Von Persefoni Myrtsou
In: Gökce Yurdakul, Regina Römhild, Anja Schwanhäußer, Birgit zur Nieden, Aleksandra Lakic (Hg.): E-Book Project of Humboldt-University Students: Witnessing the Transition: Refugees, Asylum-Seekers and Migrants in Transnational Perspective. Berlin (forthcoming)
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| A.'s Archive: A portrait from the '60s partly destroyed from humidity |
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| A portrait from a photographers studio from the ‘70s |
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| A.’ s indexing system and unsorted photographs from family albums |
In a paper from 1996 entitled “Vogel's Net: Traps as Artworks and
Artworks as Traps”[1].
Alfred Gell draws attention to the curatorial choice[2] of
anthropologist Susan Vogel to exhibit a fishing net trap of the Zande people as
part of a contemporary art exhibition at the centre of African Art New York. According
to Gell, Vogel thus intended to 'deceive' the viewers regarding the actual
status of the object in this space. Inspired by this incident, Gell goes on to analyse
the aesthetic affinity between actual hunting traps and contemporary conceptual
a rtworks, and in so doing to question criteria used to affirm status of art
only to certain objects and not to others. Gell argues that artworks function
in a similar way to actual traps; as forms that are intended or are able to
entrap and capture the mind and purpose of others. The trap is the external
objectification of the mind of its maker, and a transfiguration of the
reciprocal relationship of the maker; the hunter (or the artist), and the prey
(the viewer)[3].
Taking Gell's conceptual understanding of the trap as a point
of departure, Daniel Miller in an article titled “The Fame of the Trinis:
Websites as Traps” portrays the personal websites of Trinidadians as aesthetic
forms -or even as artworks- intended to “entrap or
captivate other wills so that they will come into relationship with them,
exchanging either in economic or social intercourse” [4] and
“express the social efficacy of their creators”[5]. The
anthropological study The Fame of Gawa by Nancy Munn[6] is for Miller
(and for Gell) an important reference point. Munn conducted a symbolic analysis
of sociocultural systems, based on her ethnographic research of the main
practices related to value producing practices based on the economy of gifting
on the island of Gawa. Building on Malinowski' s study of the Kula Ring[7], Munn
demonstrated how Gawans gain their “fame” by participating in the long-distance
Kula exchange ring. The reputation that the Gawan community has been successful
in this interisland exchange system asserts the “fame” of the community; it
internal viability and external visibility. Miller thematises websites of
Trinis not simply as “expressions of particular individuals objectified” in
these personal websites, but also as “collective constructions”, which attempt
“to expand individuals largely by expanding the fame of the entity they most
fully identify with, in this case the nation-state of Trinidad and Tobago”[8], and
assert the fame of the Trinis.
As a tribute to these scholars, in this paper[9]
I build on their interpretations of the idea of the trap. I will analyse two archives put
together by two Syrians none of whom currently resides in Syria. Both archives
relate thematically to Syria. My empirical data consist of online and offline
participant observations, memory protocols and interviews with the individuals
who put together those archives. I should note that I
intentionally do not consider this topic merely from the perspective of
migration,[10]
since the two main informants, although both migrants, did not wish to connect
their archives to their experience as migrants. Rather they focused more on
their social and political practices through their archives related to Syria.
The contents,
structures and target groups of these two archives may seem very different at
first glance. The
first one is a digital archive that contains documents concerning the post-2011
Syria and is placed on a Facebook profile page. The second is a non-digital
archive about the city of Damascus, consisting of i. a. photographs, films, postcards
and periodicals, dating back from the late ’40s until today. By regarding archives
as traps in Gell’s and Miller’s sense, I firstly want to build on their
extended understanding of the concept of the trap. Secondly, I suggest
that the transfiguration of the relationship of those involved in the making of
the archive (the archivist, the contributors, the viewers) is infused -because
of the socio-political situation in Syria- by moral responsibility. This moral
responsibility towards a war-torn country, the fellow citizens and the self, functions as a self-imposed trap; one has to continue contributing
and archiving for the benefit of the whole community. Finally, I will propose the
practice of trapping in these archives as a way of activating political
and civil agency, aiming to attract attention and raise awareness for a larger
cause; to reconstruct the fame of Syrians; their visibility and viability to
their own selves and to the rest of the world.
