Visions and Traditions: Knowledge Production and Tradition Archives is a comprehensive volume featuring nineteen essays on the history, theory, and place of late-eighteenth and early twentieth-century ethnographic collecting efforts, and of folklore archives tied to scholars who are themselves archivists or who have done extensive work with archives of ethnology and folklore. The essays gathered here hark back to two different conferences. The first set of papers is drawn from four panels at the SIEF (Société Internationale d’Ethnologie et de Folklore) meeting in Zagreb, Croatia, in 2015. The second source is the Nordic Ethnology and Folklore Conference of the same year. Overall, the papers “deal directly with central questions facing the tradition archives” (12). The volume’s geographic scope spans much of Western Europe, including Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Romania, Sweden, and Switzerland, with one essay on Ukrainian Canadian archives. It provides important comparative insights on these national traditions as well as on methodological and ethical issues affecting archives, both in the past and in the present. This collection of essays can be considered a contribution to writing against the “archival grain,” presenting various perspectives from archivists, researchers, collectors, and others who take part in the archival production of knowledge.
Archives are important sites and sources of ethnological and folkloristic knowledge. Historians, since the mid-nineteenth century, have underscored the need for creating a new scientific history on the basis of archives as “neutral repositories” of what they deemed to be factual knowledge. However, since roughly the 1960s, archivists and other scholars who work with archives have tackled the myth of the impartiality, neutrality, and objectivity of archival holdings. In that light, a great contribution of the volume under review is its argument that even as archives are crucial to the production of disciplinary knowledge, ethnological and folkloristic knowledge does not passively “sit” in archival collections. Instead, the collections take part in passing knowledge on to further circles of knowledge, through the work of researchers and their collaborators as well as through publication in different forms imbued with different sorts of political power. And in that sense, this collection of essays follows the post-modernist turn, an important framework for its conceptual imaginings. I find the conceptualization of the issue of power in the formation and dissemination of knowledge obtained through archives an important framework, especially when viewed in conjunction with the de-colonization efforts that we increasingly see in anthropology and folklore studies.
The presentation of the archival collection using “earthy” metaphors is interesting. The first section opens with “Tilling the Soil—Words of Instruction,” in which Clíona O’Carroll lays out the framework for this volume in a foreword, claiming that tradition archives serve “as memory institutions in the past” and will do the same in the future. The second introductory piece, by Maryna Chernyavska, is titled “The Contested Identity of Folklore Archives: Folkloristics and Archival Studies at a Crossroads” and it further elaborates on and contextualizes the book’s coverage of archival work in the past.
Essays in the second section of the book continue with the earth metaphors. This section, Bringing the Harvest Home – Insights from Past Collection Practice, contains seven essays on different tradition archives in Europe. This diverse section allows readers to explore the unique histories of various national archives and compare archival practices across different national traditions. Important in this section is the diversity of folklore genres that have found their way to the archives, such as the collections of folk customs by Amund Norum Reslokken, of folk belief by Ave Goršič, of speech genres by Agneta Lilja, and of jazz by Alf Arvidsson.
The third section, Fields of Cultural Identity – Archival and National Policies, presents three essays on national projects, with an emphasis on collection-specific efforts that reveal the aims, pressures, politics, visions, and practices of folklore archivists and ethnographers, past and present. Treating important features of archives in Ireland, Finland, and Switzerland, these essays shed light on the internal and external dynamics of knowledge production. The essays by Konrad Kuhn and Lauri Harvilahti deal with, respectively, the production of knowledge by Swiss Volkskunde scholars and the Folklore Archives of the Finnish Literature Society. This section also features an essay by Kelly Fitzgerald and Niina Hamalainen that compares archival practices in Ireland and Finland. These essays feel somewhat lost between the longer sections that surround them in the book. For better thematic coherence, Marleen Metslaid’s “Co-production of Ethnographic Knowledge in Estonia during the 1920s and 1930s” (which, I must admit, is one of my favorite pieces in the volume) and Susanne Nylund Skog's “From Personal Letters to Scientific Knowledge: The Creation of Archived Records in a Tradition Archive” could have been included in this section to enhance thematic alignment and provide a more balanced presentation for the whole volume.
The fourth section, Seeds for Future Practice – Recent and Future Challenges for Tradition Archives, features seven essays, in which the focus is no longer on past practices but on the future of tradition archives, particularly in reference to digitization. I find the emphasis on the future of archives especially illuminating, as archives both affect and are affected by digital practices, raising important issues concerning ethical, scholarly, and affectual aspects of archival collections. A key question is whether research “from a distance” is possible or even desirable, with the suggestion that there might be other, “hybrid,” arrangements based on research in situ along with the use of archival material. Today, with an increasing number of online archives, many archives favor knowledge that is produced through co-operation between researchers and archivists. I find O’Carroll’s discussion very useful to understanding digital opportunities and challenges, and Audun Kjus notes the importance of the “digital habitat” of archives in a discussion on future directions.
The essays in this volume cover several important dimensions of archival collections. Another of these is the issue of technology that starts with collecting in the field and expands to the treatment, classification, and presentation of the material including by digital means. Another fil rouge, or connecting thread, is the production of knowledge, but one must make an effort to seek it out in the different sections of the book. Another theme that cuts across the sections is the idea of networks and networking, which is an important factor in the formation of archives as well as a useful concept in rethinking various aspects of the collaborative process.
Overall, Visions and Traditions: Knowledge Production and Tradition Archives offers critical perspectives on archival practices and is commendable for its breadth and depth of coverage. Each essay is thoughtfully written, and the editors have succeeded in compiling a set of essays that addresses a diverse array of topics. Still, the arrangement of essays could be better structured, with more attention to thematic organization and an effort to create sections of consistent dimension. Clearly, bringing together so many scholars of archives must have taken careful planning, organizing, and of course, editing. However, it would be interesting to conceive of a different arrangement of the book’s contents, for example, by gathering essays on methodologies and theories in a separate section in order to make each valuable contribution shine. As I mentioned above, to achieve a more balanced table of contents, the third section of the book could have included a couple more essays dealing with similar issues in different national traditions. This would have remedied a notable shortcoming, the under-theorization of knowledge and knowledge production despite the promise in the book’s subtitle. Moreover, this collection of essays would have benefited from the inclusion of additional essays specifically focused on this critical theme, thereby providing a more robust conceptual framework for readers. Lastly, one notices that the essays are of varying lengths and that the arrangement of topics within each section of the book seems a bit unbalanced.
Nonetheless, Visions and Traditions: Knowledge Production and Tradition Archives significantly contributes to the discussion of past and present activities in the archives of Europe, and it presents useful visions for the future. I do find the emphasis on a “global consideration” (page 13) a little overstated, since, as these essays originate in conferences on two European archives, the volume has a distinctly European focus. But, all said, this does not diminish the brilliance of these essays focused mostly on Nordic and other European settings. In particular, these case studies underline the important work that has been performed in the past, raising concerns about it but also showing its successes, and they pave the way for scholars to learn from history and carry on future archival practices at these important memory institutions.
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[Review length: 1424 words • Review posted on October 25, 2024]