ketelaar archives, memories, and identities zadar summerschool 2013

Archives, Memories, and Identities

May 2013

Eric Ketelaar, Zadar Summerschool 1

The iSchool@TorontoZadar Summerschool 2013


Eric Ketelaar

1


• Introducing ourselves

• Course goals and objectives

• Schedule

• Assignments

2


May 2013




1. Introduction

2. Memories

3. Identities

4. Archives

5. Archival policies and practices

3

The iSchool@TorontoZadar Summerschool 2013 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


May 2013



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)

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May 2013




Archivists’ adoption of the term memory has been largely uncritical.

Archivists are urged to reconsider their working concept of memory.

(Brien Brothman 2001)

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May 2013



Whether conscious of it or not, archivists are major players in the business of identity politics.

(Schwartz and Cook, 2002)

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May 2013




Memories

1. Social frameworks of memory

2. Individual memory

3. Collective memory

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Maurice Halbwachs

Les cadres sociaux dela mémoire (1925)

La topographie légendaire des évangiles en Terre Sainte: Etude de mémoire collective (1941)

La mémoire collective (1950; 1997)

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May 2013



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)

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May 2013



Individual memory

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individual family

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May 2013



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)

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Collective memory

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May 2013



individual family

collective memories

national

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Jeffrey K. Olick

Collective memory: the two cultures (1999)

individualistic x collectivistic

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May 2013



James Fentress and Chris Wickham

Social Memory

(Oxford 1992)

Barbara Misztal

Theories of Social Remembering

(Maidenhead 2003)

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Collective Memories

Constructed

Mediated

Vietnam War

Holocaust

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May 2013




• Media shape our memories

• Media shaped by memories

• Mutual shaping of memory and media

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May 2013



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)

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May 2013



“texts” in any form

• written

• oral

• physical

• bodily

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May 2013



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).

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Identities

1. Identification

2. Collective identity

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May 2013



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)


May 2013



“Identity”

• identification and categorization

• self-understanding and social location

• commonality, connectedness, groupness

(Brubaker and Cooper 2000))


Identities always involve others.

(Lyon, 2009, 12)


May 2013



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)


May 2013





May 2013



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


May 2013



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)


May 2013



functional storage memory

canon archive

Cultural memoryAleidaAssmann

2010

20061999


Inscription

Spatiality


May 2013




‘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


May 2013



Appropriation



May 2013



Commemorations


Archives and other memory texts


May 2013



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, or4. the uniqueness is derived from the way individual

items have been assembled into files, that is the document in the context of other documents.



May 2013



What is an archive?

“the value of an archival document is not best understood as somethinginnate to it, but by the significanceinvested in it by those who…have created, selected, shaped and used itas an archive.”

(Andrew Flinn 2011, 151)


The Archive

“as it is” (institutional, cultural, and curatorial) ontological

“as archive” (symbolic, metaphoric, and discursive)epistemological


May 2013




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)


May 2013



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



May 2013





May 2013



“Identity”

• identification and categorization

• self-understanding and social location

• commonality, connectedness, groupness

(Brubaker and Cooper 2000))



May 2013



Charting the history of a particular collectivememory 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 undocumentedand underdocumentedspaces.

(Bastian 2009, 119)


individual family

social frameworks of archives

national


May 2013





May 2013



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)



May 2013



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)

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May 2013




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


May 2013





May 2013



functional storage memory

canon archive

Cultural memory



May 2013



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)


There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.

(Jacques Derrida)


May 2013



Contestation

• within the community

• with outsiders

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May 2013




May 2013



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)


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.”


May 2013



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)


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)


May 2013



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)

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ketelaar archives, memories, and identities zadar summerschool 2013

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