Recently The National Archives (UK) Blog posted a piece entitled, “Decolonising Archaeology in Iraq?” by Dr. Juliette Desplat. Whereas I am a big fan of archival research, in particular Dr. Desplat’s ongoing work on making the archive more publicly accessible through her blog posts, I was a bit perturbed by the generous use of the word decolonizing. Decolonization must be protected as a political act. The use of the word as a descriptor is naively violent if used to illustrate the manner by which bureaucracies articulate themselves in the post-colony — those are not acts of decolonization, more often than not they are in their first instances replications of previous power structures. Decolonization must continue to be thought of and contextualized as a mode of political action that, alongside dismantling colonial structures of power, provides the space for the oppressed to occupy equitable power relations. It is about reparations, it is about social justice, it is about equity, and it is about claiming power socially, politically, and psychologically.

My main concern with The National Archives (UK) post was that it was purely descriptive about the colonial archaeologists working in Iraq, their words/letters/notes, and their petulant reluctance to abide by the new rules. With the focus on description, there was a lack of criticality; for example, any mention of Iraqi archaeologists or inspectors reproduced the dismissive tone found ripe in the archive. This was perhaps unintentional, but still problematic and unacceptable. Replicating racialized sterotypes of the other is ethically problematic, and if it is uncritically presented, it continues to travel through citation embedded within other concerns, like that of excavation and artifact movement. This packaged sensibility will continue to be reproduced, for example in Paul Barford’s blog in which he re-presents Desplat’s work under the title “The beginning of the end of excavation archive partage in Iraq.” The reproduction of her work, once again without a critical lens, just continues the cycle of archival reproduction without any sense that such replication could have contemporary consequences if treated without a context or analysis.

The National Archives (UK) post started with the citing of the 1924 Antiquities act which provided quite a bit of latitude for foreign archaeologists to take back materials to the metropole and museums (the Act was written up by Gertrude Bell in 1922 while she was Honorary Director of Antiquities for Iraq). Upon Iraq’s independence (1933) however, the rules changed and archaeologists were no longer permitted to take artifacts out of Iraq and Iraqi inspectors were required on teams. These new rules caused quite a bit of frenzy among archaeologists and their home institutions (like the Oriental Institute and the University of Pennsylvania among others, see FO 371/16923), with memorandums of concern being written to the Foreign Office, and even a veiled threat by Sir Leonard Woolley who “thought it was a strong statement from the Iraqi government, and one that could discourage foreign expeditions to return to the country.” (Desplat 2017)

Unsurprisingly, the archival record posted on the blog makes archaeologists sound like bratty, over privileged school boys who are only interested in their research and antiquities over and beyond the sovereignty of a nation of people. The archival memorandums posted on the blog illustrate the ways colonial epistemic muscle expected itself to continue to work in the postcolony. The clarity of expectations is the most interesting part of the archival material. If the Iraqi’s were going to make all these demands on foreign expeditions then they themselves had to prove their own modernity in order to gain the respect of the colonists. “George Rendel, the Head of the Eastern Department at the Foreign Office, emphasized the ‘serious injury which [the law’s] adoption would obviously occasion to the cause of archaeology in general’. He also thought that ‘the attitude adopted by the Iraqis in this matter [would] be regarded by many as a test of whether Iraq is really a modern and progressive State’ (FO 371/16923).” (Desplat 2017)

Why must Iraqi’s pass a test of modernity to claim their own heritage? This doomed-from-the-start set up if often how patronizing colonialisms find their way into epistemic foundations of archaeological teaching. How many times have I heard, Why should we repatriate these artifacts to [insert post-colony here] if they themselves cannot take care of them?

This blog post is not read in a vacuum, as concerns related to museums and museum collections are not relegated only to archaeologists. On my screen, the tab next to The National Archive post is an interview of Nicholas Mirzoeff by Inês Beleza Barreiros on BUALA. Barreiros does a great job in bringing together some key insights as questions leading Mirzoeff  to outline and clarify his visual activist agenda which he brings to three main points, “empty the museum, decolonize the curriculum and open theory.” I will not expound on all of what these three points entail, but I bring this up just to say that his idea around emptying the museum is literally just that – all expropriated cultural materials should be returned to their appropriate owners. For all those of us involved in repatriation issues and the politics around cultural property, we know it is not that simple nor as easy, even though it should be — and it is also not a new hot button issue or the theory fad of the decade. It is one that communities world wide have been fighting for since archaeologists started taking their things.

