The humility of the archive

I thrive in archives and libraries. Two weeks ago, as I was leafing through old education magazines with a friend in Ateneo’s Rizal Library, I cracked a joke about archival research being like thrifting. The ukay-ukay thrifter, like the historian looking for documents, scans through stacks of old material to find one or two items of note. It is a tedious process. But both recognize that half the fun is the search, and both know that success demands patience. 

 

Archival work is a humbling and grounding experience. It is a way of communing with people from a distant culture (the past, even of one’s own country, is a different culture) and letting them speak in their own terms. Since your respondents are dead, you cannot talk back, so you have no option but to listen. Alone, either in the scorching rooms of the National Library or in your grandfather’s old study, you think, you anticipate, you absorb. The process becomes a form of meditation, an externally aware practice of introspection.  

 

Over the years, I’ve seen archives and libraries as sanctuaries for ethical as much as intellectual discovery. Since I started working at Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies earlier this year, I’ve tried to schedule weekly dates with either my beloved microfilm reader or the volumes of Filipiniana in our special collection. These dates have allowed me to learn a lot about my favorite topics: early 20th century Pinoy intellectuals, Pinoy Marxists, and the milieus that animated them. 

 

The dates have also allowed me to look into my own ethical weaknesses. As a former college debater, I was used to shooting my mouth about any topic, even those I knew nothing about. Ironically, as I’ve done more research, my know-it-all tendencies have waned. After all, there is no better way to remind yourself how much you don’t know and how much you will never know than by looking at stacks of old books you will never get to read. There is no better way to remind yourself how fleeting knowledge and certainty are than by reading old texts that no longer make sense. 

 

The 19th century German historian Leopold von Ranke famously remarked that a historian must “extinguish the self.” Ranke was not referring to suicide (although I have met suicidal academics), but the process of taking one’s biases out of historical research. Many contemporary historians see this injunction as passé, correctly noting that any act of interpretation is filtered through one’s personality. 

 

None of this, however, means we should stop grappling with our biases. Maybe historians—and anyone seeking to discover provisional truths for that matter—shouldn’t extinguish the self but wrestle with it, know it, and rework it the way sculptors form layers out of rocks. This process is perhaps what Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche meant when they referred to ethics as “aesthetic.”  

 

When uninformed polemic informs everything from our politics to our personal relationships, quixotic quests for objectivity become radical. And while these quests may be less exciting than grand claim-making for un-grand times, the humility that informs them may inspire others. Take the example of Jesuit historian Fr. John "Jack" N. Schumacher, who passed away last May.  

 

Fr. Jack wrote his works on 19th century Filipino nationalism roughly at the same time radical nationalist historians from UP like Teodoro Agoncillo and Renato Constantino were working on similar topics. His works were always restrained, cerebral, and sober—bereft of the agit-prop value of Agoncillo’s or Constantino’s tomes. While the Diliman historians looked at the drama of the Philippine revolution as a working-class, militant struggle, the American Jesuit priest from the “clerico-fascist” university in Loyola never romanticized, because, as his footnotes show, he spent too much time crawling through stacks of documents in Madrid (Disclosure: I am an Ateneo historian). Many activists from the 70s claim Agoncillo and Constantino fomented the militancy of an entire generation, while Schumacher merely wrote facts. But who was correct?

 

As historians do more research on the Philippine revolution, we are starting to discover that the old Jesuit was more accurate than the radical polemicists (see, for instance, the introduction of Michael Cullinane’s new book "Arenas of Conspiracy"). Perhaps what prevented many in my profession from seeing this was the modesty of Schumacher’s claims: He never tried to define the essence of Filipino identity (although he was a Filipino citizen), nor did he claim to have the political blueprint for a radical future. He simply wrote what he saw. 

 

I have never had Schumacher’s modesty. As a writer trained in the age of cultural theory, I’ve made grand claims of my own, regretting some and relentlessly defending others. But I drag myself back to the archive when I’m full of myself. The dust may sometimes give me allergic attacks, but it is worth the rewards of knowledge and humility. 

 

Another humble and rigorous historian in the mold of Schumacher, Resil Mojares, reminds us that the word “archive” derives from the same word as “archon”—the ruler who watched over Greek city states. Archives watch over our political and cultural life by reminding us of past lessons. What I learned, however, is that archives and written texts also allow us to watch over ourselves. 

 

The simple wonders of dusty paper.