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Paper short abstract

By juxtaposing fragmented colonial archives with ethnography, this paper shows how archival logics persist and are negotiated locally. Rather than "filling" gaps, ethnography critically reveals ongoing power relations and the lived realities behind archival silences.

Paper long abstract

This paper argues that working with fragmentary and digitised colonial archives and ethnography generates crucial methodological and theoretical perspectives for contemporary anthropology. I ground this argument in my research on land and client-patron relations in a volatile riverine region of India. My archival sources comprise dispersed, often damaged, colonial-era land records and correspondence, which are now partially digitised. These fragments systematically officialise categories of ethnicity and land tenure, while rendering the subaltern presence as silence or a bureaucratic trace.

Anthropology’s distinctive contribution, I contend, lies not in "filling" these archival gaps with ethnographic data, but in using ethnography to read the logic of the archive itself critically and to follow its omissions into the present. Ethnographic engagement with communities allows me to trace how the categorical logics embedded in century-old documents are actively negotiated, embodied, and resisted by living local figures of authority who simultaneously exploit and protect, within structures forged by historical policy. This methodological synergy transforms the archive from a repository of facts into a "field" of enduring power relations. This approach offers a model for anthropological history that is ethically reflective and attuned to the collaborative potential between discontinuous traces in the archives and situated presence in the "field".