Rethinking Local History through CollaborationThe Creation of the Cambodian Community History and Archive Project Susan Needham (bio) and Karen Quintiliani (bio) When we started conducting research with Cambodian refugees, first as anthropology students and later as anthropologists at local universities, we did not think much about what would eventually happen to the research materials we gathered and produced. We also did not consider the fact that our career trajectories would include establishing and maintaining a long-term research and writing partnership with each other. Yet because of our initial collaboration as engaged scholars, we ended up bringing together our universities and the Historical Society of Long Beach, California, to rethink local history. In this article we discuss this collaboration and the process of creating the Cambodian Community History and Archive Project (Camchap), a university-community partnership between California State University, Long Beach (csulb), California State University, Dominguez Hills (csudh), and the Historical Society of Long Beach (hslb). Camchap grew out of more than two decades of ethnographic field-work and our shared vision that our research materials should be available to the public, students, other scholars, and most important, to members of the Cambodian community. Our personal and professional motives for creating Camchap were informed by the ethics, theories, and practices of collaborative anthropology and feminist theory, which, as Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban notes, call for cooperative research approaches [End Page 1] with a central goal of “work[ing] for as well as with research communities… to develop reciprocal relationships that allow projects to be initiated, discussed, reviewed, and evaluated through a process of continuous consultation and collaboration” (2008: 178, emphasis in original).1 In keeping with these goals, the creation of Camchap addressed an area of need that had been identified by members of the Cambodian community, namely the desire to preserve their culture. Camchap gives voice to the Cambodian experience in Long Beach and also makes available to the public some of the material evidence of the contributions Cambodians have made to Long Beach history. Additionally, Camchap provides an avenue through which the university and our students may become engaged with a local institution (hslb) and a local minority group; it supports our own professional and scholarly collaboration; and because it is situated in an institution outside the university setting, it is a space from which community-based collaborations between the university, students, and the communities we serve may be developed and expanded. Admittedly, we are (and have been) naïve about what “going public” means (Sanjek 2004), especially in terms of which documents and research materials should or can be made public. In this article we explore these issues and provide background on how the archive came to be, discuss the challenges and successes we have encountered along the way, and report on Camchap’s current status. A review of the literature on the ways anthropologists, historians, and archives intersect reveals two main areas of concern. The first comes out of the work of Michel Foucault (1970; Foucault and Gordon 1980) and Jacques Derrida (1996) and their critiques of the archive as an instrument of colonial hegemony. Archives were created to house the records through which the state both created and legitimized itself. The archive did this by controlling what qualifies as a record, who has access to the records, and how they are interpreted (Zeitlyn 2012; Blouin and Rosenberg 2007). However, as Foucault, Derrida, and others point out, a careful reading of the archive can also uncover the presence of subaltern voices through which an alternative history may be pieced together (Zeitlyn 2012). As we discuss later, a major reason for creating Camchap was to diversify hslb’s records and make a minority group’s experience more apparent within the dominant white narrative of Long Beach’s history. A second area of focus is the ethical responsibility anthropologists have “for ensuring the integrity, preservation, and protection of their [End Page 2] work” (aaa Committee on Ethics 2012). In support of this principle the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (Copar) was formed in 1995 to help “anthropologists, librarians, archivists, information specialists and others preserve and provide access...
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Jul 22, 2021
Robert Bloom 
