Documenting History, Historicizing Documentation: French Military Officials' Ethnological Reports on Cilicia

Extract

Archives are, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot has argued, “the institutional sites of mediation between the sociohistorical process and the narrative about that process.”Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 52. How this mediation structures the production of meaning, on the one hand, and historical knowledge, on the other, is the major problematic of this article. I focus on how certain textual models and modes of representation impart a particular sense of purpose to the archives. That is, I am concerned with investigating how it is that texts are construed as documents that are destined for state archives. This project requires questioning how documents are made credible and authoritative in their myriad social contexts, in order to understand the relation between historicity and power relations. To study the potential impact of archival documents thus requires re-evaluating the uneasy relationship between documentary practices, canons of representation, politics, and scholarship.