1

Published in: Archives and Manuscripts 33 (2005), p. 44-61

Eric Ketelaar

SHARING: COLLECTED MEMORIES IN COMMUNITIES OF RECORDS

Abstract

A recent book Owning Memory. How a Caribbean Community Lost its Archives and Found
Its History, by Jeannette Bastian, has enriched archival discourse with the notion of a
“community of records”, referring to a community both as a record-creating entity and as
a memory frame that contextualizes the records it creates. To what extent are records
constructive in creating and maintaining memories, communities and identities –
imagined or real – of individuals, families, corporate bodies, social groups, nations? Could
we use the concept of a “community of records” in making the fourth dimension of the
records continuum model more vigorous and its impact on shaping the three other
dimensions more productive? The concepts of ‘communities of records’ and ‘joint
heritage’ could become the components of a holistic view of the rights and duties of
‘records stakeholders’. Such a view might help in repositioning the archive’s (and the
archivist’s) role in shaping memories and identities.

Eric Ketelaar is Professor of Archivistics in the Department of Media Studies (Faculty of

Humanities) at the University of Amsterdam He is Honorary Professor at Monash
University, Melbourne (Faculty of Information Technology). His current teaching and
research are concerned mainly with the social and cultural contexts of records creation
and use.

In 2000/2001 he was The Netherlands Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan

(School of Information). He was National Archivist of The Netherlands from 1989-1997.
From 1992-2002 he held the chair of archivistics in the Department of History of the
University of Leiden. During twenty years he served the International Council on Archives
(ICA) in different capacities. In 2000 ICA elected him Honorary President. He is president
of the Records Management Convention of The Netherlands.

Eric Ketelaar wrote some 250 articles mainly in Dutch, English, French and German and
he wrote or co-authored several books, including two general introductions on archival
research and a handbook on Dutch archives and records management law. He is one of
the three editors-in-chief of 'Archival Science. International Journal on Recorded
Information'.

Collective memories

Over the past decade, archival science has been challenged to strive for “not only a more
refined sense of what memory means in different contexts, but also a sensitivity to the
differences between individual and social memory.”1 Individual memory becomes social
memory by social sharing of experiences and emotions.2 Social sharing is mediated by
cultural tools.3 These tools are “texts” in any form, written, oral, as well as physical. The
landscape or a building or a monument may serve as a memory text, while bodily texts
are presented in commemorations, rituals and performances. 4 Often, different media
work together whenever society requires
both an archival and an embodied dimension: weddings need both the
performative utterance of “I do” and the signed contract; the legality of a court
decision lies in the combination of the live trial and the recorded outcome. 5
 2

Memory texts (in this broad sense) can be regarded as interfaces between an individual
and the past, but I prefer to treat them (in actor-network theory) as agents (actors) which
interact with human agents (actors).6 Remembering is distributed between texts and
other agents: neither operates autonomous, but they work together in a network. This
networked or distributed remembering happens between one agent and one or more
texts, as well as between several agents and several texts. Memory texts do not “speak
for themselves” but only in communion with other agents. Let me give an example. A
colleague asked me to recommend a book on collective memory. I knew the book I
wanted to advise. I could “see” its color and its size in my mind. I even knew the name of
the author, but could not recollect the title. Therefore I involved another agent:
amazon.com. By entering the author’s name, the website yielded the title and a picture of
the book, which I could then recommend. Who “remembered” the book? Neither I myself,
nor amazon.com could remember in isolation: the two together were involved in a system
of networked or distributed memory.

