Archival Research for Social Science: A Practicuum

Since the 1980s, the necessity of historicizing cultural and social formations has become established as integral to anthropological research. Every ethnography and dissertation has historical sections, derived primarily from secondary sources, commentaries within other ethnographies and published historical work. Most students attempt to conduct archival research in local or national archives alongside ethnographic fieldwork, most often in an ad hoc manner, collecting and analyzing archival material on a trial and error basis. This class is conceived as a practicum that addresses students who need to and want to do archival research as part of their anthropological and sociological fieldwork, but find themselves at a loss for how to think about, begin, and, do archival work.The base layer of the class is methodological and practical: students will be engaged in the practical activities of becoming acquainted with archives, developing archival research questions, learning techniques of recording, coding, and thinking historically. The second layer will be conceptual. Students will be reading and discussing concepts of the archive, reading and analyzing different styles of historical ethnographies, and thinking about how to organize and conceptualize cultural categories historically.Students will be asked to conduct archival research at the archives available at Stanford Libraries and the Hoover Institution archives and write a research paper based on this archival work. We will have weekly meetings divided into two sessions. The first half will discuss set readings and intellectual concern. In the second half, we will discuss methodological concerns, problems encountered in the archives and bounce ideas off each other. We will also have regular guest speakers who will give talks and answer questions, intellectual and methodological about archival research.