PLAINTIFFS, HISTORIANS AND PENSIONERS INSIDE THE ARCHIVES - SCARING UP SOME NOTIONS FOR A CRITICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY
PLAINTIFFS, HISTORIANS AND PENSIONERS INSIDE THE ARCHIVES - SCARING UP SOME NOTIONS FOR A CRITICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY

Summary/Abstract: This essay tries to sketch some possible avenues for a critical historiography through an inquiry into the status of archival documents, the main (re)source for historical narratives. Drawing on the Romanian post-socialist context, it focuses on the various ways in which archival documents are engaged and deployed in local political struggles. These struggles evince novel forms of employing archival records, different from both professional constraints and the public debates over the national past which have characterised the post-socialist period. Moreover, these ways of dealing with archival records represent local, institutionally-embedded historiographical operations which may bear significant social consequences. The main contention of this essay is that the historian’s methodological toolkit should be reconstructed through a constant dialogue with these historiographical operations while paying attention to the manner in which social actors frame their social critiques in these everyday struggles. By switching the attention to the archives as an institution, the second part of the essay makes the case for a historical anthropology of bureaucratic practices that may help aid historians and marginalized social groups in engaging in debates over the status of the archives. This may help in undermining the monopoly that archivists and state institutions have over archival records.

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