Archives, Memories and Identities Summerschool

Archives, Memories, and
Identities
May 2013
Eric Ketelaar, Zadar
Summerschool 1
The iSchool@TorontoZadar Summerschool 2013
Archives, Memories, and Identities
Eric Ketelaar
1
• Introducing ourselves
• Course goals and objectives
• Schedule
• Assignments
2

Identities
May 2013
Summerschool 2
1. Introduction
2. Memories
3. Identities
4. Archives
5. Archival policies and practices
3
4
Let us not begin at the
beginning, nor even at the
archive.
But rather at the word ‘archive’.
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever
(1995), p. 1

Identities
May 2013
Summerschool 3
Archives (or records ) also means
‘information created, received, and
maintained as evidence and/or as
an asset by an organization or
person, in pursuance of legal
obligations or in the transaction of
business or for its purposes,
regardless of medium, form or
format.’ (ISO 30300, 2011, 3.1.7)
Archives (or records )
Information created, received, and
maintained as evidence and/or as an
asset by an organization or person,
in pursuance of legal obligations or in
the transaction of business or for its
purposes, regardless of medium,
form or format.
(ISO 30300, 2011, 3.1.7)
5

Identities
May 2013
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7
Archivists’ adoption of the term memory
has been largely uncritical.
Archivists are urged to reconsider their
working concept of memory.
(Brien Brothman 2001)
8

Identities
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Whether conscious of it or not,
archivists are major players in the
business of identity politics.
(Schwartz and Cook, 2002)
9
10

Identities
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Memories
1. Social frameworks of memory
2. Individual memory
3. Collective memory
11
Maurice Halbwachs
Les cadres sociaux de
la mémoire (1925)
La topographie légendaire des évangiles
en Terre Sainte: Etude de mémoire
collective (1941)
La mémoire collective (1950; 1997)
12

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Maurice Halbwachs
The social frameworks of memory.
The legendary topography…
(transl. Lewis Coser 1992 abstracts)
The collective memory
(transl. Mary Douglas 1980)
13
No memory is possible outside
frameworks used by people living in
society to determine and retrieve their
recollections.
We can remember only on condition of
retrieving from the frameworks of
collective memory the position of past
events that interest us.
(Maurice Halbwachs)
14

Identities
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Individual memory
15
individual family
16

Identities
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Individual’s memories spread into an
extended network of meanings that bring
together the personal with the familial, the
cultural, the economic, the social, and the
historical.
In all memory texts, personal and collective
remembering emerge again and again as
continuous with one another…All memory
texts…constantly call to mind the collective
nature of the activity of remembering.
(Annette Kuhn)
17
Collective memory
18

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individual family
collective memories
national
19
Jeffrey K. Olick
Collective memory: the two cultures
(1999)
individualistic x collectivistic
20

Identities
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James Fentress and Chris Wickham
Social Memory
(Oxford 1992)
Barbara Misztal
Theories of Social Remembering
(Maidenhead 2003)
21
Collective Memories
 Constructed
 Mediated
 Vietnam War
 Holocaust
22

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23
• Media shape our memories
• Media shaped by memories
• Mutual shaping of memory
and media
24

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Texts / Records
determine social spaces, both as
products of the social world of
authors and as textual agents at
work in that world, with which they
entertain often complex and
contestatory relations.
(Gabrielle M. Spiegel, 1990).
25
To study the social formation of
memory is to study those acts of
transfer that make remembering in
common possible.
(Paul Connerton, How societies remember,
1989)
26

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“texts” in any form
• written
• oral
• physical
• bodily
27
28

Identities
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Collective memory
a group's representation of its past in terms of shared
origins, values, and experiences. Collective memory is
distinct from individual memory because of the
emphasis on common representations of past events
or experiences, some of which occurred long before
the lifetime of any living person.
(Hedstrom 2010, 165-166).
the socially organized or mediated representation of
the past created via socially produced artifacts, and
held in common by a group.
(Schudson 1995, 348).
29
Identities
1. Identification
2. Collective identity
30

Identities
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We are nothing in an absolute
sense. We are only what we
have been – more exactly,
what we remember we were.
We are memories personified.
(Franco Ferrarotti 1994)
Both ‘collective memory’ and
‘collective identity’ are rather the
effects of intersubjective practices of
signification, neither given nor fixed
but constantly re-created within the
framework of marginally contestable
rules for discourse.
(Boyarin, 1994, 23)

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“Identity”
• identification and categorization
• self-understanding and social location
• commonality, connectedness, groupness
(Brubaker and Cooper 2000))
Identities always involve others.
(Lyon, 2009, 12)

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Collective identity
What we are faced with – what we are
living – is the constitution of both group
‘membership’ and individual‘ identity’ out
of a dynamically chosen selection of
memories, and the constant reshaping,
reinvention, and reinforcement of those
memories as members contest and create
the boundaries and links among
themselves.
(Boyarin, 1994, 26)

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38

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Founding trauma
(Dominick LaCapra 2004)
Archives
1. Touchstones of memory
2. Canon and archive
3. Inscription and spaciality
4. Appropriation
5. Archives and other memory texts

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Records, along with stories, artifacts,
songs, rituals, traditions, and myriad
other non-documentary touchstones, are
used to shape memories into narratives
and to transform information and
recollection from the individual to the
collective.
(Laura Millar 2006)
Further understanding of the role of
archives in collective memory formation
depends on placing archival documents
in relation to an array of other memory
devices and singling out the unique
contribution of archives to this process.
(Margaret Hedstrom 2010)

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43
functional storage
memory
canon archive
Cultural memory
Aleida
Assmann
2010
2006
1999
44
Inscription
Spatiality

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46
‘There is no archive without
consignation in an external
place which assures the
possibility of memorization, of
repetition, of reproduction, or of
reimpression.
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever
(1995), p. 11

Identities
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Appropriation

Identities
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Commemorations
Archives and other memory texts

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James O’Toole, ‘On the Idea of Uniqueness’ (1994)
The uniqueness of an archival document
1. the physical document itself is unique, or
2. the information it contains is unique, or
3. the process which the record produced is unique, or
4. the uniqueness is derived from the way individual
items have been assembled into files, that is the
document in the context of other documents.