Social frameworks of memory

6
Hedstrom (as note 1); Bruno Latour, “On technical mediation – Philosophy, sociology,
genealogy”, Common Knowledge 3 (2) (1994) 29-64; James R. Taylor et al., The
computerization of work. A communication perspective (Sage Publications, Thousand
Oaks/London/New Delhi 2001).
1
Margaret Hedstrom, “Archives, Memory, and Interfaces with the Past”, Archival Science,
2 (2002) 21–43, here 31–32. See also Brien Bothman, “The Past that Archives Keep:
Memory, History, and the Preservation of Archival Records”, Archivaria 51 (2002) 48–80;
Eric Ketelaar, “The Archive as a Time Machine”, Proceedings of the DLM-Forum 2002:
@ccess and Preservation of Electronic Information: Best Practices and Solutions,
Barcelona, 6–8 May 2002, INSAR European Archives News, Supplement VII (Luxembourg
2002) 576–581; Barbara L. Craig, “Selected Themes on the Literature on Memory and
Their Pertinence to Archives”, American Archivist 65 (2002) 276-289; Laura Millar,
“Evidence, Memory, and Knowledge: The Relationship between Memory and Archives”,
paper presented at the International Congress on Archives, Vienna 2004
(http://www.wien2004.ica.org/imagesUpload/pres_166_MILLAR_ZMIL01.pdf); Michael
Piggott, “Archives and memory”, in: Sue McKemmish, Michael Piggott, Barbara Reed and
Frank Upward (eds.), Archives: Recordkeeping in Society (Charles Sturt University, Wagga
Wagga 2005) 299-328. A comprehensive and very readable text on collective memories
is: Barbara A. Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering (Open University Press,
Maidenhead and Philadelphia 2003), with an extensive bibliography.
2
Véronique Christophe and Bernard Rimé, “Exposure to the social sharing of emotion:
Emotional impact, listener responses and secondary social sharing,” European Journal of
Social Psychology, 27 (1997) 37-54.
3
José van Dijck, “Mediated Memories: Personal Cultural Memory as Object of
Cultural Analysis”, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 18 (2004) 261-
277.
4
Stephen Muecke, Textual Spaces. Aboriginality and Cultural Studies (New South
Wales University Press, Kensington 1992); Diana Taylor, The Archive and the
Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke University Press,
Durham and London 2003); Paul Connerton, How societies remember (Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge 1989); Thomas A. Markus and Deborah Cameron, The
words between the spaces. Buildings and language (Routledge, London and New
York 2002).
5
Taylor (as note Error: Reference source not found) 21.
 3

Maurice Halbwachs was the first to study individual memory in its social context. His book
La mémoire collective was published in 1950, posthumously after the death of Halbwachs
in the Buchenwald concentration camp.7 At the time of writing, mainly during the years
1935 to 1938, it was not even customary to speak, even metaphorically, of the memory
of a group.8 Frederick Bartlett – the Cambridge psychologist and a contemporary of
Halbwachs - wrote about memory in the group, instead of memory of the group.
According to Halbwachs each individual memory is a viewpoint on the collective
memory.9 In his earlier book Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925) Halbwachs had
developed the thesis that every memory is socially framed: “no memory is possible
outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their
recollections”.10 Individual memory, he wrote, is
a part or an aspect of group memory, since each impression and each fact, even if
its apparently concerns a particular person exclusively, leaves a lasting memory
only to the extent that one has thought it over – to the extent that it is connected
with the thoughts that come from us from the social milieu. 11

Pursuing Halbwachs’ reasoning, I want to investigate the possibility of mapping a

“memory continuum” onto the records continuum, in which memories of the individual,
the family, the organisation, the community, and society function, not in isolation, but in
a flow of continuous interaction.

Individual memory

Individual cultural memory (the autobiographical memory) fades if it is not supported and
nourished in contact with other people or – as we will see – in contact with memory texts.
Your memory is as it were rooted in other people’s remembrances. When meeting a
friend from college, after a ten years interval, you start sharing memories: “do you still
remember that day when we …” Your own memories are intertwined with the memories
of other people, the memories of a group. This is clear, even in what is mostly considered
to be a reflection of the most personal remembering, the diary – both the traditional
paper diary and the modern weblog or blog.12 Annette Kuhn reported on her ‘memory
work’, using photographs from her family album and linking them with other public and
private memory texts, discovering that an 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. Memory
work makes it possible to explore connections between ‘public’ historical events,
structures of feeling, family dramas, relations of class, national identity and
gender and ‘personal’ memory.13

And Kuhn concludes, echoing Halbwachs:

