world's citizens can open the doors to personal and societal well-being that comes from experiencing continuity with the past, from a sense of roots, of belonging, of identity.2 Archivists recall that Memory, in Greek mythology, is the Mother of all the Muses. Through her, society may be nursed to healthy and creative maturity. Yet such societal or collective memory has not been formed haphazardly throughout history, nor are the results without controversy. Historians in a post modernist milieu are now studying very carefully the processes over time that have determined what was worth remembering and, as important, what was forgotten, deliberately or accidentally. Such collective "remembering" -and "forgetting"- occurs through galleries, museums, libraries, historic sites, historic monuments, public commemorations, and archives-perhaps most especially through archives. French historian Jacques Le Goff refers to the politics of archival memory: since ancient times, those in power decided who was allowed to speak and who was forced into silence, both in public life and in archival records. Indeed, archives had their institutional origins in the ancient world as agents for legiti mizing such power and for marginalizing those without power. This initial emp hasis has continued. Medieval archives, scholars now find, were collected -and later often weeded and reconstructed- not only to keep evidence of legal and business transactions, but also explicitly to serve historical and sacral/symbolic purposes, but only for those figures and events judged worthy of celebrating, or memorializing, within the context of their time. Taking the opposite perspective of those marginalized by the archival enterprise, American historian Gerda Lerner has convincingly traced from the Middle Ages to this century the systemic exclusion of women from society's memory tools and institutions, including archives. World War I archives are now revealed to have been subjected to signifi cant tampering and alteration in order to make Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig appear less culpable for the slaughter on the Western Front over which he had command and much responsibility. And from yet another perspective, archivists in developing countries are now seriously questioning whether classic archival concepts that emerged from the written culture of European bureaucracies are appropriate for preserving the memories of oral cultures. All acts of societal remembering, in short, are culturally bound and have momentous implications. As Czech novelist Milan Kundera asserts, "the struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."3 But whose memory? And who determi nes the outcome of the struggle?[19] These questions seem to me the central issues of archival history. How, for example, have archivists reflected these changing societal realities and power struggles as they built their "houses of memory"? How have archival assump tions, concepts, and strategies reflected the dominant structures and societal ethos of their own time? Upon what basis, reflecting what shifting values, have archivists decided who should be admitted into their houses of memory, and who excluded? To answer these questions, we need an intellectual history of our profession. We need to understand better our own politics of memory, the very ideas and assumptions that have shaped us, if we want our "memory houses" to reflect more accurately all components of the complex societies they allegedly serve. Archival history has other uses too. Canadian archival educator Barbara 31 ARCHIEFWETENSCHAP of the original paper's text, was also prepared for actual delivery in Beijing, and that summary forms part of the conclusion of this article. The ICA will pro forma publish a significantly different version of the paper without any of these changes. I consider this version in Archivaria to be the definitive text. In writing the original version of the paper, I received the formal advice of twenty-eight archivists in six countries. I wish to thank sincerely these colleagues who took the time to comment (often very extensively) on my earlier drafts. Their criticisms have much improved the content of this version of the paper, as well as its predecessors, and I hope that none are distressed by the many changes subsequently introduced. Any errors that remain are my full responsibility. The readers were from Australia (Glenda Acland, Sue McKemmish, and Angela Slatter), China (Han Yumei), the Netherlands (Jan van den Broek and F.C.J. [Eric] Ketelaar), South Africa (Verne Harris), the United States (David Bearman, Richard Cox, Margaret Hedstrom, Jim O'Toole, and Helen Samuels), and Canada (Barbara Craig, Gordon Dodds, Luciana Duranti, Tom Nesmith, Hugh Taylor, and Ian Wilson); and my National Archives of Canada colleagues (Gabrielle Blais, Brien Brothman, Richard Brown, Jacques Grimard, Candace Loewen, Lee McDonald, John McDonald, Heather MacNeil, Joan Schwartz, and Jean-Pierre Wallot). The paper at various stages also benefitted from the careful editorial corrections of Ed Dahl and Tim Cook of the National Archives of Canada. I wish to thank Jean-Pierre Wallot and Lee McDonald for the rare luxury (in terms of my past publications) of signi ficant time away from work to research and write the various versions of the paper, and to Sheila Powell, as General Editor of Archivaria, for agreeing to publish a very long article in one rather than two or more seg ments and for her usual helpful editorial comments. 2 Jean-Pierre Wallot, "Building a Living Memory for the History of Our Present: Perspectives on Archival Appraisal," Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 2 (1991), pp. 263-82, with citations from p. 282. 3 Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, translated by Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York, 1992), pp. xvi-xvii, 59-60, and passim. On medieval archives and their purposes, see Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, 1994), pp. 86-87, 177, and especially chapter 3: "Archival Memory and the Destruction of the Past" and passim; and Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, 1989); also on the symbolic rather than evidential characteristics of some records, see James O'Toole, "The Symbolic Significance of Archives," American Archivist 56 (Spring 1993), pp. 234-55. For women and archives, see Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist ConsciousnessFrom the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy (New York and Oxford, 1993), passim, but especially chapter 11: "The Search for Women's History;" see also Anke Voss-Hubbard, "'No Documents No History': Mary Ritter Beard and the Early History of Women's Archives," American 30 TERRY COOK WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE Archivist 58 (Winter 1995), pp. 16-30. On World War I, see Denis Winter, Haig's Command: A Reassessment (Harmondsworth, 1991), especially the final section: "Falsifying the Record." Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980), Part I, Section ii, cited in Justin Kaplan, ed., Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th ed., (Boston, 1992), p. 761. For discussion about the "controlling" politics of archiving, see Terry Cook, "Electronic Records, Paper Minds: The Revolution in Information Management and Archives in the Postcustodial and Postmodernist Era," Archives and Manuscripts 22 (November 1994), especially pp. 315-20. Archivists need to explore this field of "memory scholarship" more carefully, for it puts into context many unquestioned assumptions underpinning archival theory and conceptualization, even if the authors (unlike those above) rarely explicitly address archives (except for Clanchy). See, for example, Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace ofMatteo Ricci (New York, 1984), which is a fascinating exploration in cross-cultural history of the interaction of Ming Dynasty China and sixteenth-century Counter- Reformation Christian Europe, as well as a good introduction to the art of memory, which was then in the final throes of a very long history. For the original ground-breaking analysis of memory and its elevated place for over one thousand years in Western education and culture, and of various fantastic mnemonic devices (such as memory palaces, memory trees, and memory theatres), see Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966). Continuing analysis in that vein is Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990). The classic analysis of the shift from oral memory to memory recordings (or written records, and thus archives) is Michael Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307, 2nd ed. (Oxford and Cambridge MA, 1993), although Patrick Geary (as cited above) respectfully questions some of Clanchy's central interpretations. For the use of the past to con struct memories through various civic and heritage initiatives in order to defend one's status in the present, a whole range of recent studies have been produced: the pioneering study was Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983); and three of the best known are David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge MA, 1985); Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991); and John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1992). Biochemists, psychologists, poets, literary critics, and philosophers, among others, join historians (and one hopes archivists) in being drawn to the study or mystique of memory: what it is, how it works, and why it functions as it does, both in remembering and in forgetting. Their works could fill a library, but for a short, yet incisive introduction, see Mary Warnock, Memory (London and Boston, 1987).

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