Misplaced archives, statehood and provenance out of place: the case of two personal records from the peripheries

Abstract

This article aims to reconsider some key aspects of the classical concept of “provenance”. To do this, we draw on our experience working with two personal archives from the South: one from Argentine physicist and mathematician Carlos Mallmann, and the other from Italian-Argentinian sociologist Gino Germani. Unlike State archives in which preserving, organizing, identifying, and standardizing public documents is a regulated obligation, the safekeeping of documents in the case of personal records is a contingency. They must overcome multiple obstacles: interventions by their custodians, difficulties in their serialization and standardization, challenges on the differentiation between personal, and familiar and institutional sections. In the case of archives from the peripheries, other problematic issues regarding statehood are added, such as hegemony, domination, sovereignty. Thus, we argue, these archives are constitutively incomplete, precarious, contaminated and hybrid. To shed light on this, first, we explore the complexities of “custody” and its porous boundaries with the record creation, and then move on to a less explored topic, regarding the areas of personal archives that appear more stable, homogeneous, and akin to the notion of serial production. Then, we problematize some aspects of archival ratio and how they (surreptitiously) permeate and naturalize the North Atlantic nation-state’s experience, universalizing a singular (and historical) form of producing hegemony as a totality. Finally, we propose some reflections and raise some questions regarding how institutionality/statehood is modulated in the archives from the peripheries, and how some aspects of the classical-North Atlantic notion of “provenance” appears here “out of place”.