Abstract
Reporting on ongoing research, this paper reviews stories, drawn from recent literature as well as gathered through ethnographic research, that people tell about records and recordkeeping during and since the Yugoslav Wars. It focuses on what these stories reveal of the agency and affect of recordkeeping in individual and community lives, particularly in Croatia. The paper concludes with a contemplation of what might be learned from such an approach for the development of recordkeeping infrastructures that can anticipate, avert or alleviate some of the ways in which records and recordkeeping continue to traumatize or target the vulnerable, and frustrate and prevent the human and societal need to “move forward,” if not “move past.”
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Notes
I am using this term here as shorthand to refer to the bureaucratic imperatives, rationales, functions and actions that generate records, as well as associated systems, services and procedures, and archives where such records may eventually reside or that share in the creation and ongoing management of the records.
Identities of speakers have also purposively not been disclosed.
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Gilliland, A.J. Moving past: probing the agency and affect of recordkeeping in individual and community lives in post-conflict Croatia. Arch Sci 14, 249–274 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-014-9231-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-014-9231-3