(…)
(…)
By way of conclusion: Trapped in a
Syrian Kula Ring
Civil uprisings in Syria began in March 2011,
what is also referred to by my informants as the beginning of the revolution in
Syria. This is also the period when many people started en masse to express
their regime-critical views publicly, and in most cases digitally. This
mobilisation also brought to the foreground a need to rescue and collect
scattered memories from the past for the purposes of a (self)critical future
building for Syria. “Crowdsourcing”
as a method for recreating Syria's pre-revolution memory but also capture the
historicity of current situation in Syria presented itself as an efficient way
to gather, share, curate and archive “anecdotes and snippets of memories
published” online and offline “by individuals who experienced these decades,
but had stayed silent for many years out of fear”. “[A] new collective memory
of pre-revolution Syria was being spontaneously curated and rediscovered by the
crowd”[24].
In his paper “Foucault’ s Archive in the Era of Cold War Big Data” Jason
Pribilsky examines critically the fascination with big data
archives[25]
developed during and after the Cold War period; he condemns the development of
universalist archiving methods of stripping identifying or contextual
information from the cultural “facts”. In Foucault' s
view, the archive is a more general epistemological category; it is not “the
library of libraries;” nor is it “the sum of all the texts that a culture has
kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past.”[26] The archive
is what he calls “the system of discursivity”[27], a
domain of things said. In this sense the archive is not a static, often
physical, storage of information; rather it is an evolving space of
contestation, in which documents undergo constant interpretation. “Tacit narratives” of what is considered worth being remembered and archived are related to conscious or subconscious
subjective choices of the archivist and “hidden in categorisation,
codification, and labelling”[28]. “Social, cultural, political, economic, religious and personal
contexts determine those narratives”[29] and
posses the power to make meaning for the narrative and generate situated
knowledge. Crowdsourced archives[30], such
as S.’ s and A.’ s archives, are by nature discursive and situated into
quotidian practices of a certain period of time in Syria and beyond, because
they are put together by people who have experienced this period first-hand in
place and time.
But let us now
return to the question with which I started: why are these archives traps?
First of all, they
are aesthetic traps; the first 'victim' to be “trapped” in the aesthetics of
these archives is an unsuspected viewer (as I was the first time I encountered
them). The circumstances of their creation (the war in Syria) may instantly “lure” the viewer into a
melancholic, nostalgic, sorrowful -even victimising- reading of these efforts
and omit the “tacit” narratives and the larger cause of these archives. In the
case of S. one cannot stay unaffected in front of the view of bodies of dead
children, or the breathtaking story of a kidnapped individual. In the case of A., one can easily fall for the nostalgic aspect evoked by what we would call
“vintage” photography from the '60s -although for A. these photographs
encapsulate latent memories of a suppressive time for which he is not nostalgic
at all.
As Gell[31]
supports, the trap is the transfiguration of the relationship between the hunter (the one
who creates the trap) and the prey (the one who falls into the trap). In the cases
analysed in this paper, this relationship among the archivist, the contributors
and the viewers of the archive is determined by the socio-political situation
in Syria; the archivists are constantly looking for material to gather (to
trap), the contributors to the archives (S.’ s “friends” and A.’ s
photographers and families, who give him their private family albums) are being
voluntarily disclosed (trapped?) by the archivists, and may actively continue
to gather information from other sources in order to share them with or pass
them on to the archivists. The people involved into
this type of exchange are bound together by a moral responsibility towards each
other, towards themselves, but above all towards Syria. The transfiguration of this
relationship is objectified in these archives.
