“No, I never thought that we were different.” Vulnerability, Descriptive Discourses and Agency in the Archive [Elektronisk resurs]

• With the point of departure in discussions on knowledge production within the research filed of oral history and Judith Butler’s discussions on vulnerability and agency this article explores the collecting practices and archiving of stories from one group that often is referred to as vulnerable in Swedish society, the Jewish minority. The analysis is based on life stories kept in the archive of the Nordic Museum in Stockholm (Nordiska museet), that came about as the result of project focusing on Jewish memories in Sweden. The article explores in which ways the different actors – the professionals from the museum and the interviewees – in the knowledge production reaffirmed or contested prevailing discourses about Jewishness in the 1990’s and how this is manifested in different ways during the collecting process, archival practices and in the archived materials. The analysis demonstrates how a memory institution, despite the best intentions, might contribute to maintaining stereotyping discourses on for example Jewishness. However, the analysis also gives examples on how vulnerability enters agency when some of the individual Jewish narrators resisted certain descriptive discourses on Jewishness during the interviewees and the archival process. Hence, an important conclusion from this study is that the power of the knowledge production in the archive does not only belong to the initiators and interviewers working with the collection, but also to the individual narrators – when their acts of resistance is recognized as central in the creation of the collection and its archived narratives 

Ämnesord

Humanities and the Arts  (hsv)

Other Humanities  (hsv)

Cultural Studies  (hsv)

Humaniora och konst  (hsv)

Annan humaniora  (hsv)

Kulturstudier  (hsv)

History and Archaeology  (hsv)

History  (hsv)

Historia och arkeologi  (hsv)

Historia  (hsv)

Genre

government publication  (marcgt)

Indexterm och SAB-rubrik

Archives

Vulnerability

Jewishness

Antisemitism

Holocaust

Narratives

Life stories

Oral History

Cultural Heritage

Arkiv

samlingar

oral history

levnadsberättelser

kulturarv

antisemitism

antisemtiska stereotyper

sårbarhet

judar

Förintelsen

andra världskriget