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.14

This has led people who studied diaries to question the demarcation between personal
and corporate, or private and public records. The histories recorded in your personal
records belong to “those public narratives of community, religion, ethnicity and nation
which make private identity possible.”15 Australians have discovered, in the memory work
involved in Bringing them Home, that there is no clear division between personal and
collective stories, between public and private.16 Life stories of Aboriginals are about we,
rather than I17 and the life stories of the ‘stolen generation’ have constituted an Australian
lieu de mémoire, both for Aboriginals and non-Aboriginal Australians. 18 In a comparable
way have life stories of immigrants contributed to constituting collective memories within
the immigrant groups and within society at large. 19

I use the plural collective memories on purpose. There is no single collective memory.
Even if members of a group have experienced what they remember, they do not
remember the same or in the same way. The Australian collective memory of the Vietnam
War is shared by people who have not experienced the war or the anti-war movement,
 4

and even those who did take part remember other events. Their memories differ
according to the nature of the social frameworks in which they did function then and do
function now, the groups of which they were a member then and are a member now. This
has led Ann Curthoys to state “particular social groups are constructing different
‘Vietnams’ ”20, just as different people (re)construct a different Holocaust. 21 To a large
extent these differences originate from differences in mediation, which transforms the
‘historical’ Vietnam War and the ‘historical’ Holocaust’ into a represented and symbolic
Vietnam War and Holocaust.22 Mediation not only through literature, film, and TV, but also
through ceremonies, rituals, being performed and transformed, through monuments
which we visit and view, and venerate or abominate in a context which is quite different
from the one when they were created.23 Mediation through archives too: archives whose
‘tacit narratives’ are constantly re-activated and re-shaped. 24 The sum of these collected
rather than collective memories25 one may call social memory. Some writers prefer this
term social memory over collective memory, because the former indicates the social
‘constructedness’ of memory, of the social process of remembering. 26

Social or collective memories are no fixed entities: their content will change over time,
because they are contingent on societal norms and power. As David Gross argues, society
plays a powerful role in determining which values, facts, or historical events are worth
being recalled and which are not.27 Secondly, society has a hand in shaping how
information from he past is recalled, and, thirdly, society has a say in deciding the degree
of emotional intensity to be attached to memories. And in most cases it is the state that
decides on behalf of society, thus imposing state’s politics of memory. 28
Thus, “none of the features of social memory are themselves by any means free from
power relations, pre-existing discursive formations, and the effects of strongly influential
forces,” as Tanabe and Keyes write in a recent book about social memory in Thailand and
Laos.29

Family

The first social framework of any individual’s memories is constituted by his or her family.
Personal (or autobiographical) memory (remembrance of what one has experienced) is
not sealed off from other people’s remembrances, from what Halbwachs called social or
historical memory.30 The family too, has a memory: as any other collective group the
family has “its memories which it alone commemorates, and its secrets that are revealed
only to its members.”31 Through the family memory the individual is connected with a
past he or she has not experienced. This connectivity is the basis for any culture.

Family memory, in turn, is embedded in (and permeated32 by) larger frameworks of

kinship, local and regional memories, religion, nation, etc. even if, as in the case of
(im)migrants, the family replaces the nation as the frame of memory and identity. 33
Halbwachs therefore treats the collective memory of the family first, before he devotes
chapters to religious collective memory and to social classes and their traditions. In many
families, it is the women who are “the historians, the guardians of memory, selecting and
preserving the family archive.”34 This gendered recordkeeping has, as far as I know, not
yet been recognized sufficiently by scholars and practitioners in archival studies. Their
recordkeeping is, as any recordkeeping, not a neutral activity, but contingent on social
and cultural norms and beliefs.

