7 ms·

I don't believe in decolonizing archives. (It's amazing that the article says this with complete seriousness.)

by Jiro 5y ago

JoelMcCracken 5y ago
What does it mean? I agree that this information should be open and available to all, but I find this language confusing.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > What does it mean? I agree that this information should be open and available to all, but I find this language confusing. Honestly, it seems like a faddish buzzword, incorrectly used. IIRC "decolonizing" sometimes means returning cultural artifacts acquired during colonial times to the regions/cultures where they originated. However, it doesn't make any sense to do that to cultural artifacts created by citizens a colonial power in their own originating culture. Honestly, that sounds like another kind of colonization. This article seems like a mess trying to force a combination of trendy ideology with personal experience that don't really fit. For instance: > For her, the archive became a place of postcolonial recovery and remembering. What's that in reference too? A student seeing a card catalog that's still in use, and being reminded of personally using them in the past. It's weirdly trying to particularize the universal. I'm about the farthest from a "colonized" person there is, but I could have had the exact same reaction to the exact same situation as that student. The only difference is that I have the wrong background, so no one's going to try to gratuitously describe my reaction as something "postcolonial."
  - rualca 5y ago
    > The only difference is that I have the wrong background, so no one's going to try to gratuitously describe my reaction as something "postcolonial." "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." The only tool the author of that blog seems to have is their personal ideological beliefs regarding colonialism, thus the author proceeds to treat everything as if it was colonialism.
  - antonvs 5y ago
    > However, it doesn't make any sense to do that to cultural artifacts created by citizens a colonial power in their own originating culture. The issue here is that these works have been in a private library, inaccessible to the public, since the 1930s. In this case, the author is using "decolonize" to mean to liberate the work from private ownership and make it available to the public. When "decolonize" is used in the context of e.g. education, it refers to restructuring an education system to be more equitable to all students. As such, the idea of providing access to everyone is a default implication of the term, even if its origin more specifically relates to dismantling the colonial baggage that led to structural inequality.
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > In this case, the author is using "decolonize" to mean to liberate the work from private ownership and make it available to the public. If that's the case, it seems like jargon for jargon's sake. IMHO that sense would have been much more clearly communicated by using a word like "democratize." The situation kind of brings to mind slang, where people often invent unneeded new words mainly as a way to signal being fashionable or being part of a group.
      - antonvs 5y ago
        Sure. And if you read HN as an outsider, you'll find a metric buttload of such terms. The people reacting badly to this are just being somewhere between parochial and bigoted.
- swashboon 5y ago
  It's certainly a provocative use of the language. I believe they are making the case that fetishistic hoarding of historical documents is both, only available to those with a means of wealth created through probably exploitation, and in an of itself an aspect of western/euro-centric ideology and its propagation through colonization. I tend to think the hoarding mentality is more base then that (I've watched squirrels before) but I think the argument that hoarding knowledge specifically is certainly a more amorphous problem. Yes, they are just making the claim that the information should be available. They are putting it into their own contextualized argument framework.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > I believe they are making the case that fetishistic hoarding of historical documents is...in an of itself an aspect of western/euro-centric ideology and its propagation through colonization. I'm pretty sure a historian with the right background could easily find examples of that in, for instance, China before it had any significant contact with the West. Trying to particularize it seems incorrect. > I believe they are making the case that fetishistic hoarding of historical documents is both, only available to those with a means of wealth created through probably exploitation... That's probably true but well understood. Caring about historical documents, let alone hoarding them, is quite a luxury activity available only to those with wealth, and wealth (now, and especially in the past) usually comes from some kind of exportation of others.
- SiVal 5y ago
  Yes, it's confusing, and a dictionary won't help, because it's religious jargon. Religious jargon, whether from a theistic or, currently, a non-theistic religion, is used to turn comments about nearly anything into declarations of faith. When a single religion dominates academia, as has often been the case through the centuries, they can comment on anything, but it will always be expressed in the form of an argument for their institution's religious doctrines. Professors at Cambridge in the early 17th century were almost all puritans, so they could talk about chemistry experiments, but it would have to be presented as yet more proof of the glory of God and include some jab at popery. In the religion of today's academies, they can choose to talk about Brontë family artifacts as being emblems of "white supremacy" that should be hidden or destroyed or public goods that need to be "decolonized" (opened and freely given to all), but either way, the jargon combines the opinion with the jab at "popery" required by their co-religionists.
  - antonvs 5y ago
    Buried in your comment was a short, simple definition of how the term is being used here: > "decolonized" (opened and freely given to all) Given that it's a word whose meaning you apparently understood in this context, was the rest of your comment really necessary? Its frothiness makes the whole "religious" charge seem like projection.
    - SiVal 5y ago
      The meaning was not simply open and freely given to all. It was that plus a payload of a specific type of condemnation of historical villains that is fundamental to the current campus dogma. The meaning of "made available to the public" is not one of the dictionary senses of the term "decolonized", which caused the "confusion" mentioned by the questioner. The "open" part of the meaning as well as the full implication can only be parsed if you recognize the doctrinal jargon.
      - antonvs 5y ago
        I've described the meaning the author used here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27889686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27889686 The rest seems to be you just jerking your knee at a term that triggers you. Here on HN people will use computer jargon or appropriated scientific jargon to describe things. Guess what, the same happens in other circles, just with different terms. The culture war you're fighting is all in your head.
thebooktocome 5y ago
It's not clear to me if you object to the choice of word or the action that the author intends for it to mean.
subsubzero 5y ago
Just the title of that website makes me "allegic" to its content :) To be fair if people(the public) wanted to review these documents just digitize them. Google's book search project could probably do the whole archive in a day(they scanned rare and ancient books from Stanford and other top libraries) and make them accessible to all.
fosshogg 5y ago
You wouldn't think it was amazing if you graduated with a Literature degree. This is the norm now. Texts are purposely ransacked for ideological goals instead of closely studied for transcendent themes and values. And I am willing to bet my entire life's savings that no one would give a shit about Dickens or Browning in this situation. Not one bit.
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  Decolonization as the article uses it just means to have curricula include authors from a diverse range of perspectives and backgrounds. If you think people should spend more time studying "transcendent themes and values", I can't imagine why you'd be against that.
  - hodgesrm 5y ago
    How about just saying that directly? The language is very confusing.
    - AlotOfReading 5y ago
      It's the only meaning that fits contextually. You can also ignore the sentence that contains it and be no worse off in understanding the argument. People just fixated on that particular word for whatever reason.

