Epilogue: Reflections on the archive (original) (raw)

Archives in a wider world: the culture and politics of archives

Archivaria, 2001

Archives in a Wider World: The Culture and Politics of Archives * SARAH TYACKE RÉSUMÉ L'auteure propose ici une réflexion sur quelques questions que soulèvent la culture, la critique littéraire, l'histoire et le post-modernisme pour la gestion des documents, les archives et les archivistes, d'un point de vue britannique. Cet essai se fonde sur les changements observés, au cours des dix dernières années, dans la place des archives telle que perçue dans différents pays. L'auteure soutient que les archivistes ont le rôle majeur de résoudre les tensions sociales contemporaines concernant ce qu'il faut conserver et détruire et ce qu'il convient d'ouvrir ou de restreindre, que ce soit pour le présent ou, plus important encore, pour les générations futures. Les archivistes doivent expliquer de façon claire les fondements de leurs décisions et comprendre les biais inhérents qui les sous-tendent. ABSTRACT This is a reflective essay on some of the cultural, literary criticism, historical, and postmodern implications for records management and archiving, archives, and archivists from a point of view situated in the United Kingdom. It is based on observing the changes, over the past ten years, in the position of archives in various countries' perceptions. The author maintains that archivists have the critical role of producing an archiving resolution of the tensions in society at any one time between what should be kept and destroyed, and what should be open and closed-both for the present and, more importantly, for future generations. Archivists need to make the manner of the archival resolution clear and understand the inherent biases in the processes necessary to achieve that resolution. * This is a revised version of an unrefereed article for a Festchrift. I am indebted to discussions I have had with Michael Moss, Elizabeth Hallam-Smith, and Ian Willison. In particular, they have improved my own slender knowledge of the battleground between postmodernists (or at least some) and other historians (or at least some) and drawn my attention to the work of Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History, 2d ed. (London, 1997).

Articles Archives in a Wider World: The Culture and Politics of Archives * SARAH TYACKE

https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/issue/view/429, 2001

ABSTRACT This is a reflective essay on some of the cultural, literary criticism, historical , and postmodern implications for records management and archiving, archives, and archivists from a point of view situated in the United Kingdom. It is based on observing the changes, over the past ten years, in the position of archives in various countries' perceptions. The author maintains that archivists have the critical role of producing an archiving resolution of the tensions in society at any one time between what should be kept and destroyed, and what should be open and closed-both for the present and, more importantly, for future generations. Archivists need to make the manner of the archival resolution clear and understand the inherent biases in the processes necessary to achieve that resolution. The subject of archives is, on the face of it, dry and dusty, but nevertheless fascinating for all sorts of reasons to many millions of people across the world. Moreover, in its formal, organizational, and utilitarian guise as "Arch-ives," it is increasingly emerging from the "basement to the boardroom" in governments and organizations and becoming a cultural phenomenon at the same *

To file the world: the archive as cultural heritage and the power of remembering

ICON-S International Society of Public Law 2018 Annual Conference "Identity, Security, Democracy: Challenges for Public Law" Hong Kong University, 25-27 June, 2018

This paper analyses the historic archive as a tool for the preservation of memory. Beyond the idea of the archive as a fixed and immovable space, the paper wishes to consider the archive in its dynamism, chronological evolution, and in its changing relations with both the State and the private individual. Starting from a historical perspective, the paper retraces the archive’s strong link with the nation-state and investigates its role in the identity-building process and in the legitimization of an official public historiography. In doing so, the paper underlines the elements of control and social construction behind the archive as an institution. This leads first to a critical analysis of the complex relationship between preserving, remembering and forgetting. It is then possible to analyse the origin and development of the notion of historic archive as a cultural asset and to see how this classification affects the general discipline of cultural heritage. The paper uses examples from both national legislations and international bodies in order to see how countries at different levels interpret and appropriate this idea of the archive as a cultural asset and how the establishment of dedicated institutions, guidelines and constraints shape the process of document preservation. Fruition is another central issue: the paper considers if and how allowing citizens to interact with and to access documents would permit the archive to become a space for the sharing and the negotiation of memories and cultural identities.

