Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2021
These concluding reflections assess how the contributors to this special issue intervene in key assumptions that shape the current field of archival studies. As the “archival turn” gains ground, forms of Euro- and state-centrism reappear in scholarship otherwise innovative in its attention to the textual remnants of the past. Here, instead, we explore the methodological stakes involved in defining both the “archive” and the historical power brokers who created and preserved a documentary record in pursuit of their varied social, cultural, economic, and political projects. The essay points to the resurgence of culturalist and civilisational indices for comparative archivistics, and follows the arguments collected in this issue to assert by contrast the often uneven and uneasy regional, administrative, and procedural definitions at work within preserved records. Identifying “mobility” as both a methodological tactic and a historical process, this conclusion presents a fluid rather than fixed textual landscape and presents an alternative frame for investigating preservationist practices.
Heather Ferguson received an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas, Austin, and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. After a two-year postdoctoral position at Stanford University, she joined the faculty at Claremont McKenna in 2011 and is now an Associate Professor of Ottoman and Middle Eastern History. Heather is an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, 2014–2015, for her book project entitled The Proper Order of Things: Language, Power and Law in Ottoman Administrative Discourses (Stanford 2018). Her second book project, supported by an NEH summer stipend and an ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship, is titled Sovereign Valedictions: “Last Acts” and Archival Ventures in Ottoman and Habsburg Courts. Her research focuses broadly on comparative early modern empires, categories of sovereignty and power, linkages between archives and state governance, as well as on legal and urban transformations around the Mediterranean. She serves as editor of the Review of Middle East Studies, and associate editor for the International Journal of Islamic Architecture.
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