The hyphenated language of the archive
Natalie Wood is a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester. Her ethnographic research explores how the entertainment-based tourism industry of Blackpool might shed light on what it means to live, work and holiday in post-industrial- cum- neoliberal Britain. In particular, she asks what it is about British life that is being worked out through holiday play in Blackpool. She reflects on her first week of her ESRC funded placement scheme at the Mass Observation Archive.
I first came across Mass Observation in an undergraduate history course titled ‘Sexual Histories’ at the University of Auckland in 2012. I was asked at random to read aloud an excerpt from Gary Cross’ Worktowners (1990), which to my embarrassment, involved the reading of a ‘dirty’ song (to use the language of the observer) sang by two drunk women in a pub in 1936 Blackpool. This, being read in my Northern English accent, was particularly amusing to my New Zealand peers and naturally, more performative than intended. Fast forward to my time at the archive, not only did I come across the original 1936 copy of this song and recognise it instantly, but I was reminded of how interactive, playful and multi-vocal the archive can be in the myriad and textural layers of communication that emerge out of engagement with these documents.
These early MO documents – some written by anthropologists, some by recruited middle class observers, some voluntary citizens (as is the case with the 12th may diary’s) – have an ambiguity of context, intention, audience and author that leaves interaction with these documents unscripted, and social analysis open. Conversely, these documents are also a palimpsest of voices, layered with after-the-fact crossings out, additional notes to self in biro and coded drawings to other observers. They are accompanied by paper clippings, doodles, sketches, some of which look purposeful but indecipherable. Further, the ability to continue to read, touch and smell these documents, to flick through them, read them aloud, and discuss their intention, leaves room for countless interpretations.
There is also something immersive and anthropomorphic about haptically handling these documents. To have the embodied experience of reading the same restaurant menu as someone from the 1940s, of course not with the same surroundings, but nevertheless, opening it with the same gesture and embodied POV has a profound affect. Indeed, with my head in Blackpool ephemera all day, I had forgotten that I was in fact in Brighton and not Blackpool when for a split second I made a plan with myself to go admire the Blackpool casino building – that I was staring at a sketch of – after work; a slip in consciousness that I accredit to the sensorial nature of the archive.
This makes me think of the archive like how Michel Serres (1997) describes a hyphen, that is – as a conversation on two layers – a playful, ambiguous and porous connection. One could think about the archive in this way, in a hyphenated language between past and present. Further, in this dialectical rupture of the hyphen is the potential for something else, in the sense that it leaves conversation open to interjection. This is an interesting perspective form which to think through writing anthropological fieldnotes.
Of particular interest are the 12th of May Diary entries. In anthropological terms then, the 12th of May diaries are particularly interesting as here interlocutors – while still anonymised – write their own field notes thereby making up a kind of citizens archive. The 12th of May diaries – an annual invitation for the general public to contribute an account of their everyday life – adds another layer of communication, in anticipating an intended audience, or at least a sense of a future reader. This addressing of the future reader seems to be the most striking difference between the 1930s MOA archive and the more recent MOP collections; that is, that the latter was written with the intention to be kept and an audience in mind. Here, the later 12th may diary entries often address a future reader thereby adding yet another layer of communication which often projects the author’s hopes or fears for a future generation. In some cases, the document is even anthropomorphised, as children begin with phrases like ‘dear diary’.
Conversely, in the original MOA collection form the 1930s is an absence of communication with the reader, as well as, the modern-day reader. This perhaps highlights how emergent the project was, without the hindsight of the longevity of the project, but it is also perhaps to do with it’s beginnings in the anthropological method. While some anthropologists have in recent years experimented with making fieldnotes public (Wang, 2012), for the majority of anthropologists fieldnotes are private, even confidential material to be – in accordance with ethical clearance – kept anonymous and under lock and key.
There are pros and cons to leaving social analysis open within the discipline of anthropology, while Kathleen Stewart has demonstrated the value in capturing atmosphere rather than dictating social analysis, Gillian Evans (2017) has warned anthropologists of the importance of reclaiming a study of culture with robust social analysis amidst the rise of the populist far right in Britian. Perhaps anthropologists can still make critical commentary while also leaving space for an unfinished social analysis through an engagement with the archive. Anthropology has already seen something of an ‘archival turn’, where anthropologists have argued that there is something subaltern to reclaim in the archive (Zeitlyn, 2012).
While Mass Observation was originally an anthropological project, contemporarily, MO finds more engagement with history, sociology and heritage departments. Yet, the MO archive leaves me with something to contemplate about the anthropological method; in particular, the distinction between ethnography as process and ethnography as product. More concretely, I wonder, in the anthropology of Northern England, with such a history of observation, what would it look like for interlocutors to participate in writing fieldnotes? Or what would it mean for anthropologists to make fieldnotes public? Most simply, what I mean to say here is that there is something about the archive that fosters participation beyond the page. While Tom Harrison and his observers cannot respond to my questions or pondering,s there is something posthumous and transparent about the archive of raw data available to the public that invites these hypothetical conversations in ways that a finished ethnography does not.
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Cross, G. (1990). Worktowners at Blackpool: Mass Observation and popular leisure in the 1930s. London: Routledge.
Evans, G. (2017). ‘Social Class and the Cultural Turn: Anthropology, Sociology and the Post-Industrial Politics of 21st Century Britain’, The Sociological Review Monographs 65: 88–104. doi: 10.1177/0081176917693549
Serres, M. (1997). The Troubadour of Knowledge (Studies in Literature and Science). University of Michigan Press.
Stewart, K. (1996). A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America. Princeton University Press.
Wang, T. (2012). Writing Live Fieldnotes: Towards a More Open Ethnography. Ethnography Matters, 2 August. https://ethnographymatters.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/writing-live-fieldnotes-towards-a-more-open-ethnography/
Zeitlyn, D. (2012). Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41, 461–480. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23270722