Organisations

29
Tanabe and Keyes (as note Error: Reference source not found).
30

?
Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (as note 6), 52.
31
Halbwachs, On collective memory (as note 10), 59.
 5

In the third dimension of the memory (and records) continuum, memories are organized,
that is: constructed. The memory of a group is not merely the sum of the memories of its
members, nor is the memory of an organization merely the sum of the memories of its
units. Mark Ackerman has found that people maintaining organizational memory systems
are very aware of the political nature of the system.35 They want to make their own unit
“look good” or “more visible”. Records shape a group, because information “directly
influences the nature of the social relations which it helps to organize.” 36

Group (or unit) members share memories, tacit knowledge, and social cohesion. Members
of different groups, even within the same organization, often inhabit different social and
language worlds.37 Once the unit’s information is to be shared with other units within the
organisation, that information has to be made understandable for outsiders. This is done
by formalizing the information, thereby stripping the information of information that was
meant to stay inside the group. Recordkeeping systems are “active creators of categories
in the world” and people in these systems “classify away traces that they know to be
relevant but which should not be officially recorded.” 38

12
Michael Piggott, “The Diary: Social Phenomenon, Professional Challenge,”
Archives and Manuscripts 31 (2003) 83-90; Van Dijck (as note Error: Reference
source not found).
13
Annette Kuhn, Family secrets: acts of memory and imagination (Verso, London
and New York 1995) 4.
14
Kuhn (as note Error: Reference source not found) 5. Kuhn uses ‘memory texts’ in a
narrower sense than I do in this paper.
15
Patricia Holland and Jo Spence, Family snaps: the meanings of domestic
photography (Virago, London 1991) 3, 91.
16
Paula Hamilton, “Memory studies and cultural history”, in: Hsu-Ming Teo and
Richard White (eds.), Cultural history in Australia (New South Wales University
Press, Sydney 2003) 92-93.
17
Bain Attwood and Fiona Magowan, Telling stories: indigenous history and memory
in Australia and New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, N.Z. 2001) xiv.
18
Bain Attwood, “ ‘Learning about the truth’: the stolen generations narrative”, in:
Attwood and Magowan (as note Error: Reference source not found) 183-212, here 199.
19
Alistair Thomson, “ ‘The Empire was a bar of soap’: life stories and race identity
among British emigrants travelling to Australia, 1945-1971”, in: Teo and White (as
note Error: Reference source not found) 201-213.
32
Halbwachs, On collective memory (as note 10), 184.
33
Anne Marie Fortier, Migrant belongings: memory, space, identity (Berg, Oxford
2000) 166.
34
Holland and Spence (as note Error: Reference source not found) 9, 107, 172, 211;
Graeme Davison, The Use and Abuse of Australian History (Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest
NSW 2000) 81.
7
Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (Francis J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter,
transl.) (Harper & Row, New York 1980). Original edition : La Mémoire collective,
Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 1950. The newest critical edition is: La
mémoire collective (Gérard Namer, ed.) Paris Albin Michel 1997. References are to
the 1980 translation.
 6

Every axis of the records continuum model offers different views of transactions,
identities, evidence, and recordkeeping. The matryoska-like ‘nesting’ of all these views
has as a consequence that no single view is permanent. Were individual memory is
framed by family, group, organisational and societal memories, so are family and
organizational memories permeated and changed by other social frameworks. The same
goes for documents, which are, as Graeme Davison remarks
not only the products of their originators but of successive processes of editing,
revision, translation and interpretation. They are potential evidence about all those
who participated in the processes through which it was handed down to the
present.39

The record is a "mediated and ever-changing construction" 40; records are "constantly
evolving, ever mutating"41, over time and space infusing and exhaling what I have called

