15
th
International Congress on Archives
Owens
www.wien2004.ica.org
5
Memories can also be altered by revision. Contrary to the stereotype of the remembered past as
immutably fixed, recollections are malleable and flexible; what seems to have happened undergoes continual
change. Heightening certain events in recall, we then reinterpret them in the light of subsequent experience and
present need.
advancement of women's history in the past generation. Archival records have been revisited and reinterpreted
by feminist scholars. Facts and events, which had been ignored by generations of male scholars, have been
reformulated and have resulted in a renaissance of historical insight. The archives has been an agent of
preserving memory and when the time was ripe the transmission of new ideas was possible. The retrieval of
memory is seldom sequential. We locate recalled events by association, rather than by working methodically
forward or backward through them.
Archives do have such incredible power endowed within them that whole cultures and histories can be
created from them. Archives recovered and read in situ in Ebla, Syria, by an Italian archaeological team, under
Paolo Matthiae have reconstructed a Middle Bronze Culture which had not been know beforehand. This
intellectual possibility, in which researchers are able to reconstruct ideas and former civilisations from the
archival record, is yet another testimony to the efficacy of archival memory transmission..
Archives cannot provide the full solution to recovering memory. We confirm sets of recorded
information against the canons of accepted facts, on philosophical theories and upon personal, social and biases
of the time period in which we use archival records. However, the archival institution provides some account of
the past. There are limitations of memory, but combined with publications, oral accounts, etc. we have a
multiplicity of tools for the reconstruction of remembrance, or of memory. And of course, memory can
interpreted variously, depending upon the perspective of the narrator, or the historian. Memory is not static, but
malleable and will change through successful generations. For example photos assist us in seeing memory. We
use these to contextualise and to confirm and to verify memory.
Manuscripts are authoritative and fundamental transmitters of human culture. Manuscripts give voice
to human acts and thoughts. The elimination of books and manuscripts is a means to mute human culture and
silence the acts and thoughts of individual peoples. These acts have led to a systematic elimination of the
written word, alongside the eradication of distinct cultures. We need only refer to these acts as being one and
the same: genocide.
Failure or lack of memory results in neurological disorder. The same can be said for a collective
identity, failure of erasure of the written archival word results in societal disorder. We who are archivists
believe our institutions have great significance in terms of providing memory data. Our great handicap is that
many educated skills are required to located and interpret the data.
In times of social, political and technological metamorphosis there occurs a ravaging upon archives.
There is an active attempt to create an amnesia of social and knowledge memory. In contrast, during times of
calm and stability, social memory also remains stable and archival institutions reflect this stability.
We archivists gloss over our importance in the preservation of societal memory. We need to construct
a firmer foundation and understanding of the role which we play in the transmission of memory and in turn we
must educate the public as to our function and service. Capricious forces that threaten the existence of social
memory must be thwarted. The facilities of archival institutions contain a myriad of images of the past.
Archives can participate in shaping new realities. We can recast new ways of memorialising and remembering.
We certainly assist in the construction of new traditions. Post-modern scholarship has opened new discussion
and debate on the use and thinking, based upon the recorded information maintained in our archives. The loss of
records is egregious and we must prevent this from happening. The Archives is indeed a facility and a tool of
societal memory. It plays a complex role in transmitting its abundant resources. The archives is a prized
institution of the preservation, the utilisation and the transmission of memory.
13
Lowenthal, David L. The past is a foreign country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 206.
14
Lowenthal, David L. The past is a foreign country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 208.
