While students of imperial and colonial history began long ago to investigate the culture of documentation that informed the production, disposition and concealment of texts in archives, little has been done to understand how chancery practices and record-keeping activities in the modern Perso-Islamicate world relate to forms of governance. Material coming from the Khivan archives lends itself to provide for a corrective to this situation. By examining reports penned by leaders of mosque communities and reflecting on local archival practices, I address in this paper the following questions: Why did the Qongrats create and run an archive? What were the goals that the Qongrats wanted to achieve by developing and sustaining a project of documentation? I think these are pressing questions for anyone who sets out to make sense of trends of textualization in nineteenth-century Central Asia (and beyond) without succumbing to the somewhat facile narrative of modernization.

帝国历史和殖民历史的学生很早就开始研究文件文化，这些文化为档案中文本的制作，处置和隐藏提供了信息，但对于了解现代波斯伊斯兰世界中的机会主义做法和记录保存活动却鲜有做过与治理形式有关。来自Khivan档案馆的材料有助于对这种情况进行纠正。通过审查由清真寺社区领袖撰写的报告并反思当地的档案做法，我在本文中提出以下问题：Qongrats为什么创建并运行档案？Qongrats希望通过开发和维持文档项目来实现的目标是什么？我认为这些问题对于任何想了解19世纪中亚（及以后）文本化趋势而又不屈服于现代化的轻描淡写的人来说，都是紧迫的问题。