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 are 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, etc. However, we will argue that some sections of personal records, especially when their creators have played institutional roles, can function as institutional archives and even as public archives. In the case of the peripheries, this feature becomes an important patrimonial aspect, given the constitutive fragility of public archives. This fragility relates to problematic issues of statehood, such as hegemony, domination, and sovereignty. We argue that these archives are constitutively incomplete, precarious, contaminated, and hybrid, leading us to problematize some aspects of the archival ratio. The latter (surreptitiously) permeates and naturalizes the experience of the North Atlantic nation-state, 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”.