Todo archivo es colonial: Estrategias indisciplinadas de agrupamiento y lectura de fuentes documentales

Abstract

Challenges in readings of documentary sources appear frequently in the crosses between anthropology and history. From both historical anthropology and ethnohistory — diffuse and sometimes overlapping fields of interaction, in both cases the search for qualitative information on social groups of the past comes from the study of documentary sources — useful metaphors have emerged and become valid methodologies: reading against the grain, along the grain, between the lines, etc. Less has been discussed about the composition of the corpus and the periodization that researchers do or replicate when approaching our work. Following Walter Mignolo (1995) and others, I am interested in discussing the articulation of a historically diverse corpus based on the notion of “colonial semiosis”. According to this idea, the different types of sources are linked by the referent they share, the colonial situation, whether they were produced during the colonial period. Based on the case of a series of documents selected for the first half of the 20th century in Argentina, I suggest that the study of continuities and ruptures benefits from a corpus that is not usually considered by colonial studies. In the case of the imaginaries about the indigenous groups of the Chaco, I point out some benefits and challenges in taking three different types of sources in their intention, production, and circulation (ministerial reports, ethnographic photography, and official historiography) to account for their relationship with a previous period. I believe that such an exercise, far from diminishing the specificity of our task, contributes to a more complex understanding of the colonial period and with the possibility of a better un-disciplinary communication.

Keywords

• Colonial Studies
• un-disciplinarity
• colonial semiosis
• Chaco