonged to the very opposite camp of the cold war, they were so similar in their ways of treating their own people. And it was a very unpleasant moment for me to link Guatemala to my own country together as I read through this book.
Due to the limitation of space, I will just state one more point that I think is very interesting. I really appreciate the author’s effort to see the case presented by the Political Archives from both sides: from the old conservative power, and from the progressives. The author states later that after working together with each other for a long time, “nearly everyone I spoke with stressed the idea that the police were also victims of the war, and if this did not mitigate the PN’s abuses, it partly served to explain them” (176). Also, at the last of the book, the author tries to explain in some way the retaliation of the conservative power in more recent years because those legal cases used to accuse them in courts “prominently reiterated the army’s version of history, in which its cadres had loyally rescued the nation from the dangers of subversion” (244). This, I think it is very interesting and worth pondering. Sometimes what we saw as absolute truth might sounds very different in others opinion.
Lastly, I have a few questions. Throughout their initial work as amateur historians and archivists, those people tried to imagine and re-construct the tree of the police organization, since as we can see, the U.S has always been in very close contact with the Guatemala conservative government, and they introduced and taught the Guatemala government of everything they needed regarding to recording, archives and extreme methods of cleansing enemies, the U.S would definitely know how the secret police department worked back then. Why not just ask the U.S on that information since the U.S also helped with the archive work by sending archivist to assist them. Moreover, it is surprising for me to see that at later stage, when the archive works had to be more vertical than horizontal, it was the older people who support that and the young people were not so happy that being too professional than intimate. I thought it might be vice versa.
Anyways, I really like this book in the sense that it really makes me think a lot more archival-ly than before. Also, I have to say that I really admire those people who committed to do this work. Some people talked about the pressures and stresses when dealing those memories every day; I just read this book for this week and I sometimes would even dream about those things, not to speak people who had went through all of this.
Weld writes that “[at] the PN archives, relatively few ‘smoking gun’ documents were ever unearthed. Rather, most case investigation rested upon complex processes of triangulation among multiple sources…these records’ legal proof value depended on how effectively the Project workers ‘constructed an archives,’ and maintained the documents’ archival bonds, in the midst of the chaos of their discovery site” (168-169).
This quote strikes me because the readings thus far have emphasized understanding sources in context—in relation to the author’s background, other texts, audiences, and documentary media. Likewise, Weld’s idea is that the PN documents had to be systematized, or “constructed as archives,” in order to have epistemic (and political) utility. So my question is this: what would a “smoking gun” document actually look like? Do such things actually exist in isolation from a broader context? What can historians do with a single document?
Second, I think the temporality of the narrative is also something that is fundamental to Weld’s book, which Aaron’s already noted. Access to the PN archives could only have been permitted (to the extent that it was) in the post-war era. Its political salience, meanwhile, derived largely from the fact that those affected by PN crimes and indeed many of the perpetrators of those crimes were still alive at the time. On a deeper level, I think we can also historicize such things as the phrasing of grievances in terms of human rights, as historian Samuel Moyn has done in his work, for example. All this is to say that perhaps the political function of the archive, or on a broader level the power/knowledge relation, is something that demands detailed historical treatment.
I really enjoyed this book! Basically there are three reasons for this:
First, it is not only an interesting and for me quite new topic but it is also written in a way that I wanted read further. It was quite suspenseful and I was a bit disappointed at the end that the author could not tell me if Montt was convicted of his crimes. By the way, just yesterday brought my favourite German newspaper an article about the way the current Guatemalan society commemorates the years of dictatorship. Compared to Weld’s book it looks a bit better nowadays, even when the judgement of Montt was overturned and the new suit has not begun yet.
Second, I think Weld gives a good example why history still should be involved in politics. Even if we can’t transfer this one-to-one to other counties, it reminds us what importance doing history can have for current and future societies.
Third, Weld brings to my mind that archives are constructed and organised for a purpose. The story of the PN archive tells this two times, first the original organising of the police itself and second by the Project to reconstruct the actions of the PN. We as historians should keep in mind that every archive was somehow constructed. None saved everything and therefore historians won’t find the whole past’s reality in any archive. This is true even for archives which a far less dramatic history than the PN archive.
So in general this book made a positive impression on me. Nevertheless I am not sure what I should think of Weld’s usage of theory (for example Foucualt). At the very end of some of her chapters she mentions Foucault like she wanted to say “hey, look, he was right!” Is this the way we should use theories? I am not sure and would like to discuss this question tomorrow morning in class.
