Agrarian Studies Colloquium: Ann Farnsworth-Alvear & Daniel Varela Corredor "People with History, History with People: Participatory Research with a Century-old Court Archive in the Colombian Chocó"

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?
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Abstract: Almost a half-century after Eric Wolf and others demonstrated that no peoples are without history, it remains true that those educated in urban contexts think of so-called “remote” areas as having less of it. Young people in rural places absorb that prejudice, as well. This holds whether history is thought about as the arrival of modernity (having come to us from the city) or thought about as pastness that holds transcendent meaning. When history, modernity, and legitimacy are located elsewhere, rural people, places, and their archives are devalued–a calculus that continues to be reproduced even as professional historians increasingly depend on such regional archives to construct more nuanced understandings and to demonstrate the agency of local actors. This paper describes a digitization project co-led with activist scholars from the Muntú Bantú Foundation for African Diaspora Memory, in the Colombian Chocó. Its goal was to make available to researchers thousands of disorganized, deteriorating documents from what was described as a "dead archive" by judges and other officials at the courthouse in Istmina, for whom the piled-up sacks of moldering paper we found fascinating were simply no longer of relevance for the daily administration of justice.
Rather than envision researchers located elsewhere, the project centered on recruiting local college students. Young Afrocolombians from the region photographed, read, and catalogued court cases dating from the 1880s-1930s; they also worked to interpret them, producing a set of essays titled Memorias Vivas. By immersing ourselves in a collective project of discussing century-old civil and criminal cases–replete with descriptions of property titling, land grabs, political rebellions, intra-family violence, concubinage, and witchcraft–both the professional researchers involved and the young people who joined us gained new insight into what modernity had meant in turn of the century Chocó.
Our archival work demonstrates that Chocoanos turned to their own purposes an official legal system in which legitimacy theoretically emanated from Colombia’s urban centers. Vernacular understandings of property, family, and society became enmeshed with imported normative structures. Small-scale miners, gold and platinum traders, government officials, and foreign mining engineers, among others, participated in a hybrid system that hinged on local understandings. Historians and anthropologists’ work is enriched when what we produce is similarly hybrid.