I don't believe in decolonizing archives. (It's amazing that the article says this with complete seriousness.)

by Jiro 5y ago

I don't believe in decolonizing archives. (It's amazing that the article says this with complete seriousness.)

What does it mean? I agree that this information should be open and available to all, but I find this language confusing.

tablespoon 5y ago
> What does it mean? I agree that this information should be open and available to all, but I find this language confusing. Honestly, it seems like a faddish buzzword, incorrectly used. IIRC "decolonizing" sometimes means returning cultural artifacts acquired during colonial times to the regions/cultures where they originated. However, it doesn't make any sense to do that to cultural artifacts created by citizens a colonial power in their own originating culture. Honestly, that sounds like another kind of colonization. This article seems like a mess trying to force a combination of trendy ideology with personal experience that don't really fit. For instance: > For her, the archive became a place of postcolonial recovery and remembering. What's that in reference too? A student seeing a card catalog that's still in use, and being reminded of personally using them in the past. It's weirdly trying to particularize the universal. I'm about the farthest from a "colonized" person there is, but I could have had the exact same reaction to the exact same situation as that student. The only difference is that I have the wrong background, so no one's going to try to gratuitously describe my reaction as something "postcolonial."
- rualca 5y ago
  > The only difference is that I have the wrong background, so no one's going to try to gratuitously describe my reaction as something "postcolonial." "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." The only tool the author of that blog seems to have is their personal ideological beliefs regarding colonialism, thus the author proceeds to treat everything as if it was colonialism.
- antonvs 5y ago
  > However, it doesn't make any sense to do that to cultural artifacts created by citizens a colonial power in their own originating culture. The issue here is that these works have been in a private library, inaccessible to the public, since the 1930s. In this case, the author is using "decolonize" to mean to liberate the work from private ownership and make it available to the public. When "decolonize" is used in the context of e.g. education, it refers to restructuring an education system to be more equitable to all students. As such, the idea of providing access to everyone is a default implication of the term, even if its origin more specifically relates to dismantling the colonial baggage that led to structural inequality.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > In this case, the author is using "decolonize" to mean to liberate the work from private ownership and make it available to the public. If that's the case, it seems like jargon for jargon's sake. IMHO that sense would have been much more clearly communicated by using a word like "democratize." The situation kind of brings to mind slang, where people often invent unneeded new words mainly as a way to signal being fashionable or being part of a group.
    - antonvs 5y ago
      Sure. And if you read HN as an outsider, you'll find a metric buttload of such terms. The people reacting badly to this are just being somewhere between parochial and bigoted.
swashboon 5y ago
It's certainly a provocative use of the language. I believe they are making the case that fetishistic hoarding of historical documents is both, only available to those with a means of wealth created through probably exploitation, and in an of itself an aspect of western/euro-centric ideology and its propagation through colonization. I tend to think the hoarding mentality is more base then that (I've watched squirrels before) but I think the argument that hoarding knowledge specifically is certainly a more amorphous problem. Yes, they are just making the claim that the information should be available. They are putting it into their own contextualized argument framework.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > I believe they are making the case that fetishistic hoarding of historical documents is...in an of itself an aspect of western/euro-centric ideology and its propagation through colonization. I'm pretty sure a historian with the right background could easily find examples of that in, for instance, China before it had any significant contact with the West. Trying to particularize it seems incorrect. > I believe they are making the case that fetishistic hoarding of historical documents is both, only available to those with a means of wealth created through probably exploitation... That's probably true but well understood. Caring about historical documents, let alone hoarding them, is quite a luxury activity available only to those with wealth, and wealth (now, and especially in the past) usually comes from some kind of exportation of others.