Paper Cadavers speaks to a lot of what I envision doing in my future research. My goal is to work in the British National Archives in Kew and to exhume recently declassified documents relating to British actions in Kenya during the 1950s/60s—i.e., the Mau Mau Crisis. Moreover, at some point farther down the line, I would like to visit the Kenya National Archives in Nairobi and potentially interview Mau Mau survivors. In a way, then, there are obvious parallels between what Weld’s research entailed, and what I would like to pursue. Kenya, like Guatemala, continues to grapple with its postcolonial(?) legacy and it has had some similar political experiences. And particularly noteworthy is that “million-dollar question” that Weld tries to answer in Chapter Three: “Why did the police, or the military, not destroy the files while they had the chance?” (86) A similar question often strikes me when I think about the declassified documents relating to Kenya, or really when I think about colonial archives in general. Why did the colonial masters and their descendants not destroy these damning records? I think a common response to this question would be shortsightedness—something that Weld notes many of her colleagues suggested. She also mentions that some people think it is because humans have “a need to keep records, to leave traces.” Weld’s attempt at forming an answer, though, is wrapped up in the Foucauldian knowledge/power nexus, and it relates to what Weld calls a “culture of impunity” on the part of the original archive keepers. The records remained necessary to the hegemonic group right up until the very end of the civil war, because they not only represented, but actually were the means of control, for those in power in Guatemala. Only after that power was taken away did the previous knowledge controllers actively try to erase evidence, fearing that that which they used to control could now be used similarly against them.
I think Weld’s argument is a step in the right direction when examined alongside the other sources that I am presenting tomorrow—Steedman’s “Something She Called a Fever,” Stoler’s Along the Archival Grain, and a book called For the Record by Anjali Arondekar. In my presentation I will clarify and further this position, but for now I would like to pose an open-ended question that I have been considering, and that I do not think Weld’s research could fully engage with because of the nature of her sources and their context: Why, even after the demarcated end of colonialism, after those old colonial administrators largely responsible for the atrocities in Kenya had passed away, would the British administration put so much effort into restricting access to these records? Why did they desperately try to keep the archives closed or secret even into the twenty-first century? I can immediately think of two practical reasons why they would do this. The first is contemporary politics: no administration wants to unleash these sorts of records and potential truth claims while it is in office. The second is economic: when the high court in London deemed that Mau Mau survivors could file a claim against the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office for 60-year-old atrocities a couple of years ago, it opened up a very expensive proverbial can of worms, one that over 40,000 Kenyans (and perhaps hundreds of thousands of other colonial survivors?) now feel they are entitled to. These two practical reasons raise a whole bunch of very important questions about how contemporary governments could and should handle situations like these, which seem to be becoming more common.
If Weld were so inclined, I think she would—and, I expect, I will—argue that there is something much more important at stake here, though. We have to keep in mind that the British desire to keep these files under lock and key is cross-generational. There must be something long-lasting about the archive aside from its physical structure or its contents that truly frightens people who know their grip on that archive is being loosened. It must be related to this power/knowledge nexus, and it must be wrapped up in notions of memory, identity, and control. I won’t pretend that I have precise answers to these questions, but I do think these themes are directly related to some of the core takeaways from Paper Cadavers. On page 10, for instance, Weld notes that although an archive’s contents, taken as a whole, represent “one physical set of papers, those papers have at different historical moments represented two distinct archival logics.” Those logics are (a) “a Cold War-inflected logic that used archives as a weapon against enemies of the state” and (b) “one of democratic opening, historical memory, and the pursuit of justice for war crimes.” Again, there are some differences here between Guatemala and Kenya, but the similarities are striking. Perhaps, when considering postcolonial/decolonized states, we need to add a third archival logic: that of the psychically embattled colonial descendant, for whom letting go of the knowledge/power of the archive would present a presumably catastrophic knowable but unknown rupture.
The most salient feature of our reading for this week for me was its demonstration of how history and memory can be used outside of the academy. In our discussions in this class we have debated about the epistemological foundations of history, encountering daunting problems about what we can actually say in the face of issues around interpretation and the nature of sources which developed during the Cultural and Linguistic turns. Weld’s book was a refreshing example of a case where historical work actually had an effect in the real world, the Project not only providing closure for some older workers who discovered the fate of disappeared family members, but also opening the road for reforms in Guatemala, which while modest in scope, were still an important step forward in a country ruled by a government which still bears many of the markings of the oppressive totalitarian regime that ruled during its civil war.
Another interesting aspect of Weld’s book is that its publication, itself, may very well have a pragmatic effect on the world. Weld continually mentions that the continuation of the project is largely contingent on foreign funding that may dry up if another human rights crisis catches the attention of those donors and leads them to divert their funds. The compelling story that Weld presents in her book will serve as an excellent companion to official reports published by the Project, reminding donors of what is at stake in the Project’s work as well as humanizing the efforts of the “amateur historians” who work there.
