Facing the future. Inventing a temporal historiography. Dealing
with an uncertain past in order to work in an uncertain future
Summary Report
AHRC Grant Reference AH/K005170/1
Professor David Zeitlyn, PI and coordinator
Project Summary
"The future is certain. Only the past is unpredictable." USSR
graffiti 1980s.
Conventionally the past is fixed and the future changeable. But
these commonsense attitudes are subject to interesting questions
which the Soviet graffiti summarizes. Contentiously in therapy the
past is changed (our understanding is changed) and this can change
present and future affliction. How can archives and museums allow
for such future reconfigurations of the past?
The project workshops explored the background and potential
understanding of controversial episodes in colonial and
post-colonial history, including the Bamileke uprising in Cameroon
and other delicate cases and also considering the relevance of such
cases for others in UK and Europe. The topics discussed have
relevance to and hence potential impacts on a variety of different
professions outside academe: archivists and museum curators working
on collections which are/were controversial and are subject to
highly variable readings/ interpretations which are themselves
controversial. Bedouin history in the Negev is controversial in
contemporary Israel, as is, in very different ways, the status of
models (statuary) among native groups in Canada. Who can speak to or
for the past? Who should be speaking to or for the future? How do
pasts speak to futures? How do futures speak to pasts? Changing the
questions has important repercussions. Our responsibilities to the
future mirror those to the past and the structures for our present
archiving activities need be doubly inflected towards future uses of
the then past. Such inflections are all the more important when
dealing with volatile digital materials whose long term survival is
far less certain than analogue or paper based records. Only clay
tablets have a proven track record for longevity in the seriously
long term (more than a thousand years). So we end up returning to
the central importance of an attitude of hope: we hope our
successors will solve the curatorial problems and find what we
bestow to them both useful and inspirational.
Example of a modern, digitally
encoded clay tablet made as little experiment in the
hope it might be readable in six thousand years time.
Outputs:
These will appear as
a special issue of the journal ‘History and Anthropology’,
setting
up a Cameroon-based online (open) journal 'Vestiges: Traces of
Record/Vestiges: Traces de Reference' (bilingual English
French).
Collaborative Partners
National Archives, Cameroon
Solomon Muna Centre, Yaoundé
University of Yaoundé 1
University of Maroua
University of Ngaoundere
University of Buea
Association of Friends of Archives in Cameroon (AFAC)
LABEX, Les Passées dans le Présent (U Paris X)
Subject Key Words
History Plural/multiple futures
Neglected archives Divination/Prediction
Plural/multiple pasts Futurology
Plural/multiple presents