8
Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (as note 6), 50.
9
In the English translation (Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 48) the word “individual”
is missing.
10
Maurice Halbwachs, On collective memory (Lewis A. Coser, ed.) (The University of
Chicago Press, Chicago and London 1992) 43 (translated abstracts from: Les
cadres sociaux de la mémoire, Paris, Librairie Alcan 1925). The newest critical
edition is: Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Gérard Namer,
ed.), Paris, Albin Michel 1994. References are to the 1992 translation.
11
Halbwachs, On collective memory(as note 10),, 53.
20
Ann Curthoys, “ ‘Vietnam’: Public Memory of an Anti-War Movement”, in: Kate
Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton (eds.), Memory and history in twentieth-century
Australia (Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1994) 114.
21
Lynn Rapaport, Jews in Germany after the Holocaust: memory, identity, and
Jewish-German relations (Cambridge University Press, New York 1997).
22
David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of identity: global media, electronic
landscapes, and cultural boundaries (Routledge, London and New York 1995) 93
23
Shigeharu Tanabe and Charles F. Keyes (eds.), Cultural crisis and social memory:
modernity and identity in Thailand and Laos (University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu
2002).
24
Eric Ketelaar, “Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives”, Archival Science 1 (2001)
143-155.
25
James E. Young, The Texture of Memory (Yale University Press New Haven 1993)
preface; Jeffrey K. Olick, “Collective Memory: The Two Cultures”, Sociological
Theory 17 (1999) 333-347.
26
James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social memory, New perspectives on the past
(Blackwell, Oxford, UK and Cambridge, Mass. 1992). See Piggott (as note 1) 306,
and Michael Piggott, “Building collective memory archives” in this issue.
27
David Gross, Lost Time. On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture
(University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst 2000) 77.
28
Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television. Filmed Interviews
(Polity Press, Cambridge 2002) 62. On the issue of politics of memory and the power of
the state see Eric Ketelaar, “Archival Temples, Archival Prisons: Modes of Power and
Protection”, Archival Science 2 (2002) 221-238, and the other articles in the two thematic
 7

‘tacit narratives’. These are embedded in the activations of the record. Every interaction,
intervention, interrogation, and interpretation by creator, user, and archivist activitates
the record. These activations may happen consecutively or simultaneously, at different
times, in different places and contexts.42 Moreover, as I argued before, any activation is
distributed between texts and other agents in a network. The record, “always in a state of
becoming”, has therefore many creators and, consequently, many who may claim the
record’s authorship and ownership.

Community of records

“Very little ethnographic work has been carried out which focuses on the relationship
between people, communities and documentation,” Laura Bear laments at the end of her
study that shows how intimately public records and family histories can be interrelated. 43
A recent study of this relationship between people, communities and archives is
Jeannette Bastian’s Owning Memory.44 Bastian was from 1987 to 1998 director of the
Territorial Libraries and Archives of the United States Virgin Islands. Named by Columbus
in honour of St. Ursula and her 11,000 virgins, the Virgin Islands were seized by the
Spanish, occupied by the Dutch, changed hands to the French, became a Danish colony,
and were sold in 1917 to the United States. The indigenous Indian peoples had
disappeared before the 17th century: the early colonists found the three islands
uninhabited. The labour force, needed by the white plantation owners and traders, was
built up by indentured immigrants, prisoners, and an increasing number of slaves,
imported from West Africa.

Bastian proposes the concept of a community of records, starting from a new concept of
provenance. Tom Nesmith recently defined provenance as consisting of
The societal and intellectual contexts shaping the action of the people and
institutions who made and maintained the records, the functions the records
perform, the capacities of information technologies to capture and preserve
information at a given time, and the custodial history of the records. 45
According to Bastian,
the records of a community become the products of a multitiered process of
creation that begins with the individual creator but can be fully realized only within
the expanse of this creator’s entire society. The records of individuals become part
of an entire community of records.46
Communities, she argues, are defined through the relationship between actions and
records, the actions creating a mirror in which records and actions reflect one another.
A community of records may be further imagined as 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. 47
And further on she writes (resounding Giddens’ argument that recorded information is
both an allocative resource and an authoritative resource)
Records, oral or written, become both the creators as well as the products of the
societal memory of a community.48

Owning records

issues of Archival Science 2 (2002) on “Archives, Records, and Power”, edited by Joan M.
Schwartz and Terry Cook.
35
Mark S. Ackerman, “Definitional and contextual issues in organizational and group
memories”, Information Technology & People 9 (1996) 10-24.
36
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration
(Polity Press, Cambridge 1984) 262, referring to McLuhan.
 8