My questions for this week are this:
1. Oftentimes historians have shied away from discussing current events or events in the recent past because they are either considered to be the purview of journalists or are not far gone enough to allow for reflective investigation. Should we as historians continue to avoid the present?
2. For me at least, much of the power of Weld’s account comes from her use of ethnography. Her discussion of how the people working on the Project reacted to encountering the files of dead relatives and slogged through despite terrible working conditions made her account of the atrocities committed during the civil war seem much more immediate. In what other ways could ethnography be employed to enrich the practice of history?
I enjoyed this book very much, and found the story of the effort to unearth the former records of the Guatemalan National Police inspiring. But as much as I admire these efforts and would always champion their intentions and importance, I couldn’t help but look at this events in the context of the failure of the Latin American Left that of course is the subject of much discussion nowadays. At the risk of sounding overly cynical or even callous, one can view such projects as a case of progressive forces, having abandoned the hope of victory, now devoting their energy to chronicling the horrific details of their defeat. The fact that the same western powers that once packed the creation of the archive as a tool of counter-insurgency, now back it in the name of buzz words like “peace,” “truth” and “reconciliation,” speaks to the fact that such agendas prove compatible with current neo-liberal world order, and do, to an extant, reflect the desire to make post-conflict states like Guatemala safe and comfortable for multi-national capital. Weld of course raises these issues repeatedly throughout the last chapter, and gives the impression that she is struggling to reconcile her own attachment to the project with her own nagging doubts. For historians like ourselves it raises the question if we can be guilty of prioritizing or fetishizing activities, processes, projects etc because they appear important from our privileged vantage points, and/or suit our own interests as academics.
I thought this work was brilliant, though I am a sucker for taking up archives critically. I thought Weld did a great job at discussing the archive as filling in silences which haunted Guatemala, and that this idea of “haunting” (though she doesn’t use the term) that is alluded to is extremely important as a framework of analysis.
Weld discusses in her conclusion that we are both fascinated by and fear archives. The fear arises from their structural power as well as the fact that they outlive us. There seems to be a heavy focus on the archive being recovered for the sake of posterity, which seems to indicate that we are more aware of our own role in the production of history. I think that Devin and Aaron address this, and I think that is important to acknowledge when understanding history. I think that, in a way, any involvement with an archive acknowledges and recognizes that the producers of the archives in the moment are historical actors shaping a history to be consumed by posterity. I think the Guatemalan state even acknowledges this because they never completely destroyed their documents even though they were kept secret. I do not think that archival thinking is just historical thinking, but I also think it is thinking of the future and the consumption of histories in the future.
To me, Weld’s definition of archive seems to be almost a little limiting. I find that she heavily discusses institutional archives, and large “formal” archives without heavily addressing smaller “grassroots” archives and more radical notions of archives, such as cityscapes. Do more radical notions of archives fit within Weld’s definition of “the archive”? What is the effect of leaving them out of her work?
I am captivated by Weld’s idea of “archival thinking.” In a Duke Press interview, Weld explains it is “a mode of analysis that puts archives—their histories, their silences, their distortions, their politics—at the center of the story.” Whereas the historian typically relegates references to archival documents and archives to endnotes/footnotes, when thinking archivally the historian explicitly addresses the archives, recognizing them as both a collection of documents and the place (institution) where archival documents are kept. This becomes a method for historical analysis (that includes the production of the document), as well as a frame for political analysis, wherein the documents are considered “as instruments of political action, implements of state formation, institutions of liberal democratization, enablers of gaze and desire, and sites of social struggle” (13). In this way, archival thinking expands and makes more dynamic the historian’s interpretation.
Weld enriches archival thinking when describing the process through which Project workers, as amateur historians, needed to learn to “see archiving-as-process rather than archives-as-things” (48). In order to organize the piles of documents and begin to reconstruct the archives according to the principle of archival provenance, the workers needed to figure out the structure of the organization behind the archives and, more significantly, to be able to imagine the thinking of the National Police. Although I have thought about the use of historical empathy in the past, I found the image of the Project workers being willing to engage with their enemies in such an in-depth way moving and compelling. Weld writes that this “affected the way that workers understood themselves, the history of the war, and their relationships with one another. Archival thinking was a tool, but it was not without its own powerful effects – it mediated identity as well, hailing workers as archival subjects in a new and different way from that intended by the police in the first place” (83). As one worker explains: “[Working in the archives] offered the possibility that, for the first time, we could come to see ourselves from a distant point of view, from the perspective of the Other—to learn what the Other thought…” (154-5). Archival thinking allows Weld’s analysis to examine not only at Guatemala’s history, but also Guatemalan’s construction of the past.