Curiously however, although national shifts in excavation regulations in the postcolony are common, as was the case in Iraq, when it comes to indigenous rights and repatriation, there is a particular form of violence that emerges even within the postcolony. The nation state is most anxious and precarious when confronted with indigenous sovereignty; this is true in postcolonial settings, such as in India, as well as in settler colonies such as the United States. The State then, whether a postcolonial or a settler colony, responds with such violence toward indigenous interests that it permeates all forms of interaction, from military action to scientific research.

I was reminded of the violence of science in a recent book by Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh entitled, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits, in a passage that brought tears to my eyes and profoundly disturbed me, “In his final days, the last Yana Indian begged that his body be respectfully buried. Instead, Ishi’s museum friends dissected him “for science,” shipping his brain to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. It sat on a storage shelf for decades in a jar of formaldehyde.” (2017: 14)

This is what makes decolonization imperative and necessarily political. It is not just about a blog post that should not have used the word decolonising in it’s title. It is about recognizing, acknowledging and witnessing the violence that decolonization is a response to. Decolonization is not historical circumstance, it is and must be understood and protected as a political act.

NOTE: I would like to acknowledge and appreciate Morag Kersel for bringing Desplat’s blog post to my attention. I would also like to restate that I think Dr. Desplat’s archival blogging is fantastic, it just needs to be allowed to be more critical. I hope The National Archive (UK) blog can find in itself some allowance for criticality.

“This will be your office,” Dr. Bernson* says, unlocking the storage room near her office.

Tall wooden shelves frame rows of ethnography, gender studies, and area studies book, dog-eared dictionaries of minority languages, and obscure books she picked up in the field. A row of file cabinets faces the bookshelves, and in the back: two old computers for the graduate students.

One Tuesday, when work is slow, I unlock my office door and open the large file cabinet marked fieldnotes. Curious, I pull out slim tablets of lined paper, and discover the records of Dr. Bernson’s first fieldwork, some twenty years before: handwritten notes on conversations, dinners attended, interviews in halting tongue, new vocabulary, and reflections on her early research projects.

I flip through the tablets, and carefully put them back in the cabinet. Close the drawer. Lock the office.

For the next year, I work for Dr. Bernson to code her data, prepare a manuscript, translate online articles, and revise her existing publications. Yet I wonder what happened to the rest of her stories, the fieldnotes we take but never share. Will I someday inherit her notes? And what would I even do with them all?

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In this series, I’d like to talk about what it might take to safely archive and share Dr. Bernson’s—and your—field research. I’m sure this raises many questions/reflections, which you’re welcome to share in the comments.

The first, of course, is: why bother? Why even share fieldnotes?

I suggest we have an ethical responsibility to safeguard and protect our “data,” the stuff of our research—but also to preserve and share it at the appropriate time. Sometimes, we protect local communities by limiting access to information.

(Other times, we protect ourselves and our own reputations. I’ve heard from younger archaeologists that the practice of ‘hiding information’–and even withholding data for thirty years or more!–may help established scholars but may also limit the access of younger scholars to materials that might inform their research.)

There are many good reasons to secure our field data: the possibility that sharing could harm the people we work with or our own scholarly reputations, a lack of established guidelines, and a lack of time and expertise for us to archive both the content and context of our research.

Yet there are also many reasons to preserve and share our work: a desire to share stories from communities that may be ‘off the record,’ to memorialize people we have worked closely with, or to record communities, their constraints, and their ways of living in the world. We may want to help future researchers or those from outside our field to begin developing a broader view of current topics. And we may want to put photos, field documents, and stories back into the hands of those who first shared them with us.

In other words, archiving and sharing our field documents can at times be part of our responsibility to the people we work with, to fellow researchers and to the public. In this series, I’ll bring up some of the issues in securing, archiving, and sharing our fieldwork records–but also discuss why we would do that for ourselves and for future historians and social scientists.

Of course, these posts are only a primer. As an anthropologist-turned-librarian, I’ll remind you that you likely have a “liaison” librarian, archivist, repository manager, or data librarian at your institution. These folks could advise you on preserving and sharing field records. Getting connected with others, here or in person, is one of the best ways to begin thinking through how we can best care for our irreplaceable notes, images, interviews, and other field documents!