Paper Short Abstract:

Archives perform a feat of uncanny haunting. By looking at examples of food, the weather, and childbirth in the Scottish Studies Archive, this paper will explore the power of an archive to bear witness to the ghosts in academic, social and cultural histories through what it does not contain.

Paper Abstract:

The Scottish Studies Archive holds over 33,000 records; it is a rich collection. However, an archive relies on the collectors, archivists, and informants that created and contributed to it, each of whom carries to their work or recording their own cultural history and the biases of their cultural moment, and on the technology available to them at the time. As a result, the archive contains an impressive dataset of information on some topics and practices, such as fishing, but on others, such as how to cook the fish, it seems silent. The reasons for these silences are many – collectors who did not think to ask, gender, race, or class relations, informants who saw the topic as too sensitive or too mundane or simply did not have time to talk.

It is not that these silent topics are completely absent from the archive, rather they appear through allusion: they appear as ghosts. Archives perform a feat of uncanny haunting, as Avery Gordon describes it ‘not a return to the past but a reckoning of its repression in the present’ (1997, 8). At least three things only appear in archives indirectly: the process of collective knowledge production, the natural world, and the somatic. By looking at what is missing through the examples of food, the weather, and childbirth, in the Scottish Studies Archive this paper will explore the power of an archive to bear witness to the ghosts in academic, social and cultural histories through what it does not contain.