As I read Paper Cadavers, I found myself reflecting anew on my own research in private (religious) archives – archives that are institutions, not open to the public, which contain “histories, silences, distortions, and politics” – and the need for me as a historian to not only understand the structure of these organizations, but to walk in their shoes and get inside the thoughts of the archives’ creators. Documents related to residential schools have been sent from these archives to new archives at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba. I wonder about the process of the Centre workers’ creation and reconstruction (this has just begun), transforming documents into knowledge as Craig Robertson describes, and if these archives will have a heart (178).
One thing that struck me about Paper Cadavers as I read through its first chapters was how much banality (seemingly inconsequential at that) Weld serves up amid such heavy issues. Because here is an injustice of huge proportions – the wrongs committed daily, year after year, by Guatemala’s state apparatus against its own citizens. So after raising questions about reckoning with the atrocities of the past and seeking justice in light of previously unaccessible material, Weld spends dozens of pages on her everyday activities during her involvement with the Project. One has to assume she does that on purpose, but I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it yet (and I’ll sleep on that). But tonight I want to focus on the heavy stuff and contemplate this notion of “reckoning” with the past.
A “reckoning“ implies unfinished business, debts unsettled. This is obviously the case for post-war Guatemala. My meditation here concerns the difficulties of making this reckoning come about, and what it can realistically hope to yield for survivors of state violence, victims’ families, and the state itself.
Governments and courts do not seem to be the keenest to extend apologies for past crimes (or even minor mistakes for that matter) – let alone act on such apologies. This is essentially an inertia that is built into modern legal mechanisms, I think; they were simply not designed to put themselves to trial. Even the best international courts take years to do ascribe guilt to individuals that were obviously mass-murderers. (I’m thinking of the men that are still being persecuted in The Hague for committing crimes against humanity more than twenty years ago during the Bosnian War.)
Simply “knowing the truth” can be one considered a form of redemption for those who have been wronged. Dialogues with documents may well help these people (and their descendants and friends, along with younger generations) in the process of forming their identities and, in doing so, sharpening their politics. Weld also suggests that by “resurrecting paper cadavers – demonstrating with the state’s own records the extent of its repressive security structures”, a sense of “comfort” can be brought “to those who had upended their lives for political change” (168).
But is this a satisfactory reckoning for those who are owed these truths? A cynic like me is tempted to assert that it is not. Important questions remain unanswered, leaving one feeling nothing if not uncomfortable, impotent and powerless. For instance: whom exactly do we hold responsible for atrocities? Weld identifies death squads and generals in the case of Guatemala – but is that the extent of it? Then, if we come to some conclusion to that question – and that is a big “if” – what do we expect will happen then? The guilty perpetrators will be punished, sure, but what will the state do? Issue public apologies? Provide material compensation to the orphan whose mother was killed? If these questions are then extended to involve transnational injustices (like the Kenyan atrocities of the 1950s) or taken further into the past (slavery in the United States comes to mind), they become even more impossible to answer.
As I hinted in an earlier paragraph, it is wishful thinking to assume that judicial systems will restore justice. What we are left with, it seems, is this pursuit of internal peace that Weld stresses so much – a psychological antidote to an ugly political disease. Playing and watching soccer may be a momentary stress-reliever (as Weld writes about her co-workers, 75) – and alcohol and drugs are of course even more potent in the stress-relieving department – but I’m still not persuaded that peace genuinely comes when you “find out the truth”.
The surest way to achieve peace on the individual level, as I see it – and I’ve thought about this a whole lot, and for a long time – is to forgive the sick, corrupt society that violated you in ways that are beyond words. It is indeed difficult to ask this of anyone, and I’m in no position to offer it as advice to any survivor of state violence in Guatemala. But shallow wounds start bleeding again in states of emergencies, the best example of which are the 1990s genocidal episodes in the Balkans, whose seeds were sown already in the 1940s. When neighbours simply bury their guns but not their enmities, the risk of further violence will always be around the corner.
Now here is a book I really enjoyed. This was an enthralling study which was a unique mixture of historiographical themes and styles; part personal memoir, archival study, study of archives (archives as repositories of power, archives as contested political spaces, archives as dismally neglected spaces which belie their significance, etc.), consideration of historical/social memory, and investigation of political/social trauma.
