6620 Week XI Records & Identity Updated

8/6/2019 6620 Week XI Records & Identity Updated

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Archives help sustain cultural traditions andvalues

Material objects, artifacts and documentsplay a special role in human communication

Archives can extend the temporal and spatialrange of human communication

The cultural role of archives is hard to isolatefrom the contributions of other institutions &traditions


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Refers to beliefs and ideas held in common bymany individuals that together produce a

sense of social solidarity and community Term implies that many individuals and

organizations act collectivelyto maintainrecords of the past

Collective memory is NOT invested in anysingle type of institution


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Archives are frequently described as the collective memory of asociety or culture. Foote sees this description not just as ametaphor, but as a literal fact: archives serve to transmitinformation across great distances. They may also be used,however, to inhibit such transmissions, as they, like similar

institutions, are often subject to social pressure; until recently,archival records tended to favor the viewpoints of more powerfulsocial groups.

Foote explains that archives as a means of collective memory is not

simply a metaphor, but can have two meanings one which refers tothe beliefs and ideas held in common and another that individualsand organizations works collectively to maintain records. He usescultural landscapes and how they can maintain a representation ofthe past as well as tragedies and acts of violence to show how

memory can be conserved.


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What is our past and how do we know it? Accumulation of historical documents was

considered straightforward and even a nobletask

New technology in record keeping forcesarchivists to constantly rethink themselves

Archive(s) as a term is constantly changing Historical study has moved towards issues of

power, minority groups, gender, race, etc.


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Social Memory Example is the MagnoliaPlantation

Historical Memory Larger & morecomprehensive

Capture notions of individual particular pasts The archive is made from selectedand

consciously chosen documentation from thepast (power) Power has corrupted the archive as a

repository of human memory


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Archives have to be clearer about their limitsand boundaries

People not only come to our doors for whatwe have BUT also for what we do not have(archives become the object of study insteadof a place of/to study)

Need to become more aware of the archivesrole as mediator


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Blouin goes one step beyond simply claiming that archives tend tobe influenced by the narratives of the upper classes or prevailingsocial groups; he cites scholars who argue that archives areactually complicit in this process. Archivists should be more mindful

of their role in the creation of social memory, and should notnecessarily bother trying to achieve some kind of neutrality, assuch a thing is not possible.

Blouin asks What is our past and how do we know it? He

concludes that archivists will have to be clearer about the limits andboundaries of their work, they will need to be prepared to think moresystematically about appraisal practices within the context ofbroader notions of cultural studies, and they will need to becomemore aware of their role as mediators.


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Archives are major players in the business ofidentity politics

Archivists appraise, collect and preserve theprops with which notions of identity arebuilt

1892 Jewish historical society (85 pageminutes)

Co-existence of difference and unity

BUT felt profoundly connected to one another


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Ethnic Identity Larger Mission: Mold a Cohesive & Positive

Image of American Jewry Atmosphere of Crisis Fight off external detractors and internal

disintegration Determine how Jewish they wanted to be


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Began in 1791 (Massachusetts HistoricalSociety in Boston)

Future state historical societies modeled afterMHS American Jewish Historical Society ALSO

modeled themselves after MHS AJHS Goal: To Create and Promote a Public

Face for American Jewry

Against Custom: Most forbid public displays


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Kaplan takes a close look at the creation of the AmericanJewish Historical Society and the types of records theycollected to establish their cultural identity. The Jewishpeople unquestionably believed the historical record wouldhelp to overcome the political and social forces thatconfronted them. She urges archivists to pay attention to thesocial and political consequences of their work in thedeveloping of historical societies.

Via a study of American Jews, Kaplan observes the capacityof individuals to identify with multiple social groups at once, tobalance and negotiate between the various, competingidentities, and to collectively create new social or ethnicidentities when necessary. The creation of a new archivalinstitution, the American Jewish Historical Society, reflectedsuch an attempt to form a common identity.


