TY - JOUR
T1 - Research without archives?
T2 - The making and remaking of area studies knowledge of the middle east in a time of chronic war1
AU - Moustafa, Laila Hussein
N1 - Funding Information:
MES started to receive financial support from the Department of Education through the Title VI program during the era following the Second World War. MES also received funding from private foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment, and the Ford Foundation.28 The Ford
Funding Information:
56 Under the directorship of Anne Regourd, the Zabid Programme sponsored by the French Centre for Archeology and Social Sciences in Sanaa, successfully catalogued, digitized, and physically restored manuscripts from the private libraries of religious scholars in Zabid. See Anne Regourd, ed., Catalogue cumulé des manuscrits de bibliothèques privées de Zabid : La bibliothèque de ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Hadhrami, fasc. 1, Fonds social de développement (Sanaa, Yemen: Centre français d’archéologie et de sciences sociales, 2006). Based on YMDI’s (Yemeni Manuscript Digitization Initiative) model, Sabine Schmidtke led the digitization project; see Jan Thiele and Sabine Schmidtke, Preserving Yemen’s Cultural Heritage: The Yemen Manuscript Digitization Project (Sanaa, Yemen: Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 2011).
Funding Information:
Foundation started to fund area studies centres to increase US government knowledge about faraway countries during the Cold War era.29 During the 1960s, area studies were partially funded under Title VI to support the need for professionals with sufficient language capabilities. Funds from this program supported language and area studies centres, the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship programs, the Fulbright fellowship and others, as well as research in language learning methodology and specialized teaching materials.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, Association of Canadian Archivists. All rights reserved.
PY - 2018/3/1
Y1 - 2018/3/1
N2 - The Middle East is home to ancient historical documents of great value to archivists and historians. Systemic violence, warfare, and political instability in the region since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 have taken a terrible toll on documents and archives as well as human life. The destruction of libraries that house primary source materials affects the creation of knowledge in Middle Eastern studies in important ways that remain to be understood. In this article, I review the extent of the damage to libraries and archives in the region since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and then ask: What happens to Middle Eastern studies when archives are destroyed and researchers must change their topics and methods of research? Can we create knowledge about a region when its archival resources and human informants are so endangered? If access to archival materials is essential to the very essence of Middle Eastern studies, then what is happening to that field and why should that matter to archivists? I recount anecdotal evidence of researchers changing the topics and themes of their research in response to a situation of limited access to archives and to the region, and then present outcomes of a survey I designed to understand more systematically how these problems are affecting the shape of research and knowledge about the Middle East. Finally, I present an aspirational call to the cultural heritage preservation community – researchers, archivists, and librarians – to digitize archival resources in the Middle East.
AB - The Middle East is home to ancient historical documents of great value to archivists and historians. Systemic violence, warfare, and political instability in the region since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 have taken a terrible toll on documents and archives as well as human life. The destruction of libraries that house primary source materials affects the creation of knowledge in Middle Eastern studies in important ways that remain to be understood. In this article, I review the extent of the damage to libraries and archives in the region since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and then ask: What happens to Middle Eastern studies when archives are destroyed and researchers must change their topics and methods of research? Can we create knowledge about a region when its archival resources and human informants are so endangered? If access to archival materials is essential to the very essence of Middle Eastern studies, then what is happening to that field and why should that matter to archivists? I recount anecdotal evidence of researchers changing the topics and themes of their research in response to a situation of limited access to archives and to the region, and then present outcomes of a survey I designed to understand more systematically how these problems are affecting the shape of research and knowledge about the Middle East. Finally, I present an aspirational call to the cultural heritage preservation community – researchers, archivists, and librarians – to digitize archival resources in the Middle East.
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M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85073443635
VL - 85
SP - 68
EP - 95
JO - Archivaria
JF - Archivaria
SN - 0318-6954
ER -