A Response to Susan Scott Parrish

In “Rummaging,” Susan Scott Parrish invites us to reconsider early American archival research methodologies in light of what anthropologist George Marcus calls the diasporic ethnographic archive. If Marcus urges ethnographers to “Follow the People,” “Follow the Thing,” “Follow the Metaphor,” “Follow the Life,” Parrish encourages early American scholars to “follow” various textual and nontextual traces “across multiple social and communicative nodes of the Atlantic world.” In particular, she is concerned with rethinking the relationships that scholars have to those “documents whose significance is not altogether clear—not overly determined but emphatically underdetermined.” These archival encounters, which can lead researchers across continents, often require that we “wallow in sloughs of boredom and thickets of patternlessness” before learning how to find “life” within the archive. Not in spite of but because these processes produce a certain queasiness, they are ultimately productive; indeed, they render us open to new possibilities of reading even as they expose taken-for-granted attitudes toward and practices in the archive: the assumption of productiveness; the imposition of order; and the problematic search for what Parrish calls “a sinister germ or buried treasure.” Considered alongside her award-winning book American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (2006), Parrish’s essay solidifies in theory what she has already accomplished in practice: tracing an early American diasporic archive that spans continents and cultures.

Because Parrish focuses on archival methodology, her analysis is useful to an audience of scholars working outside early American studies. As someone who studies literature and science in twentieth century America, I was most captivated by Parrish’s illustration of those moments when knowledge production exists alongside—and sometimes collides with—the production of ignorance. During her presentation at the University of Illinois American Literary History symposium, Parrish mentioned the diary of Martha Moore Ballard, an archive that has been revived most recently by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Before Ulrich’s work, the diary existed in another form: an excerpt. While excerpts are not inherently problematic, their circulation in and as historical knowledge can lead to what Parrish termed “a kind of quiescence” that does not actively seek the corpus from which the part has been taken. In the case of Ballard’s diary, librarians and scholars knew of the original, but they chose to use the excerpted and partial version of the text. Here, knowledge of a text is predicated on a certain kind of ignorance, a kind of myopia or neglect, of a fuller (though always incomplete) corpus. In this and other examples, Parrish’s arguments could be put in a productive dialogue with theories about the cultural production of ignorance, a field of study known as agnotology. Agnotological studies focus not on ways of knowing, but on ways of not knowing.

Robert Proctor, a historian of science, coined the term “agnotology” in his 1995 book Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know About Cancer. Since that time, and in concert with scholars in philosophy, English, history, and a myriad of other disciplines, Proctor has crafted the concept into a field of study complete with small conferences and a collection co-edited with Londa Schiebinger titled Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (2008). I bring agnotology to the table as a term that could complement and be conversant with the examples Parrish has catalogued for early American studies: the ways that archival constructions are simultaneously epistemological and agnotological. The benefits of this dialogue are multidirectional: while studies in agnotology depend on the presence/absence, type, movement, and control of various archives, little work has been done to theorize archival methodology itself: “archive” is not indexed in Proctor and Schiebinger’s collection, for example. Similarly, work in early American studies could gain a modifiable theoretical toolbox from agnotology that will help address those moments of culturally produced ignorance endemic to fields that depend heavily on archival research. Not to mention that early American studies is a kind of archive within an archive; or as Parrish explains: “our entire subfield is an ‘archive,’ a penumbral vault, to scholars of the later, post-1830 periods.”

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