Call for Papers
MARTOR 24/2019
Archives and Politics of Memory: the Collecting, Storage, Ownership and Selective Disclosure of Archival Material
The Museum of the Romanian Peasant is seeking contributions for its annual journal Martor 24/2019.
Martor is a peer-reviewed academic journal, established in 1996, indexed by EBSCO, Index Copernicus, CEEOL, AIO, and, since April 2018, MLA International Bibliography, with a focus on cultural and visual anthropology, ethnology and museology.
Editors in charge: Bogdan Iancu, researcher, National Museum of the Romanian Peasant; Corina Iosif, senior researcher, National Museum of the Romanian Peasant; Iris Șerban, chief of Ethnological Archive department, National Museum of the Romanian Peasant.
The theme of our 24th issue is: Archives and Politics of Memory: the Collecting, Storage, Ownership and Selective Disclosure of Archival Material.
Over the past 20 years, at least two phenomena seem to be dominant in Archives dynamics as “realms of memory” (Nora 1997). In the humanities and social sciences Archives, on the one hand, there is an abundance and dissemination of information (text, image, sound etc.), due to generalized use of electronic record. On the other hand, there is an increasing diversification of Archives that have an ambigous status, as an emergent phenomenon, triggered by the discovery and/or by the partial or full opening to the public of either institutional or private archives and collections in Central and Eastern Europe, especially after the fall of communism. Such discoveries have brought about a series of challenges for the social sciences researchers: defining the right to ownership of individual memory as archived (and therefore institutionalized) memory; grasping the ambiguities which derive from this situation; finding the appropriate forms of retrieval, processing and archiving (some of the documents and objects being in a poor state of conservation); and advancing an ethics of exploiting such objects and the memories they enshrine. These challenges are more important since the “intellectual market” value of archived documents, which derives from the new policies of the research market that makes the scientific approach a commodity like any other, is directly influencing the attribution of a market value to the archive use, thus of the archive as an object of memory.
This thematic issue seeks to publish texts, from both academics and practitioners, on a broad array of subjects such as:
• New types of Archives resulting from private collectors, or from dismantling of institutions;
• Informal practices developed by non-institutional actors – akin to “forensic investigation” (Brădeanu 2007) – to access a myriad types of archives and collections;
• Methodologies for the reception, the interrogation, the processing/making use of and the (re)interpreting of archived objects/documents;
• The role of institutional actors who have shown interest in “vehicles of memory” (Confino 1997) and brought them out of the “biographical shadow” into which they had been consigned as a consequence of invisibility-targeted state politics or as a consequence of so-called historical accidents.
• Archives and art. Last but not least, the intersection between art and society has generated a scientific field of its own. This field involves forms of artistic expression which archives have themselves inspired. This has led to a situation in which cultural, political and social meanings of archives have been widely broadcasted.
We encourage early submissions in the form of abstracts and expressions of interest, by 1st of November 2018. We are expecting texts, in either English or French of 7.000 to 10.000 words by 1st of February, 2019. High quality images supporting the argument are a plus in the selection process.
For the academic writing standards of our journal, please see the Style Sheet available in the For Authors section on our website: http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/.
Please e-mail your submissions and any inquiries (e.g. editorial guidelines) to revistamartor@gmail.com.