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Discussion in this chapter focuses on an individual who created work of a sculptural nature, thus working in a medium that was relatively marginal to literati taste; who practiced away from China's traditional centres of artistic production and political power in eighteenth-century Canton; and who operated within a context where the market mediated contacts with buyers in an explicit way. Furthermore, in the case of this artist, known only as ‘Chitqua’ (with variant romanizations of ‘Chit-qua’, ‘Chit Qua’, ‘Chetqua’, ‘Chet-qua’, and ‘Che Qua’ also found), the chapter looks at someone who worked directly for non-Chinese clients, and who made visual resemblance a defining feature of his work. It aims to provide as comprehensive a picture of the artist and his work as is possible from the surviving artistic and documentary record, with the aim of remedying that omission.

This concluding chapter ends the book by summarizing the lessons of the previous chapters and asking whether the trials were successful. It covers issues such as retributive justice, documentary record, and wrongful acquittals and convictions.

In “Joseph Smith’s Sermons and the Early Mormon Documentary Record,” William V. Smith treats Joseph Smith’s preaching record in chronological fashion. This treatment provides, in part, an explanation of documentary trends in that record and its subsequent place in the Mormon textual value system. The documentary record of Mormon founder Joseph Smith’s preaching expanded with the growing importance attached to that preaching. That growth followed from Smith’s practice of increasingly offering new doctrinal teachings that he often claimed were based on revelation. The record of Smith’s sermons—longhand reports by official clerks and the work of a growing regiment of pew auditors—reached its productive acme in 1844, the final year of his life. Examples show that the complex character of that record and its subsequent evolution as a published authority bar the historian from a simplistic use of Smith’s documented preaching corpus.

This chapter tries to understand how people sense belonging through memory, and how they interpret their past experiences by first considering their implication within the present. It notes that the history of memory has seen shifts from oral transmission to documentary recording and increasingly sophisticated forms of visual media. It observes that the printing press, Romanticism, mass literacy, and latterly electronic image processing have, since the Renaissance, ensured a proliferation of forms of commemoration — from postage stamps to museums — through which efforts have been made to develop shared national memories and by which such representations might not be deconstructed. It points out that in the encounter with modernity, new ways of seeing developed and it explores some examples using the Scottish case.

Mark Ashurst-McGee, Robin Scott Jensen, and Sharalyn D. Howcroft introduce Foundational Texts of Mormonism: Examining Major Early Sources by noting the rich documentary record of the early history of Mormonism and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Among these the documents from the founding era under Joseph Smith are several major sources to which historians continually turn for information. However, as the authors explain, this is often with little appreciation for the complexity of the circumstances under which these documents were produced. The volume provides several examples of how understanding the complexity of documentary production helps historians to use these sources more critically. The authors individually introduce the chapters of the book.

The judicial archives reveal a fragmented world. The events are mundane and their occurrence beyond commonplace. The characters are ordinary and the documentary record of them is fragmentary. This chapter describes the pleasure at discovering how in these tatters of lives and scraps of disputes, found in bulk, human defiance and human misery can be found.

This chapter describes Colonial Period (A.D. 1546-1750) and Early Mexican Republic Period (A.D. 1750-1847) settlement patterns as a product of individual negotiations. Data come from the Spanish colonization of the Maya in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. Investigations in Beneficios Altos, at the southern extent of Spanish administrative control, suggests that colonialism was negotiated between individual agents seeking to maximize their personal, family, and communal circumstances. Sometimes those agents to act in the interests of the Spanish (clearly laid out, regulated, and disseminated in the form of administrative policies and hierarchies). At other times agents resisted hegemonic pressure. The results of these negotiations are explored through settlement patterns and the documentary record of Beneficios Altos in this remote frontier region with its notoriously porous border. The negotiation strategy is traced into the Republic Period, after independence from Spanish colonialism.

This chapter discusses the second-to-last sequence of scenes in Serras da Desordem as indicative of the unredemptive quality of contemporary reenactment films. The conclusion relates the cold analytical record of the realities at the reservation of the Awá Guajá Indians to the perverse ethnography of Jean Rouch (Les Maitres Fous) and Luis Bunuel (Las Hurdes), where a purposeful indeterminacy regarding time and chronology, a stasis, and a foregrounded repetition and circularity imply a critical view that has none of the prospects of transformation proper to modern neorealist and verité reenactment. Framed by Serras’ relentless fragmentation, this sequence’s dry look suggests the power of reenactment to destabilize all documentary record.