 Archives help sustain cultural traditions and

values…
 Material objects, artifacts and documents
play a special role in human communication…
 Archives can extend the temporal and spatial
range of human communication…
 The cultural role of archives is hard to isolate
from the contributions of other institutions &
traditions…
 Refers to beliefs and ideas held in common by
many individuals that together produce a
sense of social solidarity and community
 Term implies that many individuals and
organizations act collectively to maintain
records of the past
 Collective memory is NOT invested in any
single type of institution…
 Archives are frequently described as the “collective memory” of a
society or culture. Foote sees this description not just as a
metaphor, but as a literal fact: archives serve to transmit
information 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 powerful
social groups.

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

simply a metaphor, but can have two meanings one which refers to
the beliefs and ideas held in common and another that individuals
and organizations works collectively to maintain records. He uses
cultural landscapes and how they can maintain a representation of
the past as well as tragedies and acts of violence to show how
memory can be conserved.
 What is our past and how do we know it?
 Accumulation of historical documents was
considered straightforward and even a noble
task…
 New technology in record keeping forces
archivists 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.
 Social Memory – Example is the Magnolia
Plantation
 Historical Memory – Larger & more
comprehensive
 Capture notions of individual particular pasts
 The archive is made from selected and
consciously chosen documentation from the
past (power)
 Power has corrupted the archive as a
repository of human memory
 Archives have to be clearer about their limits
and boundaries…
 People not only come to our doors for what
we have BUT also for what we do not have
(archives become the object of study instead
of a place of/to study)
 Need to become more aware of the archives
role as mediator…
 Blouin goes one step beyond simply claiming that archives tend to
be influenced by the narratives of the upper classes or prevailing
social groups; he cites scholars who argue that archives are
actually complicit in this process. Archivists should be more mindful
of their role in the creation of social memory, and should not
necessarily bother trying to achieve some kind of “neutrality,” as
such 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 and
boundaries of their work, they will need to be prepared to think more
systematically about appraisal practices within the context of
broader notions of cultural studies, and they will need to become
more aware of their role as mediators.
 Archives are “major players in the business of
identity politics”
 Archivists appraise, collect and preserve the
“props” with which notions of identity are
built
 1892 – Jewish historical society (85 page
minutes)
 Co-existence of difference and unity
 BUT felt profoundly connected to one another
 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…
 Began in 1791 (Massachusetts Historical
Society in Boston)
 Future state historical societies modeled after
MHS
 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…
 Kaplan takes a close look at the creation of the American
Jewish Historical Society and the types of records they
collected to establish their cultural identity. The Jewish
people unquestionably believed the historical record would
help to overcome the political and social forces that
confronted them. She urges archivists to pay attention to the
social and political consequences of their work in the
developing of historical societies.
 Via a study of American Jews, Kaplan observes the capacity
of individuals to identify with multiple social groups at once, to
balance and negotiate between the various, competing
identities, and to collectively create new social or ethnic
identities when necessary. The creation of a new archival
institution, the American Jewish Historical Society, reflected
such an attempt to form a common identity.
 Dilemma of Caribbean History???
 Silences in the Creation of Sources…
 The Majority Population of the Carribbean
today is descendents of slaves…
 Naipaul
 Walcott
 Trouillot
 A People Torn from their Cultures, their
Languages and their Humanity…
 Three Major Islands: St. Thomas, St. Croix
and St. John
 Population +100,000
 250 Year Colonization (Danish kept
meticulous records and took most of them
with them)
 Danish National Archives of Copenhagen
 National Archives of the United States
 Virgin Islands – no way to access their history
 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”
 In “Whispers in the Archives”, Bastian uses the U.S. Virgin Islands
as an example of how the voices and histories of a people can be
silenced in records by the creators of those records and how this
silence created a loss of ability to construct its memory. She uses
provenance to argue that the colonized society itself was the
context and therefore, the voiceless population is a full partner in
the record creating process.
 If archives are powerful reflections of a society’s identity and
memory, 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 250
year colonization of the Danish West Indies. Over this long period
of time, the “colonial bureaucracy kept meticulous records and
when the Danes left the islands, they took most of these records
with them.” Most records wound up in the Danish National Archives
with some from the early 1990s being claimed by the National
Archives of the United States. The black population of the islands
has no access to their history.
 Archivists as “hewers of wood and drawers of
water”
 Neutral, Objective, Impartial???
 The Archive as a “central metaphorical
construct upon which to fashion perspectives
on human knowledge, memory, power and a
quest for justice”
 Power and Archives do not exist in a
vacuum???
 The changing word of archive again such as it
means 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 across
Time???
 Always Changing???
 Power of the state, the church, the corporation,
the family, the public or the individual
 The Power to Privilege or Marginalize
 Tool of Conformity or Resistance
 Reflect Society’s 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
 The theme of the power of archives is often referred to in
many publications, but here Schwartz and Cook specifically
study the topic, describing the ability of archival records to
almost literally control the past. Archives keep governments
accountable, they create collective and societal memory and
identity, they decide what makes it into the history books, and
on and on; archivists’ failure to recognize the power of
records, coupled with their insistence on “neutrality,” is, as far
as the authors are concerned, potentially dangerous.
 Schwartz and Cook attempt to make archivists and others
outside the profession realize that archives are not passive,
but rather active documents that wield power. This power
can be over administrative, legal and fiscal accountability,
over the shape and direction of historical scholarship,
collective memory, and national identity, and over the
description, preservation, and use.
 Again, archives referred to as “repositories of history” or
“houses of memory”
 The author Joel Wurl describes a story from one of the
riots after the 1992 incident involving Rodney King:
Looters and arsonists has worked their way to the south
LA neighborhood of the Southern California Library for
Social Studies and Research (SCL), a major repository
on contemporary justice movements and
underrepresented communities. Standing guard,
building manager Chester Murray encountered a group
that announced its intention to burn down the building.
Murray responded by telling them the library contained
the history of African-Americans, Latinos, and working
class people and persuaded them to leave it alone.
Many of the surrounding buildings were damaged or
destroyed but not the library. WHY???
 Whereas originally provenance dealt with records originating
with an organization, specifically a government body, Wurl
contends that the core notions of the concept—origin,
context, and integrity—may also apply to the records of an
ethnic community. Wurl further proposes that archivists
should consider themselves stewards, rather than
custodians, of records, as the idea of a repository owning
records divorces them from the community that created them,
to the detriment of both.
 Wurl argues that provenance should be extended to include
ethnicity because it will help archivists to move away from
arranging records in traditional approaches to ethnic groups.
He also connects the two terms with thoughts on ownership
and how archivists should respect this cultural ownership.
 What is the difference between social memory,
modern memory and collective memory? What is the
difference 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 the
records are a reflection of several groups? For
example, should 250 years of records belong to the
Danish people or the original inhabitants of the
colonies? Are copies just as powerful or must the
originals be produced?