On not knowing : how to blur methodological boundaries in postcolonial archival research / Debasish Borah.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Borah, Debasish, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Archives--Research--Methodology.

Archives.

Postcolonialism--Research--Methodology.

Postcolonialism.

Mixed methods research.

Research--Fieldwork.

Research.

Physical Description:

1 online resource : illustrations

Place of Publication:

London : SAGE Publications Ltd, 2026.

Summary:

This guide proposes a postcolonial methodology that deliberately unsettles the authority of the colonial archive by placing it in sustained dialogue with ethnographic fieldwork, embodied practice, and artistic intervention. The text critiques the archive as a gatekeeping institution that authorizes historical authenticity while marginalizing oral, embodied, and vernacular epistemologies. The guide demonstrates how colonial science systematically erased non-European forms of knowing until they could be “scientifically” confirmed by Europeans.Moving beyond critique, the guide proposes a methodological blurring of archive and field. Walking, looking, measuring, and performing become research tools, applied both to political borders and to archival objects related to mapping of the Eastern Himalayas. By treating the archive as a field and the field as an archive, the research refuses linear logic of historicism and foregrounds approximation, improvisation, and not-knowing as productive epistemic conditions. The guide positions this fragmented, performative approach as an epistemological experiment toward a replicable methodology.

Notes:

Description based on XML content.

ISBN:

9781036252366

OCLC:

1594889318

Publisher Number:

T302914