Along and against the grain: the philosophy of the archive

Archival Science, 2009

Humanities award, the conference was part of the ongoing Investigating the Archive project which was established to examine the role and nature of archives and the debates surrounding their selection, application and interpretation. The project aims at promoting interdisciplinary scholarship on research into the construction, representation and use of archives, examining the theoretical issues inherent in their preservation and interpretation in all formats. Two other interdisciplinary conferences have been held during the first phase of the project: A Triangular Traffic: Literature, Slavery and the Archive , which considered the literary/archival and creative and scholarly work in literature, grounded in archival research; and Media, Migration, Archive (2008), which examined the issues surrounding the use of photographic collections, both practically and theoretically. The second of these brought together archivists and theorists from a variety of disciplines for discussions relating to historical context, method and policy in the context of the empirical investigation of photography's archival presence. Two workshops, 'Across the Divide: Interdisciplinary Dialogues on the Archive' and 'Archives and Publics' sustained the interrogative and self-reflexive methodological critiques brought to light during the conferences.

Political Theory, the Archive, and the Problem of Authority

PS: Political Science & Politics, (Spotlight: Archives in the History of Political Thought), 57:1, 2023

, genealogy avoids imposing a preestablished meaning on a text and instead allows meaning to emerge from the text itself. The difference between documentary and genealogical approaches, therefore, is less one of archival practices than one of orientation to documents and history. Finally, some political theorists find their archive in space, architecture, and the built environment. Built structures serve as an archive in both the traditional and metaphorical senses insofar as they are collections of artifacts to be interpreted and a medium that "shapes what is salient within our visual and auditory field, habituates us to circulate in certain ways, affects who we are likely to encounter as we go about our daily affairs, and imparts meaning to what we do together" (Bell and Zacka 2021, 2). As Bernardo Zacka suggests in his contribution, the architectural features of bureaucratic institutions can be read not only with an eye to functionality and aesthetics but also for deeper insights about competing rationalities of welfare capitalism. To reveal these insights, archival work takes the form of an immersive observation that foregrounds the situated experience of the researcher and the people inhabiting spaces. This is a simultaneously descriptive and hermeneutic ethnographic practice that "interprets [ordinary people's] interpretations of the social world" (Herzog and Zacka 2019, 764). The distinctions suggested in this Spotlight introduction among documentary, digital, genealogical, and ethnographic approaches are not intended as a comprehensive system of pure types but rather as a preliminary heuristic device that may be useful for methodological self-reflection. Along with its immense benefits, archival work also poses difficult challenges. As Nancy Luxon and Kevin Olson describe in their contributions, archives are incomplete, partial, and limited and they contain silences. How can we discern such silences and what can be inferred from them? How can we respect the foreign context of a historical document while also making it relevant for our present? Whose history and present are we concerned with exactly? What types of translation, transcription, and transposition are necessary and possible? How are we to identify what is salient for our inquiries from the mass of available data? How do features of the researcher mediate access to and engagement with the archive? Moreover, for whom is this work? How we answer these questions depends on our particular understanding of and approach to archives, as well as on the ends to which we enlist them. These brief reflections can serve as a first step toward possible answers.

The architecture of archives: Whose form, what functions?

Archival Science

This article examines the claim that, through its overt symbolic messaging, the Gatineau Preservation Centre, opened by the National Archives of Canada in 1997, embodies a perfect transparency between function and form, with the shape of the place being derived seamlessly from the needs of the archival work done there, and the proof being in the exposure of all the elements to view. It reveals the undercurrents of contending oppositions to this claim, both in the subversive, Mannerist, or "impure" architectural eccentricities designed into the structure, and in the embodiment of archival narratives whose symbolism is challenged by unacknowledged resistances. While the building is clearly inspired by Modernist and Enlightenment orientations, such as the ambition to preserve unchanged a universal, transcendent historical authenticity, these diverse resistances buried in it are manifested, for example, in the contest of male versus female structural elements, and in the authority of the monumental and exposed set against the seduction of the varied and secret. Most importantly, the absorption of the body both metaphorically and physically into the many disciplines of the place unconsciously calls into question the building's self-image as the epitome of a liberal-humanist and objective-scientific activity; it reflects instead the destabilizing plays and displays of power which are increasingly seen to form the indeterminate field of the archival pursuit.