Cultural archive is a term associated with social
anthropologist Wendy James referencing the repository of knowledge found in everyday interactions that individuals reference to validate their existence in the world. This term was coined during James' research of the
Uduk people The Uduk are a Nilo-Saharan group from southeastern Sudan. They speak Uduk, a Koman language. They call themselves ''Kwanim Pa'' and are culturally and linguistically related to neighboring communities, such as the Gumuz and the Kwama from the S ...
of
Sudan
Sudan, officially the Republic of the Sudan, is a country in Northeast Africa. It borders the Central African Republic to the southwest, Chad to the west, Libya to the northwest, Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the east, Eritrea and Ethiopi ...
in the 1990's.
The term is most commonly associated with
Culture and Imperialism
Culture ( ) is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, Attitude (psychology), attitudes ...
, the 1993 collection of essays by postcolonial theorist
Edward Said
Edward Wadie Said (1 November 1935 – 24 September 2003) was a Palestinian-American academic, literary critic, and political activist. As a professor of literature at Columbia University, he was among the founders of Postcolonialism, post-co ...
. The term first appears in reference to Rudyard Kipling's Kim and Said suggests the cultural archive is a major site where investments in imperial conquest are developed. These archives include "narratives, histories, and travel tales."
Said emphasizes the role of the Western imperial project in the disruption of cultural archives, and theorizes that disciplines such as comparative literature, English, and anthropology can be directly linked to the concept of empire.
Gloria Wekker
Gloria Daisy Wekker (born June 13, 1950) is an Afro-Surinamese Dutch emeritus professor (Utrecht University) and writer who has focused on gender studies and sexuality in the Afro-Caribbean region and diaspora. She was the winner of the Ruth Bene ...
's 2016 book ''White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race'' utilizes a scavenger methodology by "work
ngwith interviews, watching TV and reading novels, analyzing email correspondence..." in order to develop a clear understanding of the
Dutch
Dutch or Nederlands commonly refers to:
* Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands
** Dutch people as an ethnic group ()
** Dutch nationality law, history and regulations of Dutch citizenship ()
** Dutch language ()
* In specific terms, i ...
cultural archive.
According to Wekker, her book is "guided by the concept of the cultural archive
(Said 1993), which foregrounds the centrality of imperialism to Western culture. The cultural archive has influenced historical cultural configurations and current dominant and cherished self-representations and culture. In a general nineteenth-century European framework, Edward Said describes the cultural archive as a storehouse of "a particular knowledge and structures of attitude and reference . . .
nd,in Raymond Williams' seminal phrase, 'structures of feeling.' . . . There was virtual unanimity that subject races should be ruled, that there are subject races, that one race deserves and has consistently earned the right to be considered the race whose main mission is to expand beyond its own domain".
(1993, 52, 53) Importantly, what Said is referring to here is that a racial grammar, a deep structure of inequality in thought and affect based on race, was installed in nineteenth-century European imperial populations and that it is from this deep reservoir, the cultural archive, that, among other things, a sense of self has been formed and fabricated".
(p. 2)
References
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Anthropology