Archive, Slow Ideology and Egodocuments as Microhistorical Autobiography

Download or read book Archive, Slow Ideology and Egodocuments as Microhistorical Autobiography written by Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-29 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to demonstrate how scholars in recent times have been utilizing egodocuments from various angles and providing an opening for the multivocality of the sources to be fully appreciated. The first part of the book is concerned with the significance of egodocuments, both for the individual him/herself who creates such documents, and also for the other, who receives them. The author approaches the subject on the basis of his own personal experience, and goes on to discuss the importance of such documents for the academic world, emphasizing more general questions and issues within the fields of historiography, philosophy of history, microhistory, and memory studies. The second part of the book is based upon a photographic collection – an archive – that belonged to the author’s grandfather, who over decades accumulated photographs of vagabonds and outsiders. This part seeks to explore what kind of knowledge can be applied when a single source – an archive, document, letter, illustration, etc. – is examined, and whether the knowledge derived may not be quite as good in its own context as in the broader perspective.