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Paper short abstract

Based on long-term fieldwork at an independent photographic archive in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this paper makes a case for the ethnographic study of archives, not solely as repositories of documents, images, and objects, but as lived sites of both knowledge production and of everyday life and work.

Paper long abstract

Based on long-term fieldwork at an independent photographic archive in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this paper makes a case for the ethnographic study of archives, not solely as repositories of documents, images, and objects, but as dynamic sites of both knowledge production and everyday life and work. Set against the backdrop of Bangladesh’s polarised political histories, the paper explores how archival absences themselves contributed to the emergence of new archival forms, and the ensuing contestations over historical narration.

Taking the archive as subject rather than source, I resist the polarisation between the field and the archive, refusing the associated bifurcations between living and dead, or present and past. Instead, I turn Achille Mbembe’s argument that there cannot be ‘a definition of the archive that does not encompass both the building itself and the documents stored there’ (2002: 19). Following David Zeitlyn’s observation (2012) that the slippage between these poles provides a particularly fruitful space for analysis, I introduce a third layer to this configuration, namely, to take the archive also as the community that sustains it.

I argue that we must play close attention to everyday life and work at the archive, considering how such work looks, feels, sounds, and smells. This vantage point can thus provide a lens through which to understand how archival practitioners both imagine new political futures and might work prefiguratively to bring them into being. Methodologically, the archive becomes field site, and its staff, community, and collections form a varied set of interlocutors.