Edgardo Civallero
edgardocivallero@gmail.comSmithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panamá
Abstract:
This article proposes a critical framework for understanding territory as document and archive within libraries, archives, and museums. Building on documentation theory, decolonial thought, memory studies, Indigenous epistemologies, ecofeminism, and critical cartography, it argues that land is not merely a backdrop for knowledge but a living repository of ecological, historical, cultural, and embodied memory. The article challenges institutional models that privilege textuality, fixity, extraction, and universal access, showing how extractivism, displacement, cartographic abstraction, and salvage logics sever knowledge from the territorial relations that sustain it. Against this epistemic violence, the article develops the concept of a geo-ethics of memory: an ethical and methodological orientation that reframes preservation as accompaniment, accountability, territorial responsibility, and solidarity with communities who sustain place-based archives. It proposes practical implications for knowledge and memory institutions, including collaborative memory work, recognition of refusal and opacity, participatory counter-mapping, sensory and embodied archives, and expanded definitions of documentary evidence. The article concludes that credible memory work in an era of ecological crisis requires institutions to protect not only records but also the places, relations, and communities through which memory endures.
Keywords: territory as document, geo-ethics of memory, archives, libraries, archives, and museums, place-based knowledge, decolonial documentation, territorial memory, extractivism.