The popular victimising image of destruction of Syria and Syrians, that one often encounters in
Western media, is blasted by the anti-image of construction mediated through these archives. These archives
function as social agents with social efficacy, and not as merely the signs of
some other agency (the archivist’s for example).[32] These
archives trap documents and artefacts with voices, opinions,
perspectives, shifts in attitudes etc. for a larger cause; to battle the imposed
and enduring social amnesia of Syrians and contribute towards social change,
collective consciousness and eventually future building for Syria. As the
Gawans assert their “fame” -their internal viability and their external
interisland visibility- by being successful in the Kula Ring ceremonies, similarly
the reconstruction of a collective memory for Syria through these efforts of
archiving, could potentially reassert and restore the “fame” of the people of
Syria; their (currently war-torn) internal viability and their moral visibility
to the rest of the world.
Bibliography
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Issue: Migrants and clandestinity, 47: 4, pp. 565-579
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(Original: “Des Espace Autres,” March 1967, Translated from French by Jay
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Artworks as Traps” in Journal of Material Culture, 1: 1, pp. 15-38
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[1] The main
ideas developed in this paper were further investigating in Art and Agency (1998)
later on.
[2] Susan Vogel exhibited a
tightly rolled and ready for transport fishing net (a fish-trap) made by the
Zande people, an ethnic group of North Central Africa. The exhibition was
entitled 'ART/ARTIFACT' and it took place at the Centre for African Art in
1988. For more information see Gell (1996), p. 17.
[3] cf. Gell (1996), p. 316.
[4] Ibid, p. 22.
[5] Miller (2000), p. 6.
[6] See:
Munn, Nancy (1992), The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value
Transformation in a Massim Society, Duke University Press: Durham (first
published in 1986). The Kula Ring is
a ceremonial exchange system conducted in the Milne Bay Province of Papua New
Guinea. Participants travel hundreds of miles in the ocean by canoe in order to
exchange Kula valuables, mostly jewellery.
[7] In
Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), while studying the Kula Ring,
Malinowski is asking the question "why would men risk life and limb to
travel across huge expanses of dangerous ocean to give away what appear to be
worthless trinkets?". He concluded that through the intercommunal contacts
due to the Kula Ring expeditions, islanders establish friendly relations
among themselves and maintain peaceful contact and communication. In this
inter-island exchange other utilitarian items are shipped back and forth, and
are traded. Also they reinforce status and authority distinctions, since the
ancestral chiefs who are higher in the hierarchy of the ceremony, assume the
responsibility for organising and directing expeditions.
[8] cf. Miller (2000), p. 6
[9] I am grateful Nedim Nomer
for his comments and help, as well as Eleana Yalouri for her encouragement and
support. I would also like to thank A., D. A., J. G.
for their advice and last but not least my informants for the contribution of
invaluable information.
[25] See Pribilsky (2016).
Pribilsky refers extensively to the Human Relations Area Files initiated in
1949 by anthropologist George Murdock at Yale University.
[28] Ketelaar (2001), p. 135.
[29] Ketelaar (2001), p. 136f.
[30] The main limitation of
crowdsourcing is its curation; A. is following a traditional thematic
indexing method of archiving his material. S.' s indexes are his Facebook
albums, though the rest of the information is scattered in his profile.
Hashtags would help, but S. is not always using them. If Facebook added a
search button on each account that would enable to search the entire content
with simple keywords.
[31] Gell (1996), p. 29.
Bitte diesen Beitrag wie folgt zitieren:
Persefoni Myrtsou (2016): The Fame of Syrians: (Facebook) Archives As Traps. In: Gökce Yurdakul, Regina Römhild, Anja Schwanhäußer, Birgit zur Nieden, Aleksandra Lakic (Hg.): E-Book Project of Humboldt-University Students: Witnessing the Transition: Refugees, Asylum-Seekers and Migrants in Transnational Perspective. Preview (Weblog), https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=863130166696833325#editor/target=post;postID=3697950972162993466;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=0;src=link
Persefoni Myrtsou (2016): The Fame of Syrians: (Facebook) Archives As Traps. In: Gökce Yurdakul, Regina Römhild, Anja Schwanhäußer, Birgit zur Nieden, Aleksandra Lakic (Hg.): E-Book Project of Humboldt-University Students: Witnessing the Transition: Refugees, Asylum-Seekers and Migrants in Transnational Perspective. Preview (Weblog), https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=863130166696833325#editor/target=post;postID=3697950972162993466;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=0;src=link
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