the administrative structures and history of the organization whose files they
are charged with the preservation of. But this begs the question of the archivists'
understanding of the implicit and un-stated assumptions driving the decision
making process in the organization and the making of decisions. What did the
decision-makers think worth remembering of their decisions, and what did they
think was insignificant and therefore not necessary to record? For archives are
ultimately the consequences of our desire to inscribe a trace of our significant
memories in some location or space external of our minds.
The archiving of a record therefore does not start with the arrival of a set of
files on the reception counter of the archives, but, as the Dutch archivist Eric
Ketelaar has argued, at the point of creation of the record, when a memory was
deemed significant to merit inscribing on a space outside of the mind. This
Ketelaar has termed archivization, following the French philosopher Jacques
Derrida. But 'before archivization however is another 'moment of truth'. It is
archivalization, a neologism which [Ketelaar] invented, meaning the conscious or
unconscious choice (determined by social and cultural factors) to consider something
worth archiving. Archivalization precedes archiving.'40There is inherent in
every archive, a tacit narrative of what is to be archived for what reasons.
Ketelaar and his Canadian colleague Terry Cook lead their archivist colleagues
in responding to the challenge of how they are appraising the records to be
taken into their collections. The archival record is ultimately an act of memory
by its creator of what should be remembered and what can be forgotten. The
archivist, in accepting these records into his collection, is then consolidating and
perpetuating these memories and the realities they recall.
At issue here is the role of archival and other textual records in the construction
of our identities of who we are. Our sense of what we are as an institution or
community or larger empire or nation is in large part underpinned by our social
memories of a common culture, heritage and landscape preserved in a text
and archived. This process of recording and archiving our culture, heritage or
landscape is about the construction of our social memories. Who decides what is
to be recorded and preserved then becomes, as the French philosopher Michael
Foucault has argued, an issue of power and hegemony over others.
Writing a narrative of our past becomes a politically contested issue. The works
of a series of key historians from Thucydides (c.460-c.390 BCE) through Sima
Qian (c.100 BCE) to Ibn Khaldn (1332-1460) and more recently, Edward
Gibbon (1734-1794) or Karl Marx (1818-1880) and Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996),
challenged their societies and continues to preoccupy us today.
Similarly, the archivist presiding over the records of a medieval European
monastery or imperial Chinese court is clearly in a position to shape the social
memories of their communities through their decisions of what records they
take under their charge.
The Straits Settlement records which Parkinson and his successors mined for
KWA CHONG GUAN AND HO CHI TIM ARCHIVES IN THE MAKING OF POST-COLONIAL SINGAPORE
38 Stockwell, MalayaBritish Documents, xxxiv-xxxv (introduction).
39 Stockwell, Malaya, British Documents, Stockwell started planning for this series several years earlier and
outlined his proposal in Stockwell, 'The approach'.
40 Ketelaar, 'Tacit Narratives'.
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