Paper short abstract:

Ethnographic study on feminist community archives in Israel (the Feminist Peace Archives and the Rape Crisis Centers). We examined the motivations, perceptions and practical engagements of non-state actors’ with an emphasis on testimonials of inter-personal and conflict-related violence.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper we would like to share our ethnographic work on studying feminist community archives that contain historical information about peace activism and sexual violence. The presentation summarizes a three-year ethnographic study (2019-2021) on archiving-as-activism in Israel. Using a comparative analysis of two feminist archives in Israel (the Feminist Peace Archives and the Rape Crisis Centers registry) we examined the motivations, perceptions and practical engagements with non-state actors’ history and politics with an emphasis on testimonials of inter-personal and conflict-related violence.

We found that while the storage conditions of these community archives vary, many of them are endangered. Scarce financial resources, lack of physical space, uneven method of archiving, and conflicts over ownership appear as major obstacles for their preservation. To understand these challenges we followed NGO workers and feminist activists, many of them are elderly women who were politically active in the Israeli feminist and peace movement in the 1970s-1990s. Through the ethnographic process, we observed different attitudes and practices relating to the archival collections and objects. We found that objects become not just a source of memories but they evoke live emotions of rage, disappointments, hope, alienations, death and reveal activists’ roles of historical gatekeepers. Some of the interviewees were deeply concerned with various aspects of preservation, while others chose to disposed of personal items, through shredding, hiding, erasing and cleaning. The act of disposition was sometimes intentional and served as a way to expressed frustrations or as protecting the privacy of victims and activists.