Systems in ignorance: subject knowledge against archival regimes
This is the text of an appearance at the University of Chicago Center for Middle Eastern Studies panel “Silenced histories: archives and archival research in modern Assyrian studies,” October 2023
I’m going to talk about identifying Assyrians in the archives, and about changing the archival profession. As usual.
This text owes debts to two books: The Americans of Urumia, by Hooman Estelami, and Revival and Awakening, by Adam Becker.
What am I doing here? The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sent Eli Smith and Harrison Gray Otis Dwight to northwest Iran in 1829, and recommended setting up mission work in Urmia among Christians of the Church of the East. Justin Perkins came to Urmia in 1834, followed by Dr. and Mrs. Asahel Grant. Presbyterians took responsibility for the ABCFM in 1871. The mission had its share of casualties. Howard Baskerville died defending constitutionalists during the siege of Tabriz in 1909. William Ambrose Shedd died helping to evacuate Assyrians from Urmia to Hamadan during the 1918 genocide. Many Assyrians educated by Presbyterians trained for the ministry stateside and founded Assyrian Presbyterian Churches, especially in California. And so my shop became a significant repository of Assyrian material.
Given this background, you’d think that we’ve successfully lifted up the presence of Assyrians as Assyrians in the stacks. But we haven’t necessarily. For a few reasons.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the Haitian historian and theorist of archives, identifies three sources of absence or gaps in the historic record: between activity and the Event; between the Event and its record; and between these recorded sources and their interpretations. In my field we spend most of our time negotiating the second gap, figuring out where and how a record portrays fidelity to what simply happened, and trying to gather as many reliable documents as exist, to match one account against another. But our efforts in historical positivism are frustrated by the first and the third gaps. That is, we come to records through what actors in time decide to identify as events. And, after the fact, we learn about the records in hand from scholarship, from finished works of history. Records are all too often, when taken on their own, either mute or so contested or contestable as to tell us nothing.
I think we frequently theorize of archives as naturally existing features — in fact the way we talk about “mining” “unearthing” “excavating” “uncovering” material, or respecting the “source,” calling large groups a “fonds”, or talking about “accruals” all evoke geology and hydrology. Walter Benjamin’s angel of history is confronted (maybe by earth and water) alongside the wind called Progress. The preservation threats to the historic record are called Slow Fires. Our metaphorical language styles archives as products of elemental magic, and any appeal to the source or founding of a record is a mystical or romantic one.
For the practitioners who make archives there’s obviously no such thing as a naturally-occurring record. And to me anyway the metaphors we use to talk about archives actively occlude (paranoidly speaking, they are intended to actively occlude) the artificiality of the record.
What does this mean for the Assyrian-related records held at my institution?
For one thing it means that we struggle with captioning photographs.
William Ambrose Shedd was a Presbyterian missionary and child of missionaries, born 24 January 1865 in Seir, south of Urmia and in his twenties served as mission treasurer, supervisor of churches and village schools, and head of the mission press. The mission continued relief work among victims of ongoing internecine and intersectarian violence. During the Ottoman occupation of Urmia in January 1915, Shedd negotiated the release of local Christians captured by Ottoman soldiers and held for ransom. The Russian Empire displaced the Ottomans from Urmia in May 1915; Russian departure following the October Revolution in 1917 left behind quantities of arms. Christian and Muslim militias sprang up in their wake. In 1918, Urmia was surrounded by militias of the Iranian Democrat Party, Turkic tribesmen, and the Kurdish confederation of Shimko Shikak. On 31 July 1918, Shedd and his third wife Mary Lewis Shedd began to lead a convoy of refugees out of Urmia, hoping to meet a local Christian militia, and then take shelter with British army units elsewhere in Iran. An estimated 70,000 refugees began the march, many suffering from cholera and influenza. William Ambrose Shedd died 7 August 1918, of cholera. The refugee column arrived in Hamadan in late August. An estimated 20,000 people died en route.
The Shedds were prodigious recordskeepers — as a teenager William served as mission librarian — and they left us many albums of photographs.
The captions we get routinely identify Assyrians as “Persians” or “Syrians.” Broadly anyone in the Shedd family photographs is a subject of Qajar Iran, and even if their first language is not Persian, they are subjects of a Persian dynasty, etc. Besides which the creators would have taken it as a given that the people they took images of were Assyrian, most of the people in the West Persia stations missioned to were Assyrian. In a sense here Assyrians are a majority population, identified by default. Their difference inside of Iran is not brought out in the Shedd papers because they were the target of God’s designs for humanity, their Assyrianness didn’t need to be enunciated.
The photograph is captioned on the verso, and my tentative reading is “Dr. Ishah Daniel and Madam Juliette — that reading is certainly wrong in parts, but “Daniel” is very clear, and the family name suggests that the people in the picture are Assyrians. (Dr. Mooshie G. Daniel, of Urmia and McCormick Theological Seminary, wrote a guidebook Modern Persia (1897) — which in part stirred up hatred of Muslims with stories of abduction and forced conversion of Christian girls — and was murdered by Kurds in 1903.)
Owing to how hard the text on the verso of this photograph is to read, we described the picture with the broadest reasonable demonym, so in our holdings they are “Persian man and woman.”
