Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar (review)

From ancient Rome's damnatio memoriae to George Orwell's memory holes, from the ancient Library of Alexandria to Google's proposed digital repository "of all books in all languages," people have ever been concerned about the written products of history, what they signify, how to preserve them, and how to make them accessible (or not, as the case may be).¹ Archives, in Randolph Starn's words, are "surrogates of God, and of the devil too"; and although materials have been archived since history has been recorded, only since the 19th century have they been "primary sites of the labor and legitimacy of professional historians."² Indeed, both the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the two great human movements of the modern age, are embodied in the archive. I suspect that most researchers have experienced that existential frisson of excitement and dread on gaining access to a private or public archive: existential because our early careers can depend on it; exciting because we have gained entry to a defined body of primary sources on our research topic; dread because we may not find what we think is there after all. Starn's characterization may seem a little hyperbolic, but romanticism still accompanies our rational inquiry in the archive.

Of late, scholars have been encouraged, fruitfully I would argue, to beware the conceptual "poverty of empiricism" or the "mythology of doctrines," to show "incredulity toward metanarratives," and to recognize that the coherent narratives crafted by historians have much to do with the historians' own drive for coherence and meaning, often based on their own sense of moral authority. ³ Archives, though quite resistant, have been subject to similar inquiry in the past two decades. Scholars challenged the received wisdoms about archives as repositories of past reality, where truth lay buried like a "sleeping princess awaiting [the scholars'] awakening kiss."⁴ "Massive research in the archives," Hayden White implied, was no longer axiomatic proof of a "rigorous 'historical method.' "⁵ In 1980, Régine Robin argued that subjects in the archives do not have a voice that can be revived or restored by the researcher, only "displaced, re-produced by narration, by fiction."⁶ For Pierre Nora, the archive, as the site where a nation intentionally consigns its memory, should be explored as part of histoire-problème, rather than histoire-récit, later adding that archives were "bastions" of identity and had to be deliberately created.⁷ It is no longer unacceptable to argue that all archives are the constructions of states, groups, or individuals, or that fiction and truth reside there together and are often indistinguishable from each other.⁸

The present edited volume represents a timely encounter with these developments and is all the more intriguing for the extended nature of its provenance. The product of a year-long Sawyer Seminar held in 2000-1 at the University of Michigan, it explores the subject of archives, documentation, and how societies remember their pasts. The starting assumption, the editors point out, was a "conception of archives ... as a complex of structures, processes, and epistemologies situated at a critical point of intersection between scholarship, cultural practices, politics, and technologies" (vii). It comprises 46 articles, of which 7 have already appeared elsewhere, by a broad range of international academics and professionals. The articles are loosely grouped into five sections that often overlap in content. The first three parts cover archives and archiving, archives in the production of knowledge, and archives and social memory. The last two parts cover archival practices in various regions and countries of the world.

The most adventurous forays here into the uncomfortable relationship between archives and the past are sometimes accompanied by authors' requests for readers' indulgence of their "skittish" (15) or "impressionistic" (51) efforts to rethink the archive. The most postmodern efforts attempt to diminish the overwhelming physical presence...