I also noted what Tryggvi mentioned: there is a sometimes bracing dichotomy between anecdotes of Weld’s which might be banal or seem trivial and the gravely serious subject matter underlying it all. Personally, though, I liked it and did not think it trivialized the seriousness of the atrocities described. One area where I thought the collision of the quotidian and the dramatic intersected particularly nicely was in Weld’s attempt to highlight the disconnect between the significance of the documents and the utter neglect they often experienced. Both the Police Archives and the National Archives were in ruinous states which Weld underlines by recounting Guatemalan’s habit of urinating on the National Archives building (50-51). Indeed, she tells us the archives were referred to as, in addition to being treated like, a dump (51). Yet, just a few pages before, Weld relates that when activists and researchers began to comb through dilapidated archives, violent episodes of intimidation were frequent (44-45). Is it paradoxical that such passion would arise over archives that were so plainly uncared-for? Weld asks us directly what the meaning of Guatemalan’s view of the archives as garbage said about their politics/state (51)? Though unsaid, I thought she was pushing us to probe the dissonance between the heated political battle over access to the archives, the violence recorded within the documents, and the almost-comically disrespected and deteriorated state of the archives.
Also, let us not forget that this is personal history, to some extent. I thought that Weld also wanted to show us what the experience of archival research was like in the unique environment of post-civil war Guatemala. It was tense, it was dramatic, it was mundane, it was occasionally surreal.
One last thing I’d like to mention: Weld mentions on p. 15 that “archives, in Guatemala and elsewhere, were another front in the global Cold War.” Indeed. There is a tendency to focus on military materiel/training or financial aid when considering America’s role in propping up anti-Communist regimes during the Cold War, but Weld is convincing in arguing that the export of archival technologies to police/military forces was also a key technology of power and control. I thought perhaps we should reflect on the information collection which occurs in our own society, which is no doubt quite a bit more extensive, efficient, and potentially ephemeral with the many benefits bestowed by digitization. I just found myself pondering the power inherent in possessing the tools of information collection and storage, along with the lack of transparency enforced by restricted-access archives. Indeed, Weld’s meditation on state secrecy and information control and collection in the Guatemalan context raises issues which I think are relevant worldwide.
I’ll hold my best adjectives for another day because I would be embarrassed if my first contribution to this blog was to throw flowers —but I really enjoyed Weld’s book, the writing of which, in addition to her work with the archive, is commendable, and completely succeeded in raising my pulse. Instead, I’d like to invite you to follow me down a tangent. It could be of no worth, but at the very least perhaps one of you could help me sort it out.
Borrowing from a fellow named Michel-Rolf Trouillot, who appears to be a Haitian anthropologist at the University of Chicago, Weld introduces two mutually-dependent definitions of history: that which happened and that which is said to have happened. One of her overarching ambitions is to explore these meanings and their interrelation. You can see the potential for conflict —such conflict seems anyhow to be the suggestion.
She makes a convincing case that the battle for the archives was propelled by the need to reconcile these two definitions. Obviously the regime myths were fragile, and she provides a harrowing account of how the scene was set — in the run up to the big discovery — by a handful of persistent activists who refused to let their histories die. But what really struck me was her framing of this process as a dialectic. I thought this was masterfully argued and, not to be overly sentimental, reassuring.
At first I misunderstood the components, due to my own neglect —believing the synthesis to be the weaponization of the archive on behalf of the victims of the crimes that it detailed. Following this misapprehension, I had intended in my response to take issue with the fact that to call the process by which the role of the archive evolved a dialectic was misleading or inaccurate. Though I wonder now, after some careful re-reading, if that initial self-abuse hasn’t lead me somewhere.
As I understand it (or butcher it) a dialectic has three components: a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis — the thesis and antithesis are opposing, incompatible ideas/practices etc., with the synthesis being the result of their inevitable clashing. Weld seems to be using this formation. And as I understand her broad argument about the role of the archive in Guatemalan society, the two forces are play here are “two [distinct] archival logics” —namely, the use of records for state-terror and subsequently to prosecute that terror — with their synthesis rendering the archive as “[a building block for the rule of law and tool of social reckoning.]” I think it’s tempting to say to oneself, “sounds like progress to me”. And frankly, it does sound like progress to me. The language of dialectics necessarily invokes a progress narrative. But if we’re to take Weld seriously when she frames the story in such a way, I think it’s worth asking whether this language helps to give us an accurate account of events and their significance; if it is, in fact, indicative of tangible progress in the world of ideas and, if so, how that might transform the material world. Is the methodology useful, faithful, justifiable? I’m inclined to think so, but I had my doubts at first and I’m not entirely able to rid myself of them.