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Dilemma of Caribbean History??? Silences in the Creation of Sources

The Majority Population of the Carribbeantoday is descendents of slaves

Naipaul

Walcott

Trouillot

A People Torn from their Cultures, theirLanguages and their Humanity


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Three Major Islands: St. Thomas, St. Croixand St. John

Population +100,000 250 Year Colonization (Danish kept

meticulous records and took most of themwith them)

Danish National Archives of Copenhagen

National Archives of the United States

Virgin Islands no way to access their history


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Interviews Census and Tax Records

Oral Tradition Folk Stories and Songs

The Place of Provenance

Do records created by the Danish government

belong only in the context of those offices???

Go Back & Fetch It


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In Whispers in the Archives, Bastian uses the U.S. Virgin Islandsas an example of how the voices and histories of a people can besilenced in records by the creators of those records and how thissilence created a loss of ability to construct its memory. She usesprovenance to argue that the colonized society itself was the

context and therefore, the voiceless population is a full partner inthe record creating process.

If archives are powerful reflections of a societys identity andmemory, the loss of records can have devastating results.Jeannette Allis Bastian explores this in Whispers in the Archives.She explains how the Caribbean people were affected by the 250year colonization of the Danish West Indies. Over this long periodof time, the colonial bureaucracy kept meticulous records andwhen the Danes left the islands, they took most of these recordswith them. Most records wound up in the Danish National Archiveswith some from the early 1990s being claimed by the NationalArchives of the United States. The black population of the islands

has no access to their history.


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Archivists as hewers of wood and drawers ofwater

Neutral, Objective, Impartial??? The Archive as a central metaphorical

construct upon which to fashion perspectiveson human knowledge, memory, power and aquest for justice

Power and Archives do not exist in avacuum???


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The changing word of archive again such as itmeans in the IT world???

Transition from one technology medium to

another Nature and Meaning of Archive(s) in Society

Neither Universal across Space nor Stable acrossTime???

Always Changing??? Power of the state, the church, the corporation,

the family, the public or the individual


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The Power to Privilege or Marginalize Tool of Conformity or Resistance

Reflect Societys Need for Information Reflect and Constitute Power Relations Control what the Future will know of the Past Records = Power Records impose Control and Order Memory & History are both rooted in

Archives


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The theme of the power of archives is often referred to inmany publications, but here Schwartz and Cook specificallystudy the topic, describing the ability of archival records toalmost literally control the past. Archives keep governmentsaccountable, they create collective and societal memory andidentity, they decide what makes it into the history books, andon and on; archivists failure to recognize the power ofrecords, coupled with their insistence on neutrality, is, as faras the authors are concerned, potentially dangerous.

Schwartz and Cook attempt to make archivists and othersoutside the profession realize that archives are not passive,but rather active documents that wield power. This powercan be over administrative, legal and fiscal accountability,over the shape and direction of historical scholarship,collective memory, and national identity, and over thedescription, preservation, and use.


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Again, archives referred to as repositories of history orhouses of memory

The author Joel Wurl describes a story from one of theriots after the 1992 incident involving Rodney King:

Looters and arsonists has worked their way to the southLA neighborhood of the Southern California Library forSocial Studies and Research (SCL), a major repositoryon contemporary justice movements andunderrepresented communities. Standing guard,building manager Chester Murray encountered a groupthat announced its intention to burn down the building.Murray responded by telling them the library containedthe history of African-Americans, Latinos, and workingclass people and persuaded them to leave it alone.Many of the surrounding buildings were damaged or

destroyed but not the library. WHY???


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What is the difference between social memory,modern memory and collective memory? What is thedifference between identity and memory? Can these

terms be used interchangeably? Should they be? Who ultimately owns records? Is it only the creator or

the group that the record identifies? What if therecords are a reflection of several groups? Forexample, should 250 years of records belong to theDanish people or the original inhabitants of thecolonies? Are copies just as powerful or must theoriginals be produced?

6620 Week XI Records & Identity Updated

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