Is there room for archives in the postmodern world?

American Archivist

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 88-101

  Heald, Carolyn ^a  

^a Archives of Ontario   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 23944470531     PISSN: 03609081     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.17723/aarc.59.1.u854130x02844653     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. 'Hugh A. Taylor, "Transformation in the Archives: Technological Adjustment or Paradigm Shift?" Archivaria 25 (Winter 1987-1988): 13.
2. Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 174-75.
3. 'Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), x.
4. Madan Sarap, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 145.
5. Jameson, Postmoderism, xi.
6. Michel Duchein, "The History of European Archives and the Development of the Archival Profession in Europe," American Archivist 55 (Winter 1992): 14-24;
7. Michael Roper, "The Development of the Principles of Provenance and Respect for Original Order in the Public Record Office," in The Archival Imagination: Essays in Honour of Hugh A. Taylor, edited by Barbara L. Craig (Ottawa: Association of Canadian Archivists, 1992), 134-53.
8. Roy C. Schaeffer, "Transcendent Concepts: Power, Appraisal, and the Archivist as 'Social Outcast'," American Archivist 55 (Fall 1992): 611.
9. E.H. Carr, What is History'' (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 29.
10. Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History (London & New York: Routledge, 1991), 5.
11. "Jenkins, Re-thinking History, 56.
12. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (1978), as quoted in Lloyd S. Kramer, "Literature, Criticism, and Historical Imagination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra," in The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 100.
13. Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 51-52.
14. Brien Brothman, "The Limits of Limits: Derridean Deconstruction and the Archival Institution," Archivaria 36 (Autumn 1993): 207.
15. See also Brothman's "Orders of Values: Probing the Theoretical Terms of Archival Practice," Archivaria 32 (Summer 1991): 78-100.
16. "Richard Brown, "Records Acquisition Strategy and Its Theoretical Foundation: The Case for a Concept of Archival Hermeneutics," Archivaria 33 (Winter 1991-92): 43.
17. "Brown, "Records Acquisition Strategy," 50.
18. It must be pointed out that not all historians are of one mind over the postmodernist debate. Bryan Palmer has criticized the tendency to reduce historical reality to language in his Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). Similarly, Gertrude Himmelfarb has criticized postmodernism as just another passing fad, anticipating a time when "boredom, careerism...and sheer bloody-mindedness" will impel a new generation of historians to post-postmodernism.
19. See her article, "Telling it as you like it: Post-modernist History and the Flight from Fact," Times Literary Supplement, 16 October 1992.
20. Bill Russell, "The White Man's Paper Burden: Aspects of Records Keeping in the Department of Indian Affairs, 1860-1914," Archivaria 19 (Winter 1984-85): 72.
21. See Luciana Duranti's six seminal articles entitled Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science," Parts I-VI, Archivaria 28-33 Summer 1989 to Winter 1991-92 respectively).
22. "Duranti, "Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science," Archivaria 28 (Summer 1989): 17.
23. Barbara Craig, "Meeting the Future by Returning to the Past: A Commentary on Hugh Taylor's Transformations," Archivaria 25 (Winter 1987-88): 10.
24. "Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries (Toronto: Random House, 1993). Shields' novel is interesting, too, in presenting the story, like a Picasso painting, from different points of view. Her fragmented narrative places her firmly in the postmodernist camp.
25. See Taylor, Transformation in the Archives," 14.
26. "Barbara L. Craig, "Looking at Archives from a Bird's Eye View: Flights of Fancy, Recreation, or Re- Creation," Archivaria 36 (Autumn 1993): 196.
27. Helen W. Samuels, "Improving Our Disposition: Documentation Strategy," Archivaria 33 (Winter 1991-92): 126.
28. See, for example, Diane L. Beattie, "An Archival User Study: Researchers in the Field of Women's History," Archivaria 29 (Winter 1989-90): 33-50;
29. and more recently, Steven Maynard, " 'The Burning of Wilful Evidence': Lesbian/Gay History and Archival Research;" Mary Ann Plypchuk, "A Documentation Approach to Aboriginal Archives;" and Candace Loewen, "From Human Neglect to Planetary Survival: New Approaches to the Appraisal of Environmental Records," all in Archivaria 33 (Winter 1991-92).
30. Thomas Richards is writing not about archival institutions, but rather masses of bits of information accumulated by the British Empire as a means of controlling the external world. He writes, "Magic epistemology returns information to knowledge, giving facts binding force only by desperate recourse to magic. In an age overwhelmed by information, magic is epistemology's last resort, offering the promise of the unity of knowledge." See Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 142.
31. Brothman, Orders of Values," 81-82
32. Brothman, "The Limits of Limits," 214. German archivist, Hans Booms, has gone the furthest in describing the subjectivity of archival practices in his denouncement of political purposes which the former East German archives served. As a counterpoint, he argues that archivists must cast themselves back to the past societies they aim to document, and appraise records based on the contemporary values of the times. While this method sounds useful in theory, it persists in maintaining the fiction that anyone, no matter how politically disinterested, can break through the bars of his or her own subjectively-conditioned mindset.
33. A thoroughly unpostmodern approach! See Booms, "Society and the Formation of a Documentary Heritage: Issues in the Appraisal of Archival Sources," Archivaria 24 (Summer 1987): 69-107
34. and "Uberlieferungsbildung: Keeping Archives as a Social and Political Activity," Archivaria 33 (Winter 1991-92): 25-33.
35. TV.H. Galbraith, An Introduction to the Use of the Public Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 11.
36. "Barbara L. Craig, "Outward Visions, Inward Glance: Archives History and Professional Identity," Archival Issues 17, no. 1 (1992): 119.
37. Most archivists are by now familiar with the seminal article on the series system by Peter J. Scott, "The Record Group Concept: A Case for Abandonment," American Archivist 29 (1966): 493-504.