Caught in the Nick of Time: Archives and Fieldwork

Introduction

Dust, as academic convention has it, is an impediment to good archival scholarship. Dust coats surfaces. Dust obscures print. It is dust that renders already bad handwriting illegible. Dust is the irritant in the historian's otherwise discriminating eye. Unless care is taken, dust can be the cause of itching and reddening. Such vocational discomforts acknowledged, dust is quintessentially the scholar's choice of dirt. It is a research phenomenon to be quietly gloried in as might the scientist fieldworker take the grimmest sort of pleasure in oppressive heat or swarming insects. Dust blackens palms and gets under fingernails. But at day's end, on having departed the scene, it can ...