Archives, What are they and How do we use them?

“All acts of societal remembering, in short, are culturally bound and

have momentous implications.” – each type of archive highlight issues of power dynamics depending on their origin or use.

Terry Cook, “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future

Paradigm Shift”, p.17, 1997.

The function of an archive is to hold a collective memory of people, nations or organizations

• To further knowledge
• For a functioning democracy
• To enable the organization to function
• To protect rights and privileges - to prove citizenship
• To hold identity and community

Types of Archives

Cultural Institutions – special collections, museums, community archives and historical societies, archives of artists and galleries, university and college archives. In these spaces, historians, cultural theorists, and archivist in a postmodernist milieu, critique what is worth remembering, as important, what was forgotten, deliberately or accidentally. Specifically, because, “collective "remembering'- and "forgetting"--occurs in these sites - galleries, museums, libraries, historic, historic monuments, public commemorations, and archives.

Added to this this many of these sites have historically been the worst offenders in benefiting from and perpetuating’s colonialism, racism, sexism and capitalist exploitation, thus driving organizational culture-reevaluation, at best - or more often, drawing external institutional critique.

Corporate Archives – are responsible for the litigious accountability of the organization to prove compliance with industry and tax legislation and for to document the history of the brand.  

Government Archives – are responsible for the running of democracy. All records created in the running of the government must be kept in the National Archives to hold all political parties accountable for their actions. They uphold individuals’ constitutional rights and citizenship.

"Blood Memory": Native American Storytelling and the Oral Tradition | N. Scott Momaday

Mainstream archival practice posits that “archival institutions develop naturally as cultures develop a written from an oral tradition and adopt the practice of recording information by writing on a receptive material. They originate from:

• the need of rulers and governments to operate efficiently supported by appropriate administrative infrastructure;
• a realization of the value of archive as encapsulating precedent and recording rights; and
• an appreciation of archives as cultural artifacts and as an expression and reflection of nationhood.”

This model traces archives on clay tablets to the Sumerians in present day Iraq in the 9^th millennium BCE, others cite ancient Greece in the 5^th century BCE in the “Metroon” a temple next to the court house in Athens, then the Romans – Emperor Justinian ordered the creation of public buildings for safe storage of memory and faith in the Byzantine government in the 6^th century, through to the medieval monasteries and European courts of kings, with their archives, - demonstrating power and legitimacy.

C. Williams 2006 p. 21

However, this narrow view of archives with an emphasis on written word, ignores the fact that there have always been oral histories, embodied archives, less tangible collected knowledge passed down from generation to generation. Around the world this is seen, from pre-colonial India and Ireland (who had the Seanchaí), similarly oral history is central in Native American culture, and when enslaved Africans were brought to the United States, they brought with them a vast oral tradition dependent on their place of origin. As institutional archives did not deem this knowledge stored and disseminated in unconventional ways, as important, much of this history has been lost.