Semiramis Vieira Rodriguez is a Spanish student from the University of Venezuela who, as part of KAICIID’s “Talking Dialogue” project, has been conducting archival work in Southampton, United Kingdom. Semiramis’ research has focused on the International Association for Religious freedom, and interfaith organisation founded in 1900 (making it the oldest such organisation in the world). Led by Unitarian and Free Christians, the Association now counts members from all the world’s major religions, cooperates closely with the UN, and is engaged in peace-building activities in Africa and South East Asia.

 

“Talking Dialogue”: The American Unitarian Association, the world’s oldest international interreligious association, opens its doors to historical research

Author: Semiramis Del Carmen Vieira Rodríguez

For my archive work, I had the great opportunity to research the oldest international religious association in the world, the International Association for Religious Freedom, or IARF. Founded in 1900 in Boston, USA during the 75th anniversary meeting of the American Unitarian Association, IARF is a non-political organization dedicated to encouraging interfaith dialogue and tolerance and to the promotion of global peace. The organization today has seventy-three member organizations in twenty-six countries, including Kenya, Nigeria, Australia, India and Pakistan, representing traditions from four world regions. This research was conducted in the Harley Library of the University of Southampton, in England.

Working in archives is certainly not an easy job. It requires a lot of patience, determination and consistency. You need to be thorough with every document, regardless of how many you’ve already gone through, and your results depend heavily on your perseverance.

Something that really helped me through the list of document boxes was my research prior to the archival work. Getting to know the subject of your investigation can help you narrow down the exact information that you need to find, or that you would like to find. However, being open to new findings is equally important because it can broaden your perspective and enrich your investigation, which is exactly what I had to do after my first day of work. After reviewing my first box, which consisted of three files, I noticed that there was a particular set of boxes that supposedly contained letters exchanged between members of the organization I was currently investigating. Hoping I could find something of interest in them, I decided to prioritize my new find and put the rest of the project on hold.

A couple of days later I asked for the first of the six boxes that were arranged under the same title, but the documents I found were not what I expected. First, every box had four big folders in it, and it therefore took me about four days to review only the first three boxes. Second, the boxes didn´t contain letters as expected, but work material from the first thirty years of the organization’s existence. Nevertheless, I got to get a glimpse of those first thirty years of the organization and found a couple of useful documents too. Patience in archival work is indispensable: without it, I surely wouldn’t have found the information useful to me in the large amount of documents I had in front of me.   

Something curious about my research is how it changed my view of congresses. In my preliminary research, I found various authors that mentioned that in these congresses organized by IARF, a lot of networking connections where made, something that I had not paid much attention to at the time. After my first day of archival work, however, I felt the need to reread these authors: in my first file, I found a letter from Shinichiro Imaoka, president of the Japan Free Religious Association, to Mrs. B. van Gennep, Director of IARF in 1969, kindly asking her for the Executive Committee to approve the membership of the Rissho Kosei Kai[PJ1]  (a worldwide Buddhist organization founded in Japan in 1938), who he had persuaded to apply for membership of the IARF due to its increased popularity.1 This meant that not only were friendships and connections made in these congresses, but that the spirit of working towards peace and interreligious dialogue transcends these gatherings and reaches other groups and people that haven`t  necessarily heard of the congresses’ work. From that moment, I learnt to not underestimate the power of these gatherings, as they can also reach people that don`t have the money or opportunity to go to them.

It is also very important in these types of research to ask for help whenever you need it, as more times than not we tend to forget that we can and should ask for help. That was my case; I received a lot of help from the staff of the Hartley Library. Every doubt I had was clarified by them, and for that I am very grateful, which I let them know. Considering that it was my first time working in archives for such a long period of time, they were very patient with me and my questions, especially considering that English is not my first language, making it often troublesome to get my point across.

I also received a lot of support from my partners at the Talking Dialogue project; Sana Saeed posted a video of how to manipulate the documents in special collections, Maria Bargo sent me an article concerning the history of my organization, while others like Minjung Noh and Zachary Wone were there to share their experience with me.

Organizing of your time in field work can be the last key to gathering all the information you need. Having control over the hours you spend with the documents, the ones you spent with your notes and those you spend comparing previous results with new finds really helped me find documents relevant to the material I already had in the six boxes I mentioned previously.