Chapter Seven. FileLife: Constant, Kurenniemi, and the Question of Living Archives

Qualitative Sociology, 2020

History's epistemological dilemma equally applies to sociology: how can we make claims about persons, events, and processes on the basis of archival records? This article develops a framework called Life on File that combines sociological strengths in qualitative methodologies and an interest in how states shape populations, with library and information sciences' attention to documentary production and anthropological and historical insights into the intersections of archives, knowledge, and power. The framework has three components: the act of recovery of life, processes, and events; the turning of life into a record; and the movement of a file from collection to preservation and use. The result is a methodologically rigorous and globally mobile theory. Empirically, the piece draws on comparative historical fieldwork on state-led racial classification and naturalization practices preserved in Japanese and German archives. While the framework is grounded in research on state archives, its utility extends across types of archives and records. In addition, it provides sociologists with a roadmap on how to use archives in single case as well as comparative and transnational research. The archive is like a raw material, which is not the same as saying that it is an originary material or an unworked-upon material; rather it is what has been made available, what has been thus presented to us, a kind of gift, which is to say also-for future constituencies, future publics-a kind of debt. (Osborne 1999, 57) Cast in the image of the humans who create them, archives are mortals with aspirations to immortality. (Daston 2017, 329)

The essays in this volume explore how writings have been stored and kept available for future use across time and space. They can be regarded as some of the first steps towards a cross-cultural and even global study of archives and archival practices. Taken as a whole, the papers indicate many of the topics (and difficulties) that would need to be addressed in a future global investigation of archives and archival practices. *

Migracijske i etničke teme, 2020

Given their role in the preservation and protection of an authentic and credible trace of the past (documents) and, consequently, national identity, archives are considered places of choice for interpreting and representing shared memory and the past. Emphasising authenticity and credibility frames archives as seemingly neutral institutions in terms of politics and ideology. However, the trace that provides an insight into the “truth and knowledge” of our (individual and collective) past “that makes us what we are” needs to be questioned. Since the archiving procedure is based on the processes of inclusion and exclusion in all segments of everyday interpretation of material, the archive is a political and ideological institution that takes its place in the order of political power. This paper discusses the role of the archive as a place of preservation of “shared past and history” as an important part of national identity through the prism of institutional apparatuses or forms of knowledge/power (example of architecture) and technologies or manners of articulating and practising knowledge/power (example of everyday practice). The paper points to the role of archives in the (re)interpretation and (re)vision of shared memories, collective history and national identity on the examples of the Croatian State Archives and Archives of Yugoslavia, in the context of changes in the symbolic and political order (SFRY/Croatia). By constructing national memory and narratives of nationality through narratives of history and memory, and by constructing “truth” (knowledge) through exclusion and inclusion, archives (just like museums and libraries) have a role to play in “imagining” the community–nation. Or, according to the theory of performative identity (Foritier 2000), everyday practice that takes place in archives is an institutional identity practice that contributes to the unification and homogenisation of the community through a policy of interpretation by performing and producing (performative) memory (collective identity formation).

This collection of essays explores the current proliferation of the concept of the archive. The concept of the archive has expanded into areas beyond the classical archive to art, philosophy, and new textual and media practices. Simultaneously, these new practices both resist and transform the archival impulse, perhaps creating what one could call a new “anarchival” condition. The contributions approach the topic from three different but related angles: 1. New Conceptions, 2. New Archival Practices, and 3. New Challenges. In the first section Knut Ove Eliassen (one of the best on MF ever written) and Wolfgang Ernst lays the ground for some of the new conceptions of the archive at stake in this collection. The next section, “New Archival Practices” is devoted to practices outside the archive proper which relate to or reflect upon the contemporary archival condition. Susanne Østby Sæther explores emerging forms of Archival Art practices, and Terje Rasmussen analyses how the interplay between digital media and memory construction affects the smallest units in society, the family and the individual. Here, the mobile phone as an archive and a recorder is crucial. In the last section, “New Challenges” Kjetil Jacobsen and Alexander Galloway pose a series of critical reflections as well as speculative conclusions regarding the future of the archive. In the article “Anarchival Society” Jacobsen argues that we have moved from a historical society to an archival society, or as he calls it (after Wolfgang Ernst), “anarchival society”, and Alexander Galloway from New York University addresses the Internet as a new kind of archive which determines every aspect of social life. In the epilogue, Trond Lundemo sums it all up in an reflection upon the organizational principles and algorithms structuring what is accessible and stored in the archives and on the Internet, tends to hide themselves.

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Archivio di Etnografia, anno XVI, n. 2, 2021

Maddalena Gretel Cammelli Lo sguardo dell'abisso. Sfide, opportunità e rischi nelle etnografie dei fascismi rEpErtori Piero Cappelli Matrici folcloriche del ciclope omerico. Un esempio recente della tradizione orale pugliese

Archival Science

By cultivating archives through successive activations, people and communities define their identities. In these activations, the meanings of archives are constructed and reconstructed. Archives are not a static artifact imbued with the record creator’s voice alone, but a dynamic process involving an infinite number of stakeholders over time and space. Thus, archives are never closed, but open into the future. Furthermore, digital archives are always in a state of becoming, being created and recreated by technologies of migration and reconstruction.

Creative and compelling theoretical formulations of the archive have emerged from a host of disciplines in the last decade. Derrida and Foucault, as well as many other humanists and social scientists, have initiated a broadly interdisciplinary conversation about the nature of the archive. This literature suggests a confluence of interests among scholars, archivists, and librarians that is fueled by a shared preoccupation with the function and fate of the historical and scholarly record. The following essay provides an exploration and overview of this archival discourse.