The Virgin Islanders lost their archives, Bastian argues, because the majority of the
records were removed from the islands to Denmark and the U.S.49 Loss of custody of
records is seen as equivalent to loss of the records. Virgin Islanders have to travel abroad
to find their own history, and that means loss of access to the primary sources of their
history.50 This is the same argument used by Henrietta Fourmile who described Aborigines
“as captives of the archives”.51 Not only are virtually all records concerning Aborigines
located thousands of kilometres away from the communities to whom they have
relevance, there are other inequities in access too: lack of knowledge about the existence
of the records, reticence of archivists, the jargon in which the records are written, etc.
Furthermore, the records are crown property and Aboriginals have not sufficient control
over the management of the records. Since Fourmile wrote this, the Bringing them Home
report and the ensuing changes in archival policies and procedures may have met most
of Fourmile’s concerns, but the main question “Who owns the documents?” is still being
answered largely in legal terms of governmental ownership rather than in terms of the
rights of a community of records.52 Bastian, however, asserts that in a community of
records
all layers of society are participants in the making of records, and the entire
community becomes the larger provenance of the records. Seen from this view, all
segments of the society have equal value.53
Especially the native inhabitants of the Virgin Islands, who were the primary subjects of
the record-creating process, and thereby, as Bastian writes, a full partner in that process,
might lay a claim to at least co-ownership of the records. This was also proposed by
Fourmile: sharing the physical records and the responsibility for their custody and
management “so that the rights of one party are not prejudiced in order to benefit the
other”.54 She did not make a distinction between records of the central administration of
Aboriginal affairs and others, like the tenancy records, of departments. And right she was,
because such a distinction may be correct according to traditional archival methodology,
but does not recognize the subject of the record being a party to the business function
which created the record, a co-creator.55 The agency’s file not only is “my file”56, but the
file of a community of records.

For decades, the Dutch archival community has debated the destination of certain
categories of records created by state agencies acting within a local community, like
courts and chambers of commerce. In the ‘70s the National Archivist and the municipal
archivists of Amsterdam and Rotterdam were fighting for archival fonds which legally
were state property, but which held information essential to (and having been submitted,
and used by) the local communities. The legal argument of crown property and an
interpretation of provenance which was more ‘political’ than archival prevailed. Those
fonds stayed in the state’s repositories in the provincial capitals, rather than being
deposited in their places of origin.57 Interestingly, at roughly the same time the Dutch
National Archives were, at the international level, involved in shaping the idea of a joint
archival heritage of Indonesia and The Netherlands.

Joint heritage

The concept of joint heritage was developed by the International Council on Archives and
accepted by the General Conference of UNESCO in 1978 as one of the basic principles
which should guide the solution of conflicting archival claims. 58 The two other principles
are: the principle of provenance (that is the respect for the integrity of archival fonds)
and the principle of functional pertinence. The latter is the only exception to the principle
of provenance, applicable when records of a non-sovereign political or administrative
authority are needed by a successor State to carry on that authority’s business. The
concept of joint heritage is advisable where archives

form part of the national heritages of two or more States but cannot be divided
without destroying its juridical, administrative, and historical value … The practical
result of the application of this concept is that the archives group is left physically
intact in one of the countries concerned, where it is treated as part of the national
archival heritage, with all of the responsibilities with respect to security and
 9

handling implied thereby for the State acting as owner and custodian of that
heritage. The States sharing this joint heritage should then be given rights equal
to those of the custodial State.59

This statement does not use the term co-ownership, which has a specific legal meaning,
but makes clear that the parties to a joint heritage have equal rights. These rights
encompass not only rights of access, but also rights with regard to appraisal,
conservation, and other archival functions which might normally not be subsumed under
access. I suggest that mutual rights correspond to mutual obligations, which entails that
the owner and custodian is not free to exercise his part if that would obstruct the
effectuation of the other party’s rights.

The concepts of ‘communities of records’ and ‘joint heritage’ could become the
components of a holistic view of the rights and duties of ‘records stakeholders’. Such a

37
John L. King and Susan Leigh Star, “Conceptual foundations for the development of
organizational decision support systems”, Proceedings of the Hawaii International
Conference on Systems Science (1990) 143-151.
38
Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting things out: classification and its
consequences (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1999).
39
Davison (as note Error: Reference source not found) 144.
40
Terry Cook, “Archival science and postmodernism: new formulations for old
concepts”, Archival Science 1 (2001) 3-24, here 10.
41
Sue McKemmish, ”Traces: Document, record, archive, archives”, in: Sue
McKemmish, Michael Piggott, Barbara Reed and Frank Upward (eds.), Archives:
Recordkeeping in Society (Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga 2005) 1-20,
here 14.
42
Ketelaar (as note Error: Reference source not found).

