Archives of Discrimination: The Evolution of Muslim Book Collections in Daghestan

Abstract

The present article traces the history of multiple private and state archives in Daghestan. Such collections bear imprints of competition between particular individuals and factions. As we shall see, various parties exploited the cultural resources available to them in order to project their subjectivities onto the textual and material evidence. Shifts in cultural values and fashions, together with transformations in language use and an ongoing struggle for personal and communal representation, contributed jointly to the formation of multi-layered discourses on the past. If we are to make sense of our sources, therefore, we must engage with a multitude of competing discourses that have privileged one type of historical view over others, thereby shaping the contours of the body of available material, and rendering information lacunae not just unavoidable, but themselves reflective of past events. Colonialism and coloniality are not alone in having helped configure the power structures that we find manifested in state archives. In fact, much of the competition, marginalization, and careful selection took place even before the transfer of documents to imperial institutions.