Tirant Ses Origines Des Conflits Portant Joel Wur Abstract

Abstract

I often turn to Wurl’s essay as a source of inspiration for thinking through post-custodial archival possibilities. While the contemporary North American archival ethos imagines custodianship as the defining principle of archives, Wurl – now 15 years ago – advocated for a shift toward stewardship characterized by long-haul association between repositories and communities of origin. Departing from the “totalizing” mentality of custodial collecting, “stewardship recognizes the misleading futility of referring to a repository’s holdings as anything more than a [limited] selection of potentially useful sources.” I am thankful to the queer ethnographers and oral historians whose writing has also helped me to reflect on listening for what people want, especially as their wants have conflicted with my expectations for interview encounters and archival acquisition discussions. Horacio Roque-Ramirez’s haunting contribution to Bodies of Evidence , in which he grieves for his friend and narrator Alberta Nevarez (a.k.a. Teresita La Campesina), clarified for me that their relationship and those I have developed in my own work are the method of stewardship.