Laura Bear, "Public Genealogies: Documents, Bodies and Nations in Anglo-Indian

43

Railway Family Histories," Contributions to Indian Sociology (2001) 386.

44
Jeannette A. Bastian, Owning Memory. How a Caribbean Community Lost its
Archives and Found Its History (Libraries Unlimited, Westport Conn. and London
2003).
45
Tom Nesmith, “Seeing Archives: Postmodernism and the Changing Intellectual Place of
Archives”, American Archivist 65 (2002) 35. Cf. Nesmith’s earlier definition: “the social
and technical processes of the records’ inscription, transmission, contextualization, and
interpretation which account for it [the record’s] existence, characteristics, and
continuing history”: Tom Nesmith, “Still Fuzzy, But More Accurate: Some Thoughts on the
‘Ghosts’ of Archival Theory”, Archivaria 47 (1999) 146.
46
Bastian (as note Error: Reference source not found) 3.
47
Bastian (as note Error: Reference source not found) 5.
48
Bastian (as note Error: Reference source not found) 5.
49
Jeannette A. Bastian, “Question of Custody: The Colonial Archives of the United
States Virgin Islands”, American Archivist 64 (2001) 96-114.
50
Bastian (as note Error: Reference source not found) 1, 6.
 10

view might help primarily in solving archival claims, but, more importantly, in
repositioning the archive’s (and the archivist’s) role in shaping memories and identities.

Identities

Collective identity is based on the elective processes of memory, so that a given group
recognises itself through its memory of a common past. A community is a “community of
memory”.60 That common past is not merely genealogical or traditional, something which
you can take or leave. It is more: a moral imperative for one’s belonging to a
community.61 The common past, sustained through time into the present, is what gives
continuity, cohesion and coherence to a community. 62 To be a community, a family, a
religious community, a profession involves an embeddedness in its past and,
consequently, in the memory texts through which that past is mediated. For the Virgin
Islanders and most other formerly colonized and indigenous communities, these texts are
predominantly the records created by colonial powers. The record of governance has to
be contextualized, however, “by reading it within the larger discursive formation in which
it emerged – a formation in which multiple cultural sites, texts, and contexts were
active”.63 Colonial archiving “shaped” local communities in the colonizer’s taxonomies,
while these communities “asserted their identity and agency in response to the authority
of colonial rule.”64 This reciprocal ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ (shaping and, what
Wertsch calls ‘mastery’65) of the colonial narrative of history and identity entail that
former colonizers and former colonized are a community of records, sharing a joint
archival heritage. The same is true for other mutually associated groups, like indigenous

51
Henrietta Fourmile, “Who owns the past? Aborigines as captives of the archives”,
in: Valerie Chapman and Peter Read (eds.), Terrible hard biscuits: a reader in
Aboriginal history (Allen & Unwin and Journal of Aboriginal History, St. Leonards,
NSW 1996) 16-27.
52
Danielle Wickman, “The Failure of Commonwealth Recordkeeping: the Stolen
Generations in Corporate and Collective Memory”, Comma 2003 (1) 117-128;
George Morgan, “Decolonising the Archives: Who Owns the Documents”, Comma
2003 (1) 147-151.
53
Bastian (as note Error: Reference source not found) 83.
54
Fourmile (as note Error: Reference source not found) 25.
55
Michael Piggott and Sue McKemmish, “Recordkeeping, Reconciliation and Political
Reality”, in: Susan Lloyd (ed.), Past Caring? What does Society Expect of Archivists?
Proceedings of the Australian Society of Archivists Conference. Sydney 13-17 August
2002 (Canberra: Australian Society of Archivists 2002) 111-122, here 117 and on
http://www.sims.monash.edu.au/research/rcrg/publications/piggottmckemmish2002.pdf
56
Eric Ketelaar, “Recordkeeping and Societal Power”, in: Sue McKemmish, Michael
Piggott, Barbara Reed and Frank Upward (eds.), Archives: Recordkeeping in Society
(Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga 2005) 277-298, here 281-282.
57
In a comparable Dutch case the archives (of a state school) were returned by the State
Archives to the municipal archives, but they had been made meaningless “as all files
relating to the school and its staff in the local community had been removed”: Joan van
Albada, “Archives, Particles of Memory or More”, Comma 2001 (1/2) 13-18, here 16.
58
Hervé Bastien, “Reference Dossier on Archival Claims”, Janus. Special issue:
Proceedings of the twenty-nineth, thirtieth and thirty-first International Conference
of the Round Table on Archives (1998) 209-268.
59
Bastien (as note Error: Reference source not found).
 11

