Rethinking Archives
Solares as Living Repositories in Sotuta, Yucatán
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.46.1.04Keywords:
Maya, solares, archives, domestic knowledge, historical practice, YucatánAbstract
Archives have been central to history-making since at least the nineteenth century. However, studying domestic archives in Sotuta, Yucatán (México), demands a departure from traditional notions of archives as written papers because the region has been subjected to memoricide and the destruction of documentary heritage for centuries. What the peninsula does hold are solares, Maya garden or household plots, which preserve resources curated since ancestral times together with the knowledge to make use of them, patterned upon the landscape. This article explores the prospect of considering solares as archives, utilising the Yucatec Maya concepts of tsikbal, conversation, and ts’iib, writing, and my own experiences in Sotuta. It is informed by the notions of “pluriverse” and “archival multiverse” from Latin American social theory and archival studies respectively. This will show that questioning traditional notions of archives can allow us to recast historical practice in tune with the territories we study.
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