SiVal 5y ago
Yes, it's confusing, and a dictionary won't help, because it's religious jargon. Religious jargon, whether from a theistic or, currently, a non-theistic religion, is used to turn comments about nearly anything into declarations of faith. When a single religion dominates academia, as has often been the case through the centuries, they can comment on anything, but it will always be expressed in the form of an argument for their institution's religious doctrines. Professors at Cambridge in the early 17th century were almost all puritans, so they could talk about chemistry experiments, but it would have to be presented as yet more proof of the glory of God and include some jab at popery. In the religion of today's academies, they can choose to talk about Brontë family artifacts as being emblems of "white supremacy" that should be hidden or destroyed or public goods that need to be "decolonized" (opened and freely given to all), but either way, the jargon combines the opinion with the jab at "popery" required by their co-religionists.
- antonvs 5y ago
  Buried in your comment was a short, simple definition of how the term is being used here: > "decolonized" (opened and freely given to all) Given that it's a word whose meaning you apparently understood in this context, was the rest of your comment really necessary? Its frothiness makes the whole "religious" charge seem like projection.
  - SiVal 5y ago
    The meaning was not simply open and freely given to all. It was that plus a payload of a specific type of condemnation of historical villains that is fundamental to the current campus dogma. The meaning of "made available to the public" is not one of the dictionary senses of the term "decolonized", which caused the "confusion" mentioned by the questioner. The "open" part of the meaning as well as the full implication can only be parsed if you recognize the doctrinal jargon.
    - antonvs 5y ago
      I've described the meaning the author used here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27889686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27889686 The rest seems to be you just jerking your knee at a term that triggers you. Here on HN people will use computer jargon or appropriated scientific jargon to describe things. Guess what, the same happens in other circles, just with different terms. The culture war you're fighting is all in your head.

thebooktocome 5y ago

It's not clear to me if you object to the choice of word or the action that the author intends for it to mean.

subsubzero 5y ago

Just the title of that website makes me "allegic" to its content :) To be fair if people(the public) wanted to review these documents just digitize them. Google's book search project could probably do the whole archive in a day(they scanned rare and ancient books from Stanford and other top libraries) and make them accessible to all.

fosshogg 5y ago

You wouldn't think it was amazing if you graduated with a Literature degree. This is the norm now. Texts are purposely ransacked for ideological goals instead of closely studied for transcendent themes and values. And I am willing to bet my entire life's savings that no one would give a shit about Dickens or Browning in this situation. Not one bit.

AlotOfReading 5y ago
Decolonization as the article uses it just means to have curricula include authors from a diverse range of perspectives and backgrounds. If you think people should spend more time studying "transcendent themes and values", I can't imagine why you'd be against that.
- hodgesrm 5y ago
  How about just saying that directly? The language is very confusing.
  - AlotOfReading 5y ago
    It's the only meaning that fits contextually. You can also ignore the sentence that contains it and be no worse off in understanding the argument. People just fixated on that particular word for whatever reason.