and immigrant Australians. As Upward and McKemmish wrote “The Aboriginal experience,
in many different ways, is ‘evidence of us’ ” – and I would add: so are the concurrent
records.66 One might look to the joint archival heritage of communities of records as a
“boundary object” which connects two or more communities. 67

Connecting, however, is not enough. Shaping a community and its identity unavoidably
involves “presupposing or assigning an obligatory identification or reidentification.” 68 The
search for roots and belonging69 may contribute to making the community into a
community of records. But that will also contribute to marking the limits to other groups
and their members. We have to be aware of the fact that this “dual process of inclusion
and exclusion”70 may lead to intolerance, discrimination, cleansing and usurpation. And
record professionals especially have to be mindful that records can be used as props or
tools in these processes.71 They should be mindful of the opportunities that communities
of records have for sharing, which, according to Jacques Derrida
both says what it is possible up to a point to have in common, and it takes into
account dissociations, singularities, diffractions, the fact that several people or
groups can, in places, cities or non-cities … have access to the same programs.72

The term community of memory was used by Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the
60

Heart. Individualism and Commitment in American Life (University of California Press,

Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1985) 152-155.
61
W. James Booth, “Communities of Memory: On Identity, Memory, and Debt”, American
Political Science Review 93 (1999) 249-263.
62
Morley and Robins (as note Error: Reference source not found) 72.

Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1720-1840. Colonial Currencies of
63

Gender (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 2004) 10.

Saloni Mathur, “History and anthropology in South Asia: rethinking the archive,” Annual
64

Review Anthropology 29 (2000) 95; Ann L. Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of
Governance”, Archival Science 2 (2002) 87-109; Joseph (as note 62).
65
James V. Wertsch, “Narrative Tools of History and Identity”, Culture & Psychology 3
(1997) 5-20.
66
Frank Upward and Sue McKemmish, “In Search of the Lost Tiger, by Way of Sainte-
Beuve: Re-construction of the Possibilities in ‘Evidence of Me’ ”, Archives and Manuscripts
29 (2001) 22-42, here 37. Michael Piggott, “Building collective memory archives” (in this
issue) points to the interfaces via which we can come to connect with memory resources
of others: the dominant society, the coloniser, the former dictator’s regime. I agree but
would go further. Instead of interfaces I prefer agents who network to constitute co-
partnership and sharing of memory resources.
67
Bowker and Star (as note Error: Reference source not found) 296-314.
68
Derrida and Stiegler (as note Error: Reference source not found).
69
Gerard Delanty, Community (Routledge, New York 2003) 189.
70
Paula Hamilton, “The Knife Edge: Debates about Memory and History”, in Darian-
Smith and Hamilton (as note Error: Reference source not found) 23.
71
Elisabeth Kaplan, “ We Are What We Collect, We Collect What We Are: Archives and the
Construction of Identity,” American Archivist 63 (2000) 126-151, here 151; Ketelaar (as
note Error: Reference source not found).
 12

Sharing collected memories and sharing communities of records – keeping in mind that
“we must practice a politics of memory and, simultaneously, in the same movement, a
critique of the politics of memory.”73

72
Derrida and Stiegler (as note Error: Reference source not found) 66. I have
slightly changed the translation of the French: Jacques Derrida and Bernard
Stiegler, Échographies de la télévision. Éntretiens filmés (Galilée and INA, Paris
1996) 78.
73
Derrida and Stiegler (as note Error: Reference source not found) 63.
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