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'. 135

Periodiekviewer Koninklijke Vereniging van Archivarissen

Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2012 | | pagina 137