“Persian” as a demonym sure elides what church people went to and what language they spoke, but it’s not inaccurate, just imprecise. Assyrians writing mostly in diaspora called themselves Syrians (after modern Assyrian suraya); and this is confusing to, well to me until very recently, but as a caption for photographs from the early 20th century, it’s accurate and represents how the people depicted were beginning to describe themselves.
Who by the way is consistently not identified with the broad brush of nationality, using Persian as a name? The Kurds, who are also consistently imaged bearing guns and ammunition. Being regarded as warlike gets you identified with real specificity.
So here is “Syrian boy enjoying a cucumber” — Shedd is using the contemporaneous term for Assyrians, and we’ve kept it in the verbatim caption. But following the verbatim caption without a background in the wider historic context leads us to use the LCSH for Syrians, which is wrong.
It’s also our habit to add three subject headings for individual photographs, even if there aren’t great topical hooks in a photo, which I think led us to the unique heading “Cucumbers — Iran.”
This is Malek Yonan and his family. Identified by the Shedds as a family living in a small yard, Yonan’s descendants have informed us that he was a large landowner — hence the title malek — in possession of vast vineyards.
This is Hannah and Istir with a samovar, part of an album of “Persian costumes” — and while most of the costumes depict Muslim women of Qajar Iran, leading us to identify the women as “Muslim women”. Anyone with Old Testament names in northwestern Iran is likely Armenian or Assyrian, and the spelling Istir for Esther is commonly Assyrian. When we’re bound to define items using themselves as their only context, when primary sources are taken in a vacuum, this is what happens.
So we struggle to identify Assyrianness, and at the same time, Assyrianness is not claimed evenly by our records creators in the 20th century.
The notion of Assyrian national feeling, during the period when the Shedd family was operating, was in the process of being constructed. Following Adam Becker, Christian revival and national awakening use the same term in Modern Assyrian: mar’asta — and like the Arabophone world’s Nahda of the 1860s, American Protestant missionaries had a hand in constructing Assyrian national feeling. Following Peter Van der Veer, in Imperial Encounters, religious societies “create a public sphere on which the nation-state can be built.” In Beirut and Cairo, Christian pamphlets and newspapers helped build that sphere. In Urmia, the public habits of “preaching, praying, and studying together” inculcated by the missionaries make the social sphere that would come to be named the nation. So after the fact, the records of the period read to us as evasive about Assyrian nationhood and individual Assyrians’ nationality, but that’s largely because the records-creators were present at the beginning.
We also miss Assyrians in diaspora because Presbyterianism in America from about 1920 to about 1950 is a massive assimilation engine. For Presbyterians in mid-century, ethnonationalism is something that happens abroad, and the “melting pots” of settlement houses, industrial missions, and the slow merging of language-based presbyteries, is what happens at home. The Presbyterian church was one of the social institutions that ethnicized people joined as they reached the middle class — the church of Dwight Eisenhower, the Dulleses, Marianne Moore, Fred Rogers — so Assyrianness gets cloaked in our collections by the aspirational class-passing and assimilating functions of Presbyterian church membership.
And so we’re working on lifting up Assyrianness as a historical corrective, but my opinion is that much of this kind of work in libraries and archives is bound by broken systems, and speaking personally burdened by ignorance. The current season of revising description as a form of “historic repair” or “mitigating harm,” is for sure harmless. But it doesn’t liberate captive histories.
We’re approaching legacy description with the idea of innate depravity — the subject headings we’ve been given are at fault, or embody some original sin. Washing away the terms will remove their sin, overcoming the symbolic violence embedded in our collections, bringing peace.
Adding contextual blurbs to items or collections, changing the qualities of the descriptions, is another whole beast, it takes the capacity to do research and sustain your interest in the subject matter over time. And with the exception of the academic subject librarian, we don’t hire for the skills of journalists, historians, poets, and artists. We hire for technological adeptness, capacity to endure tedium, and for attentiveness to detail. What we’re up against is a sixty-year-long technologization of librarianship and archivy, which I think is nearly complete — where our disciplines became sciences, and we stripped bare our abilities to do humanities or arts.
Maybe the texts in hand have affected my feelings about the discipline, but I think we need a second Nahda in archives — where we inculcate humanistic inquiry and reward reading and writing and stop being quants.
We need to balance out our expertise in catalogs and their rules, digital repositories and their schemas, with the wisdom of historians and historiographers, and the witness of families of the people who’ve been turned into archival subjects.
We need the archival tradecraft that gets lost in our workflows. The typical digitization project has 2 or 3 temporary or early-career staff who digitize collections and add description, overseen by one professional staffer who corrects typos and maintains consistent subject headings, and the work is laid out by a set of rules made in advance by professional managers who are usually at some distance from the digitization lab and from the collections themselves. This is not bad — this is how we get big digitization throughput, which is what our users clamor for.
We’d get more nourishing results by building up archives generalism — teaching just a little bit of paleography, history of costume and dress, publishing and book arts, photographic processes, the rise of the bureaucratic state, audio recording processes, the lifecycle of plastics, world history of the 20th century — building up fox-like rather than hedgehog-like attributes.
The newspaper of the mission in Urmia was Zahrir d’Bahra, Rays of Light. We could use a few more of those.
