Q.) What is an Archive?
Explain the relationship between archive, power,
and the production of history.
A.) Archives are our gateway to the past, they help us connect with and
understand our histories and shape our knowledge of who we are. They are,
in many ways, instruments of power, determining what we remember and
how we see ourselves. Archives are about more than just the past, they hold
organisations to account, protect rights and promote social justice.
Historians since the mid-nineteenth century, in pursuing the new scientific
history, needed an archive that was a neutral repositories of facts. Yet
archives are established by the powerful to protect or enhance their
position in society.
Through archives, the past is controlled. In the design of record-keeping
systems, in the appraisal and selection of a tiny fragment of all possible
records to enter the archive, in approaches to subsequent and
ever-changing description and preservation of the archive and in its
patterns of communication and use, archivists continually reshape,
reinterpret, and reinvent the archive. This represents enormous power over
memory and identity, over the fundamental ways in which society seeks
evidence of what its core values are and have been where it has come from,
and where it is going. Archives, then, are not passive storehouses of old
stuff, but active sites where social power is negotiated, contested,
confirmed.
Various postmodern reflections in the past two decades have
made it manifestly clear that archives – as institutions – wield power over
the administrative, legal, and fiscal accountability of governments,
corporations and individuals, and engage in powerful public policy debates
around the right to know, freedom of information, protection of privacy,
copyright and intellectual property.
Archives – as records – wield power over the shape and direction of
historical scholarship, collective memory, and national identity, over how
we know ourselves as individuals, groups, and societies. And ultimately, in
the pursuit of their professional responsibilities, archivists – as keepers of
archives – wield power over those very records central to memory and
identity formation through active management of records before they come
to archives, their appraisal and selection as archives, and afterwards their
constantly evolving description, preservation, and use. The principles and
strategies that archivists have adopted over time, and the activities they
undertake fundamentally influence the composition and character of
archival holdings and, thus, of societal memory. Cultural theorists, most
notably Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, see the archive as a central
metaphorical construct upon which to fashion their perspectives on human
knowledge, memory, and power, and a quest for justice. Control of the
archive means control of society and thus control of determining history’s
winners and losers. Verne Harris, inspired by Derrida, has shown starkly
how this operated under the apartheid regime in South Africa and its
captive national archives, and how this naturalized power may be different
under post-apartheid conditions. In the growing literature on history and
memory, the power of archives in society is made explicit in Jacques Le
Goff’s discussion of the origins of central political consolidation in the
ancient world under a monarch and establishment of the first archives to
buttress his control. Medieval archives, Patrick Geary reveals, were
collected not only to keep evidence of legal and business transactions, but
also explicitly to serve historical and symbolic purposes, but only for those
figures and events judged worthy of celebrating or memorializing. Looking
at those marginalized by the archival enterprise, Gerda Lerner has
convincingly traced, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, the
systemic exclusion of women from society’s memory tools and institutions,
including archives.
Records are also about power. They are about imposing control and order
on transactions, events, people, and societies through the legal, symbolic,
structural, and operational power of recorded communication. A tiny
fraction of all those records created
are appraised, selected and memorialized as archives; the vast majority are
not. Archival choices about how to describe this archival fragment reinforce
certain values and impose emphases and viewing orders for the archive.
Archival approaches to making records available again create filters that
influence perceptions of the records and thus of the past.
Yet, to assert that archives and records are only about power, about
imposing control and order, is an incomplete view. Human-based systems
are designed to achieve control, order and regulation for some social
phenomenon. Whether conscious of it or not, archivists are major players
in the business of identity politics. Archivists appraise, collect, and preserve
the props with which notions of identity are built. In turn, notions of
identity are confirmed and justified as historical documents validate with
all their authority as evidence the identity stories so built.
Power over the documentary record, and by extension over the collective
memory of marginalized members of society and indeed over their
representation and integration into the narratives of history, resides in the
decisions that archivists and manuscript curators make in soliciting and
appraising collections.
Submitted by :-
Name- Kishan Kumar
Roll No.- 22/0081
Course- BA(P) [History+Political Science]
Subject- SEC
