Postcolonial Digital Connections - Proceedings
 

Angelica Serna Jeri

(College of William & Mary, USA)

Access and dislocation: the digital postcolonial archive

How do archives and repositories offer access? What does it mean to have digital access to materials that for centuries have been the research site of only a handful of scholars, or only data for archivists? Digitization has made the location of archival documents visible in an unprecedented manner. But the current location that digitization offers is also an opportunity to look at the relationships of dislocation and distance that these documents have with their creators, political contexts, and places of creation. The indigenous speakers at the heart of archival documents cannot be consulted. Their entrance into history locates them in a time reconstructed by western parameters (Fabian 1983). They respond to a different reality in a colonial situation framed by social practices that make them different from the indigenous speakers of today (Burkhart 1989). Their locations are paradoxically spread and extended across textual acts – in iconic enunciations and absent dialogues – because of the power underlying the production of sources in the archive (Trouillot 1995). While researching in rural and urban archives and repositories, the problematic nature of digital access and technology in postcolonial countries like Perú became apparent to me as a symptom of a current colonial system of values. In the digitization of historical sources, institutions responsible for the care of historical materials simply have insufficient funds or disproportionally focus their efforts on urban areas in comparison to rural areas. Looking at the politics of digitization could offer a lesson on how access is produced in postcolonial countries. Can we have access to the time encapsulated in the files, notes, inventories, metadata produced to digitize a text? Can we have access to the problems that each text encounters in the process of digitization? Perhaps the efforts to create access through digitization in postcolonial countries – and globally – speaks about a more significant issue of dislocation that imperial and colonial archival institution have attempted to solve through technology, when in fact the political solution would be the repatriation and the restoration of sources acquired by colonial extractivism. To have access to the material qualities of sources allows the researcher – and the public – to challenge colonial ideas of ownership, events, and merely to contemplate the materials of history. Colonial manuscripts, books, and documents have played a substantial role in research on Andean history, culture, and society. While scholars have studied the colonial archives to document Andean socioeconomic and religious processes from the colonial period to the present, there has been little research that takes the archival material itself as its object. And with the increasing technological advancements of today, the question remains of how the technologies used by archival institutions – specifically digitization – is going to affect the way we relate with archival material.

Figure 3: Directorio espiritual en la lengua española y quichua general del inga Pablo de Prado, 1650 Peru Digitization Project

Colonial writing is an interconnected social field, a product of actions and conflicts that may speak eloquently to literacy itself as well as to the colonial history and the unfolding of social differences in the Andes. Colonial texts are not only products of such changes but also a domain through which social and economic differences emerged. The document that I reflect about in this brief intervention has been given the title “Huarochiri Manuscript” by the scholars who have studied it and it is currently located in the National Library of Spain.

Figure 1: Huarochiri manuscript, First page

This document is unique in the field of Andean studies as the only complete narration written in Quechua – and the only one from the colonial period – about Andean religious practices and myths. The text narrates the emergence of ethnic groups in the Huarochiri region in mythic time and the struggle between deities that exist alternately as mountains, animals, and humans. And in its grounding in a local territory rather than in an idea of the “Inca Empire." The Huarochiri Manuscript has had a crucial impact on the study of indigenous cultures in the Andes since its translation to Spanish. The manuscript has been digitized and is public today.

Figure 4: Screenshot of the digital source at National Library of Spain

But it cannot be consulted in the physical format due to its fragility. Thinking about the physical and ultimately affective aspect of archival materials motivates me to ask how a digital document is also transformative and experiential. How does it offer an experience, especially when the access was dominated by rules and regulations of the archon (as Derrida would have it)? The process of digitization has made the contents of large archival institutions and repositories visible to a public audience. It comes with the creation of a narrative of access in which digital visibility has had the power to reimagine archives as positive institutions that care for valuable materials and allow us to access them through the use of digital technology.

Figure 2: Huarochiri manuscript, Second page

But at the same time, this narrative also opens a possibility to give more critical thought to the archive’s “gift” of access. Though the process of digitization of indigenous sources is usually framed as the creation of a point of access, it also creates a space to consider the possibility of the complete repatriation of the original “material objects” to their makers. Certainly, the long journey from the place of dislocation and colonial access – Spain – back to Perú will not undo centuries of historical appropriation, but it will create the opportunity to reexamine how scholarship relates with, profits from or intervenes in the public sphere. The digital version of the “Huarochiri Manuscript,” which at some point during its custody at the National library of Spain was bounded in manuscript 3169, is now publicly available to read or simply observe its pages from any computer connected to the internet. But again, because the virtual access has been framed itself as a “virtual repatriation,” the potential for physical repatriation is effectively erased, along with the possibility to acknowledge the heritage of colonial exploitation of historical indigenous sources.

 

References:

  • Burkhart, Louise M. (1989). The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. Tucson: U of Arizona Press.
  • Derrida, Jacques. (1995). Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: U of Chicago Press.
  • Fabian, Johannes. (1983). Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. NY: Columbia.
  • Salomon, Frank, & Uriose, George (Eds.). (1991). The Huarochirí Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion. Austin: U of Texas Press.
  • Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. (1995). Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.
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