From the Archetypical Archive to Cultures of Documentation

Abstract This essay argues that recent theoretical literature on the archive contains critical insights for studies of Islamic documents, while also pushing to move beyond some of the core assumptions of that same literature. There is no question that the fundamental concerns of an "archival turn" are every bit as relevant to studies of Islamic societies, past and present, as they are to European-dominated ones. Yet investigating Islamic "archives" presents the challenge of coming to terms with a concept-the archive-and an attending set of assumptions and theoretical baggage derived almost exclusively from European history. To address this challenge, we propose that employing the term "cultures of documentation" offers a way of having one's cake and eating it too. In deploying this expression, we signal that there existed multitudes of textual practices and record-keeping activities in the pre-industrial Islamic world, and that it is possible to move away from "archive" as a term without abandoning the core insights and questions of the historical literature built around it.