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53
What is an archive?
“the value of an archival document is
not best understood as something
innate to it, but by the significance
invested in it by those who…have
created, selected, shaped and used it
as an archive.”
(Andrew Flinn 2011, 151)
54
The Archive
“as it is” (institutional, cultural,
and curatorial)
ontological
“as archive” (symbolic, metaphoric,
and discursive)
epistemological

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If any collection can be an archive, we
risk losing sight of an important
distinction between carefully constructed
and highly regulated collections that
produce ‘official’ narratives about the
past and shape people’s lives in the
present and random collections of objects
and documents that bring pleasure to the
collector but have little or no impact on
the larger order of things.
(Kate Eichhorn, 2008)

Identities
May 2013
Summerschool 29
Archives (or records ) also means
‘information created, received, and
maintained as evidence and/or as
an asset by an organization or
person, in pursuance of legal
obligations or in the transaction of
business or for its purposes,
regardless of medium, form or
format.’ (ISO 30300, 2011, 3.1.7)
Archives (or records )
Information created, received, and
maintained as evidence and/or as an
asset by an organization or person,
in pursuance of legal obligations or in
the transaction of business or for its
purposes, regardless of medium,
form or format.
(ISO 30300, 2011, 3.1.7)
57
Archival policies and practices
1. Remembrance
2. Social frameworks
3. Communities
4. Changing identities
5. Politics of memory

Identities
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Identities
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“Identity”
• identification and categorization
• self-understanding and social location
• commonality, connectedness, groupness
(Brubaker and Cooper 2000))
62

Identities
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Charting the history of a
particular collective
memory as an extension of
the event itself may be one
way to augment,
enhance, and contextualize
the records, a way to fill in
some of the undocumented
and underdocumented
spaces.
(Bastian 2009, 119)
individual family
social frameworks of archives
national

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65
66

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67
68

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69
The emergence of Archives 2.0 is less about
technological change than a broader
epistemological shift which concerns the very
nature of the archive, and particularly traditional
archival practice which privileges the ‘original’
context of the archival object.
In ‘Archives 2.0’ the archive is potentially less a
physical space than an online platform that
supports participation. In this potentially radical
vision, users can contribute to the archive,
engage with it, and play a central role in defining
its meaning.
(Joy Palmer 2009)
70

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A community of records
the aggregate of records
in all forms generated by
multiple layers of actions
and interactions between
and among the people
and institutions within a
community.
(Jeannette Bastian)
71
The records of a community become
the products of a multi tiered
process of creation that begins with
the individual creator but can be
fully realized only within the
expanse of this creator’s entire
society.
(Jeannette Bastian)
72

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73
74
Independence
“the active participation of a community
in documenting and making accessible
the history of their particular group
and/or locality on their own terms.”
Flinn, Stevens, and Shepherd, 2009, 75
“bodies substantially inspired,owned and
controlled by the group or the
community whose history they seek to
represent.”
Flinn, 2011, 150

Identities
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75
76

Identities
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77
functional storage
memory
canon archive
Cultural memory
78

Identities
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79
Politics of memory:
(a)the process by which accumulated,
shared historical experience
constraint today’s political action;
(b)the contestation or coercion that
occurs over the proper
interpretation of that historical
experience.
(Charles Tilly 1994)
80
There is no political power without
control of the archive, if not of
memory.
(Jacques Derrida)

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Contestation
• within the community
• with outsiders
81
82

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Identities
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85
a living archive
may help members of a community not
only to come to grips with their own
past but also to acknowledge that the
past they share with neighbouring
ethnic and political communities is not a
monolithic truth, history, or memory,
but allows, even requires, questioning
and contestation. For this, the archive
provides a space.
(Ketelaar, 2009, 123-124)
86
The archivist cannot pretend to be
outside the politics of memory: he or
she is one of the actors who, in the
words of Jacques Derrida, “must
practice a politics of memory and,
simultaneously, in the same
movement, a critique of the politics of
memory.”

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87
a larger social mission into archives
and to align archives not only with
the preservation of the past and
production of history, but with the
social causes of accountability,
justice, identity formation, and
reconciliation.
(Hedstrom, 2010, 173)
88
Community
enriching “our own identity as
archivists, transformed to be relevant
actors out in our society’s communities
more than proficient professionals
behind the walls of our own
institutions.”
(Terry Cook 2013)

Identities
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Rather than conflating archives and
collective memory, archivists could build
a more compelling case for the social
value of archives by enumerating and
investigating the conditions and
circumstances where archives are
instrumental in forming, reviving, or
transmitting a sense of shared
experience.
(Margaret Hedstrom 2010)
89
90
ketelaar@uva.nl

Archives, Memories and Identities Summerschool

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