The �Nature� of Ethics while (Digitally) Archiving the Other

Abstract

The article begins with an introduction to my digital archival project, the deconstructive approach in it, and the questions that are guiding both the project and the article. Then, I present the ethical dilemmas I encountered after I decided to build a digital archive. I connect these dilemmas with the—witting or otherwise—orientalist pattern behind two of the West-based digital archival projects about Nepal and South Asia. I also introduce the metaphor of pharmakon and argue for the need to interrogate archival performances through the questions of ethics. Through the discussion of my project, I attempt to offer, not a manifesto on ethical digital archives, but a possibility of making digital archives hospitable to the Other by building a dialectical relationship with the communities. My project, Rethinking South Asia from the Borderlands via Critical Digital A(na)rchiving, is a Nepali researcher’s humble, stubborn, and sincere effort/experiment of building a digital archive by bringing together community-praxis and deconstructive approaches. I aim to see if a dialogic room in digital archives can be built for and with the Other. I use the discussion of my project to raise some of the hardest questions and to offer a glimpse at the “nature” of ethics that archivists must unconditionally pursue while (digitally) archiving the Other.1 [Impossible archival imaginaries] explain[] how archival imaginaries may work in situations where the archive and its hoped-for contents are absent or forever unattainable. —Anne Gilliland & Michelle Caswell, “Records and Their Imaginaries: Imagining the Impossible, Making Possible the Imagined” Yes, the archive is an instrument of power. It is a technology of rule. A set of apparatuses producing and reproducing dominant narratives. An omnipotence-other. But it is also a subversive space. It is about a feigning and a fomentation, a resisting. It is a domain hospitable to resistance. — Verne Harris, Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective Figure 1: Image of Commuters in a public vehicle in