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Life on File: Archival Epistemology and Theory

Qualitative Sociology volume 43, pages 385–405 (2020)Cite this article

Abstract

History’s epistemological dilemma equally applies to sociology: how can we make claims about persons, events, and processes on the basis of archival records? This article develops a framework called Life on File that combines sociological strengths in qualitative methodologies and an interest in how states shape populations, with library and information sciences’ attention to documentary production and anthropological and historical insights into the intersections of archives, knowledge, and power. The framework has three components: the act of recovery of life, processes, and events; the turning of life into a record; and the movement of a file from collection to preservation and use. The result is a methodologically rigorous and globally mobile theory. Empirically, the piece draws on comparative historical fieldwork on state-led racial classification and naturalization practices preserved in Japanese and German archives. While the framework is grounded in research on state archives, its utility extends across types of archives and records. In addition, it provides sociologists with a roadmap on how to use archives in single case as well as comparative and transnational research.

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Notes

  1. Of course, archives are not solely the prerogative of qualitative sociologists; quantitative and computational sociologists increasingly draw on archives and also benefit from incorporating a less restrictive understanding of our data sources into our analysis, rather than relegating it to a section on the work’s unavoidable limitations.

  2. This poses technical challenges because files rarely have the same document structure; see Salminen et al. (1997).

  3. These include but are in no way restricted to history, anthropology, the history of science, documentation studies, archaeology, and library and information studies.

  4. For the NS government’s decrees on archival preservation of church books that begun in 1933 already, see Kayser (1939).

  5. Even when they profess to, rhetoric and actual social circumstance may significantly diverge—the lettres de cachet Foucault describes (Foucault 1979) use “grand rhetoric (…) to dress up those trifling affairs” (87) and deploy the language of Racine and Bossuet to clumsily signal erudition, class, and status in order to obtain desired ends.

  6. It isn’t only organizations that create records—individuals record others and themselves as well, as the recent rise of the quantified self has shown. See Lemov (2017) and Gorichanaz (2019).

  7. The editors of this special issue helpfully pointed out that qualitative sociologists have found different workarounds to access information on these missing voices, whether through direct access, as is often the case in ethnographies of the poor, or indirectly for the rich (the moral implications of this differential treatment are significant and deserve more explicit treatment).

  8. Ragin’s concerns about disembodiment and obscuring of cases in variable-oriented comparative work in his analysis of the sociological “case” has shaped how I think through how sociologists use files. See Ragin (1992).

  9. The history of German sociology under National Socialism as much as the American history of slavery until the 2000s, are cases in point: see Christ and Suderland (2014), Klingemann (1996), and Patterson (2018).

  10. I thank Lis Clemens for suggesting Padgett and McLean’s work, and for suggesting to think about archives as informants.

  11. Interestingly, national legislation impinges on whether or not researchers can get access to the very same files. In Germany, I was not allowed to see the SS files that had been preserved in the Berlin Document Center and were now housed in the National Archives and Records Administration in Maryland; the reason are German privacy laws. In the US, no such privacy laws obtained, and I was given free access to all files without any restrictions on their photographic reproduction.

  12. For details on the fate of BDC records, see Fehlauer (2010).

  13. After the war, Knöpfler, like many of his fellow archivists without whom the Holocaust would not have been possible, successfully managed to exonerate himself from public culpability or any form of punishment.

  14. This poses a number of significant challenges to computational and quantitative sociological work that uses archival records that have to date not been sufficiently theorized or addressed.

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Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this piece have greatly benefited from comments and questions after presentations at various conferences and workshops. These include the NYLON Berlin conference in March 2018, the First Chicago Comparative Historical Conference at Northwestern University in May 2018, the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in 2018, and the Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association in 2019. I would like to thank Nadja Klopprogge, Lis Clemens, Craig Calhoun, Emily Erikson, all the contributors to this special issue, the editors of Qualitative Sociology, as well as the anonymous reviewers for comments on previous versions of this article. Kevan Harris, Lorenzo Sabetta, Gustave Lester, Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Jesús R. Velasco, Marisa Fuentes, Nicholas Wilson, Damon Mayrl, Moran Levy, Paige Sweet, Aliza Luft, and katrina quisumbing king: thank you for being such joyful companions in the study and use of archives.

Funding

A MacCracken fellowship as well as a number of internal New York University grants supported research for this article, which was conducted while the author was a Ph.D. candidate in the sociology department at New York University. Subsequent writing of the piece was made possible thanks to a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies at RIJS and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

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Skarpelis, A.K.M. Life on File: Archival Epistemology and Theory. Qual Sociol 43, 385–405 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-020-09460-1

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Keywords

  • Sociology of knowledge
  • Epistemology
  • Inference
  • Theory
  • Archives
  • Racial classification